The Power of Communicating Visually
We just finished a round of the course we teach at Northwest Nazarene University’s Graduate School of Missional Leadership (which is a fancy new term for a seminary). As adjunct professors, we’re charged with leading students through a course on Communicating Visually.
It may seem out of place to have a communications course at a seminary to some. Some of the students certainly think so, at least when they start, and have no qualms in voicing their well-honed academic opinions. This fall we had 26 students, not including the three who decided after 1 of 8 weeks that it wasn’t worth their effort. Maybe a half dozen of the group were initially not only indifferent or undecided, but flat out antagonistic to the idea that their degree required something as facile and superficial as how to run PowerPoint.
Probably the most enjoyable part of the course is to see these people come around. They become the biggest believers, invariably. Here are some of their comments from the last day of the class:
I felt that same way after I read Rob Bell’s, “Jesus Came to Save Christians.” It was a life changing book even as this class is most certainly life changing for all of us! We will never again say we see in the same way again! I think it is as much of a drastic change in sight even as the disciples had after Jesus’ resurrection.
- Todd Holden
This class has challenged me to step up and educate our congregation on the culture that we are living in today. If we want to take seriously that God has commissioned us to “go and make disciples,” then we have to be willing to communicate in the language of those we are going to. Missionaries, of course, would go about learning the actual spoken language of the culture they would be reaching out to. It is no different for us- we are sent to the culture we live in, and for some reason, there has been this wall of separation that we have created as the body of Christ. On one side, we’ve kept ourselves to the “written word,” confusing it for “The Word that was made Flesh.” We have forgotten that in our very DNA we were created by a God who took on flesh and stepped into culture, adopting and adapting to a way of life.
- Cody Stauffer
More than just engaging the sense of sight for a viewer, visual ministry is meant to relate to the experiences of those to whom it is communicating. With advancements in technologies that are largely visual in nature, the church has a great opportunity to speak to its surrounding culture with this new “language” and to relate to it in a new way. To a visual culture visual language contains much more mystery, allows for much more discovery, extends much more of an invitation to be creative, and engages in more relevant questions and answers than its printed counterpart. Now, writing is not irrelevant, but visual communication is effectively meeting the needs of a culture that is on the cusp of postmodernism, and if the church ignores the fact that this is taking place then it is stuck in a tunnel vision of its own methodological arrogance.
- Nathan Hand
We’ll share some highlights of the curriculum that led to these comments over the next few weeks.
