All around us media providers are scrambling to make their products interactive. You don’t just watch the News – you email your opinions and photos. You don’t just listen to the radio – you text what you are up to, and what you thought of that song. You don’t just view TV talent shows – you decide the outcome by phone vote, or even better you audition to be the star. The internet has been transformed by what people call Web 2.0 – sites like facebook, YouTube, Wikipedia and Twitter where you provide the content, sharing your films, thoughts, music tracks, photos, writings and pretty much anything else. Always ahead of the curve, Radiohead have provided the individual ‘stems’ for some of their tracks and invited fans to remix their own versions, and then post them back on the band’s website (and then, inevitably, people can vote for their favorite).
“Interactivity is hard-wired into the postmodern brain itself. This is the key to cyberspace: it is an interactive forum of communication, a two way media.” says Leonard Sweet in his essential and prophetic book Postmodern Pilgrims (2000, B&H). He quotes musician/producer Brian Eno as saying that ‘unfinished‘ is probably a better word than ‘interactive‘ – people want to participate in the outcome of the thing they are engaging with.
How about church? How interactive are your services? How ‘unfinished’? So often we dictate what people ought to sing, pray, think and respond. One or two people will provide the ‘content’ and everyone else is expected to absorb it. Where is our Church 2.0, our red button, our text number? Paul says to the Corinthians “When you come together, everyone has a hymn, or a word of instruction, a revelation, a tongue or an interpretation. All of these must be done for the strengthening of the church.” (14:26) Today many people are afraid to even open up the meeting to open prayers or testimony – and for others that is as far as the interaction goes. Read More
