Although a number of blogs might “seem” like digital preaching, the medium controls so much of how it actually comes off.

A recent post by John Piper quoting Tope Koleoso about why he shouts when he preaches got me thinking critically about what is “lost” when we attempt to communicate online.

Tope goes onto say that

I don’t ever shout for effect, for preaching is not acting. I shout because I mount the pulpit to preach with three overriding emotions bubbling up in my soul – Anger, Joy and Love.

These three however, have an effect on how I preach…

Good preaching happens when the Holy Spirit moves the heart of the preacher by the text, the preachers experience, and the “now” Word of God to his soul. All of these move me at an emotional and spiritual level. Emotional because my heart is involved. Spiritual because the Holy Spirit is involved.

This means that during the sermon, any one of the mentioned emotions, (Anger, Joy or Love), spill out without warning or apology. This is because when I am preaching, I am angry at satan and sin, I am joyful about salvation and hope, and I am eager to show the Love of God to the lost.

Therefore, I shout, I laugh, I cry, and I dance. Therefore, I use my voice, my hands, my legs and my eyes. Therefore, I will do it with utter conviction and passion for if I will not do it from the heart, I will not do it at all.

It’s a large quote, but it’s worth reading, and he goes on to explain even more here.

Amazing, how “limiting” the blog medium truly is! Through only our written words are we communicating. We can try to SHOUT (all caps) and do smiley faces (or sad faces), but it just doesn’t really communicate fully.

If anything, it really reminds me of how truly important the exact words that I say and my choice and reasoning behind using them, because that, my friends, is all that I’ve got.

Just words on a screen.

How have you seen blogging as a limitation to communication? What are your thoughts?

[Image from *Mars]

Chapter 9 covered by Graham Brenna as part of our Group Blogging Project discussing the book Flickering Pixels by Shane Hipps. If you need a quick overview to what Flickering Pixels is about, please go here.

The shared experience… what a great representation of community!

We share our experiences with others by talking with them face to face or on a cell phone, sure. But we also have the ability to share our experiences with many people at once via facebook, YouTube, blogging and many other online tools. Those of us in the blogging group that are reading this book are reading it by ourselves on our own time, but we’re sharing our experiences with each other and many others through ChurchCrunch! We are connected to a much larger shared experience… blogging FTW!

If you are a regular reader of ChurchCrunch, you are part of a tribe… a ChurchCrunch tribe! We are sharing this experience with each other. I have made what I call “twiends” (twitter friends) with a few people that belong to this tribe and have met not even a handful of you in person!

However, according to Feedburner, there are now over 1,600 of you that are potentially reading this! We are sharing the same experience and we don’t even know each other! Whoa… total mind blow! Or maybe not a total mind blow… as we have all become accustomed to sharing experiences with each other even though we don’t know each other.

I would venture to guess that many of you ChurchCrunch tribe members are also part of another tribe, the late-nite NBC tribe, and are aware of the late-night game of musical chairs that has taken place on NBC this year with Leno, Conan and Fallon. For many of us, that is a shared experience, even though we don’t know each other.

Cell phones are great tools for connecting people, there is no doubt about that. For the last two years one of my best friends, Dan, has been living in El Salvador and working as a missionary while I have stayed at home in Naperville, IL. He moved home today and popped his head in my office, just minutes before I sat down to write this blog post! Over the last two years I have only seen him twice when he briefly came home for Christmas or something.

Other than that… our relationship had shifted from hanging out all the time to a cell phone relationship. It was hard at first but we made an effort to talk with each other at least once a month… and usually it was more frequently than that. But our cell phones kept our relationship going.

Now that he is home, we won’t rely on our cell phones as much to keep our friendship strong. If we were to not hang out now, even though he is less than 15 minutes away, and were to keep our friendship a “cell phone friendship” things would be different. We would likely not be good friends after awhile.

Yes, cell phones, facebook, and blogs are great… but they should never completely replace spending physical time with the people you love!

What are your thoughts about “shared experience” in light of Shane’s writings?