Guest Post

Today my blog-thoughts are over at Matt Dabbs' Kingdom Living blog.

"The addition of technology to communication has always blurred the lines between what is and isn’t real."

Check it out and sound off in the comments.

Resize Pictures with Fotosizer

My friend Matt pointed to this neat program a couple months ago. It's called Fotosizer and it gives you the ability to quickly resize or recolor a group or folder of images.

Select the images you want to change and then the changes you want to make. Click "Start" and it'll get going while you go get a cup of coffee. Pretty slick indeed.

What software saves you time and effort when editing pictures?

Pointed Communication

My friend Matt Dabbs posted about Andy Stanley's practice of preaching recently. Stanley wrote a book called:Communicating for a Change: Seven Keys to Irresistible Communication (affiliate link) where he describes his practice of boiling down his sermons to just one point. Matt says:

This does two things. It defines the focus of the sermon by setting the one thing that everything in the sermon needs to point back to and support. Next, it gives direction by setting up what the sermon must communicate in order to produce the desired result, call, or action on the audience. Let’s face it, change isn’t change unless something happens and pew sitting alone isn’t that something.

And I agree. It's important to communicate well and in order to do that you need to know what you are trying to say. One of the biggest obstacles to good communication is trying to provide too much information in too little time. I first learned this principle when I taught the Junior High class at church - I could make one point with those kids, so I chose it and honed in on it with everything in the class.

My experience with Andy Stanley's preaching, however, is that he takes this principle too far. He doesn't really allow for variation or sub-points within his main point. He just makes the same point repeatedly. For me this had the effect of making me tune out and get bored. It was very similar to a Saturday Night Live sketch where they make one joke in the first 30 seconds and then continue to ride that same joke, ad nauseum for the next five minutes.

What if we make one point, but we make it in different ways and look at it from different angles? What if we use all of the communication tools at our disposal to create mystery, drama, inductive reasoning, empathy, and passion as we communicate our one point?

What do you think?

To visualize or not to visualize

My friend Matt has a great post today about the use of images in preaching.

He juxtaposes the neurological research of David Phillips with the homiletic prowess of John Piper (Piper video below).

Phillips says:

What I discovered was when the brain receives sensory inputs, it transforms them into images. In other words, the brain learns, adapts, and is literally re-wired through images . . . We need to communicate in images. Whether it is video clips, or images in our sermon or verbal images, if we want to communicate for behavioral change, we need to communicate in images.

Piper on the other hand says:

I think the use of video and drama largely is a token of unbelief in the power of preaching. And I think that, to the degree that pastors begin to supplement their preaching with this entertaining spice to help people stay with them and be moved and get helped, it's going to backfire.... It's going to communicate that preaching is weak, preaching doesn't save, preaching doesn't hold, but entertainment does.

So . . . what do you think? Who do you think is right?