Tag: attention

  • Focus and the worship service

    We use lights, microphones, seating, and position to focus attention towards the platform during a worship service. People who are attending the service may come with a million words to say, a lot of things on their hearts, and a lot of individual motives… but those putting on the service easily gain control and retain control of the room tactically. 

    • Lighting – By illuminating the platform and darkening the seating area, this draws your attention to the light, humans are built that way. The darker you make the seating area, the more you focus attention on the platform and visa versa.
    • Seating – By point all of the pews/chairs towards the platform, it is more comfortable to put your back against the pew/chair and your feet facing towards the platform than it is for any other seated position. With seating pointed towards the platform, eyes naturally go there.
    • Sound – By amplifying the human voice you can communicate to the ears of everyone else in the room that you are more powerful than they are. Music, voice, video… all of that done at 80-105 decibels will typically focus all of the audience attention.
    • Height – By positioning people on a platform or a stage, especially while you are in the seated position, you are forced to “look up” to whomever is up front. This tells your brain, “that person is in control.“
    • Position – As people of faith, we already have an assumption that the people on the platform have some level of authority over us. This is right and good. We ought to give that person our attention.
    • Schedule – By controlling all of those factors, you control the schedule. People will stand when you say so, sit, be quiet, and be dismissed. These are cultural cues, defined by mores. We all know, intuitively, that it’s rude to stand and talk to the person behind us when someone with a microphone is speaking in front of us.

    From a moral perspective all of these are neutral. Nothing about having or even creating that tactical advantage is either good nor bad. But it is a tactical advantage that most churches utilize on a week-to-week basis. It’s what they know how to do as they’ve copied and refined it over the years.

    This has inherent advantages and disadvantages, like all tactics. 

    • ADVANTAGE: This allows you to start/end services according to a prescribed time.
    • DISADVANTAGE: That only works if people show up on time and are willing to stay.
    • ADVANTAGE: The person on the platform is rarely interrupted.
    • DISADVANTAGE: That only works if the person on the platform doesn’t need to be interrupted.
    • ADVANTAGE: As a worship service planner, you can set the theme and manage the content of the service.
    • DISADVANTAGE: The service is limited to the planning teams creativity and listening to the Holy Spirit.
    • ADVANTAGE: You can build the whole service towards a theme, anticipate a response, and even manipulate the audience psychologically to respond the way you want them to. (Yes, I went there.)
    • DISADVANTAGE: There is an opportunity for abuse of power, position, and the temptation to sin is great.
    • ADVANTAGE: You can make a worship service clean, orderly, and (for the service planning group) predictable.
    • DISADVANTAGE: It’s easy to forget that the Spirit is wild, untamed, living and active in the hearts of the audience.
    • ADVANTAGE: The audience knows what to expect from the worship experience.
    • DISADVANTAGE: That predictability makes it easy to tune out.

    I’d encourage you to continue with this list of advantages and disadvantages in the comment section.

    So what’s the point?

    The point is that we need to think about these things, be reminded of them, and ask hard questions about our motives. As leaders we know it’s relatively easy to gain a tactical advantage over our audience. But, in doing so, we are also intentionally limiting the input and community aspects of our congregations.

    Again, these are morally neutral. But what happens in our heart as we utilize these advantages must be regularly checked.

    Historically, the Bible was not meant to be studied in private. At the time of its writing no one had private access to scripture. The New Testement authors couldn’t have even envisioned that one day people would study the Bible privately, it was outside of the realm of possibilities. They would argue “Why would you even want to do that?” The notion of privately owning sacred texts is a 16th century innovation. (Gutenberg, Wycliffe)

    It was never meant that the speaker would prepare in isolation and reveal his teaching at a service with such a physical tactical advantage. Even the notion of a personal application and an individual dividing Scripture and then sharing it publicly is not a historical position, but a remnant of the Reformation and Enlightenment. (Evangelicalism is really the perpetuator of this today, most mainline denominations and our Catholic brethren lean on a common lectionary.) Likewise, from a historical perspective few messages could/would ever be shared outside of a small context. In today’s technological age it’s very easy to hear messages that were never intended for your context, and a lack of specific local contextualization is a general assumption for those preparing messages/sermons today.

    Again, So What?

    For me, as I personally struggle with focus and distraction during worship services, I’m left with this thought about the impact of the modern worship service:

    Are attempts to control and limit focus in worship services killing creatively looking at the potential impact of the Gospel message on a community? Research shows that distraction leads to creativity while focused attention leads to mere productivity. And in many churches we are very productive at some things while largely ignoring the major problems our communities face.

  • Fear Makes You Stupid

    Yesterday morning I woke up to the news of a massive earthquake in Chile. The world seemed to hold its breath and wonder how bad the damage would be. “If a 7.0 earthquake killed 200,000+ people and flattened Port-au-Prince, Haiti– what would an earthquake 500 times stronger do?”

    Those fears and concerns were legitimate.

    Fortunately, as news reports flooded in, we later learned that while there is widespread damage and hundreds of thousands displaced– Chile was well prepared for such an emergency. In fact, it appears that Chile may be able to handle the relief efforts largely on their own. The New York Times is reporting, “Although the United States had offered aid, Chile’s government had not yet requested assistance. All international relief groups were on standby, and the International Federation of Red Crosses and Red Crescents said the Chilean Red Cross indicated that it did not need external assistance at this point.”

    Chile’s disaster was not equal to Haiti’s disaster– and as those fears began to ease and you could see the media looking for a story to scare people.

    Later in the morning, the media attention shifted from the earthquake in Chile to a tsunami the earthquake spawned. This is when the full on fear mongering went nuts.

    • Fact: 750,000 people in greater Port-au-Prince are starving and homeless while billions of dollars of aid sits on tarmacs because NGOs and governments are paralyzed.
    • Fact: The president of Haiti has said it will take 1,000 trucks 1,000 days to clear the rubble from Port-au-Prince. The muscle part of recovery hasn’t even begun.
    • Fact: 46 days after the earthquake in Haiti, starvation and disease are happening just 2 hours south of Miami by plane. Thousands of orphans are undocumented and at risk of being trafficked. Widows and elderly have no protection.
    • Fact: 2 million people in Chile were displaced as their homes were destroyed.

    And twelve hours after the Chile quake all of the news media’s attention shifted from actual news stories to a potential tsunami in Hawaii.

    Fact: Tsunami warnings had gone out for more than 4 hours all over Hawaii. There was no danger to life.

    Fact: A potential tsunami is not equal to an actual tsunami. A potential tsunami was used to cover up the real story in Haiti. (The real story is that the church is meeting people’s needs while the NGOs and governments have meetings at the airport.)

    Fact: The news was reporting on lines at Costco/Wal*Mart/Safeway, showing live video of a camera pointed at a computer screen of a Ustream.tv feed, and anchors desperately trying to convince experts that although scientific instruments were saying the tsunami was only creating a 2-3 foot wave– the wave must really be 30-50 feet.

    Fact: This was worse than Geraldo opening Al Capone’s secret vault.

    And yet every news agency was showing live video from all over the state, showing sunshine and waves, interviewing tourists on vacation– all for a natural disaster that had not even happened yet! One reporter asked a tourist, “What is the situation like up at Diamond Head?” The tourist, confused, looked at the reporter and told the truth. “It’s a party up there.” They couldn’t go to commercial fast enough.

    Something is wrong with us. The fear of a natural disaster outweighs an actual natural disaster? The fear of damaged vacation property outweighs the reality of millions of people’s homes in Chile and Haiti? The fear that a tsunami might hit outweighs the reality that a significant disaster has actually happened.

    Fear makes us stupid.

    When will we recognize that fear is our god? When will we stop living in fear? When will we be motivated by compassion that overcomes fear?