Church as Screen Time and Pastor as Parasocial Personality

Just a quick riff on a couple of news items coming out this week:

• First, the introduction of the hologram pastor.
• Second, research published in Pediatrics suggests that childhood obesity in pre-school age children is directly linked to dislocated familial attachments facilitated by too much time in front of the television and too few communal meals with the family.
• Third, a second unrelated research project coming out of New Zealand suggests much of the same conclusions with regard to teenagers. Teens with more “screen time” have significantly lower attachment to their parents and peers (HT: Kara Powell).

There’s a fascinating sentence in the last summary:

“However, it is also possible that adolescents with poor attachment relationships with immediate friends and family use screen-based activities to facilitate new attachment figures such as online friendships or parasocial relationships with television characters or personalities,” the authors write.

I’ve written about this before, calling it the “mediation of experience.” If “screen time” inhibits our social interactions and relational attachments by replacing the real thing with “parasocial relationships” with unreal characters can the same be said to be true of other instances where we replace real live relationships with unreal characters or personalities?

Obviously I think the answer is yes.

One of the problems with the prevailing mode of church in America is that it has turned the pastor into a celebrity personality, complete with a performance-oriented and technologically mediated relationship with an audience. Once the church reaches a certain size, the pastor’s interaction must occur as a performance by a character through media. Cultural expectations about church structure coupled with assumptions about the virtues of media nearly require this. The trouble is, the character that pastor portrays, in my experience, in never quite the real thing. Some pastors try very hard to “be themselves” on stage, but others intentionally slip into a very different persona. But even for the pastor trying to be genuine, it’s very difficult in my opinion – perhaps impossible – to avoid some level of acting when you’re a preacher on stage, largely because of the entertainment-based expectations we currently impose upon the notion of what it means to be a “good preacher.”

One of the bizarre side-effects of this mediated relationship between the pastor and congregation is that, because of the high level of mediated exposure to the preacher, many in the church (most, in the case of very large churches),  actually feel a personal connection to the pastor that doesn’t actually exist. They don’t really know the pastor, in much the same way they don’t really know Oprah or Dr. Phil. They only know your stage persona. This is greatly magnified in those churches who embrace the personality-driven church model and use a charismatic pastor’s performance skills as a means of growing the church.

Hence, the church gathering becomes just another version of “screen time.”

Now consider how “screen time” becomes literally true in the proliferation of video venue churches, where many congregations only interact with a version of the pastor that is literally unreal. Now replace the video screen with hologram which remains unreal, but magnifies the level of illusion.

Moreover, much like the teens in the second study cited above who talk to each other about the fictional characters they’ve mutually engaged as relational surrogates, church members will often interact around the pastor’s persona. In this way a false persona can become a means of false social relationships. This is akin to kids talking enthusiastically about what “happened” to Hanna Montana in the latest episode (nothing happened…she doesn’t exist!). In celebrity-driven churches much of the social energy occurs around the campfire of a false persona.

Does it matter? Is there harm being done by moving church toward just another version of “screen time?” What are the consequences of this to discipleship? Perhaps, like the studies above, the consequences are spiritually obese, socially disconnected and disaffected Christians.

Technorati Tags: Church, discipleship, Media, Mega-Churches, Pastors, Teenagers

Are Mega-Churches The Healthiest Churches in America?

I have a friend – “Pastor A” – who is phenomenally gifted as a minister. He’s a skilled musician and speaker, funny, sincere, and “naturally supernatural.” He could grow a mega-church if he unleashed his gifts, but instead, he’s engaged in a form of missional ministry that involves intentionally dialing back the up-front nature of his gifts in favor of a more egalitarian approach to leadership and discipleship, which, in our American setting, means his latest church plant is growing more slowly and will probably never be very big.

Recently he had a conversation with “Pastor B,” a friend of his and another phenomenally gifted minister whose church is rather large (over 5000 I believe) and engages in some exceptionally good ministry to the community. It would be a mistake to dismiss this church as just another pragmatic, attractional sellout. They preach the word in an expository way, work hard to disciple people, and serve the community in highly innovative ways.  However, they do intentionally appeal to the “mall mentality” of Americans (his words, not mine). In that sense it is  very much an “attractional” church.

Presumably, they were talking about the missional vs attractional debate, or perhaps Pastor A’s intentionally small, slow growth approach, when Pastor B simply turned to him and said, “You have to understand, mega-churches are the healthiest churches in America.”

Is that true?

It seems to be that this is the point on which much of the debate hangs. What does it mean to be a good church, a healthy church?

In my own recent conversation with a prominent leader in my association whose church is larger and decidedly attractional we were discussing my own choice to adopt a more missional/incarnational approach. I wanted to be sure that would be welcome in our association. He assured me it would be, but added, “It is interesting, however, that it’s the mega-churches who are baptizing the most people.”

I just let it go, because more than anything his simple statement communicate a world of difference between us, and I knew we weren’t going to resolve it.

Still, it gets back to the basic questions: What does it mean to be a healthy church and what kinds of churches in America (if any) best reflect health?

Technorati Tags: Christianity, Mega-Churches, missional