Growing up, no matter how good or bad the sermon, the speaker’s closing comments were usually the last I would ever hear of it. A man would undertake to preach the Word on behalf of its Author. An hour later, the residue had trickled down into the occasional ear, or become the subject of animated discussion at a few lunch or dinner tables. If I wanted to revisit what he had said, I had to reconstruct it from memory. Most of the time, I had forgotten the substance of any given message by the middle of the next week, though a memorable one-liner might stick with me for a while.
Much like the last 2,000 years or so, I imagine, though members of the early church were arguably more attentive than modern audiences. Without Bibles to consult, perhaps they had to be.
Tapes, CDs and the New Normal
By the time I was a teenager, local churches had good PA systems and recording equipment. Most were building archives of cassette tapes of Sunday messages that you could check out and enjoy at home like a book from a library. At this point, the life of any given sermon became potentially indefinite. After conferences and special events, you might even be able to order your own copy of a sermon series. I have a few collecting dust at the back of closets, with nothing to play them on. A few years after that, tech-savvy AV guys at your local church would burn you a disk or two if you asked them nicely.
Fast forward to 2020, when the COVID lockdowns made Zoom and YouTube coverage of Christian gatherings the “new normal”. If you saw something you liked, you could download it to your PC or phone, or go back to it later and hope it was still around. Some churches had experimented with the new technological options prior to our governments’ imprudent experiment in social engineering. Most had not, to which the rough production values of local church videos from the first few weeks of lockdowns vividly attest. Things quickly improved, however. Most sizable churches have youngsters with the will and knowledge to smooth out the bumps in the road, and by a few weeks in, the stage was set for a sea change in how Christians interact with the world.
COVID eventually ended, but by that time many local churches had their own dedicated YouTube channels and Zoom routines that enabled housebound seniors to enjoy the proceedings from home. This created thousands of semi-permanent online sermon archives accessible to almost anyone. Few have abandoned the practice since.
YouTube Before COVID
To be fair, plenty of big-name evangelicals were uploading well-produced video content to YouTube prior to COVID, but everyone who did so knew exactly what he was getting into, and the potential audience for his upload. YouTube is basically the Wild West, sermons alongside foul-mouthed comedians, music of all sorts, pet videos, news, commentary and mass media offerings of various types. The edgier or more brand-conscious evangelical platform performers were all up there — Andy Stanley, Mark Driscoll, Steven Furtick, Perry Noble — but you can bet their marketers and lawyers weighed in on what appeared in their names. After all, a popular sermon might get three-quarters of a million views, and anybody might be watching. The idea was to increase brand value and reach, not pile up lawsuits. That’s not to say people like Driscoll never said anything offensive, but they made sure to target demographics that don’t bother to sue when their feelings are hurt, like old, white men.
Back then, if a megachurch pastor was caught in a scandal, it was probably for his personal life rather than the content of his videos. The smarter online grifters are still operating; the dumber ones got caught with a church secretary and tanked their ministries. Either way, it was not sermon videos that got them in trouble.
New and Unexplored Territory
Ease of access to sermon content is territory not yet fully explored, and it’s useful to Christians as well as to the enemies of the faith. Back in the day, when I thought of an unsaved friend to whom the sermon I had just enjoyed might have been helpful, I could only kick myself and say, “I wish I’d brought him along.” Now, I just email him a link. Sometimes they even get watched. There’s something cool about that.
However, there is a downside. Like Facebook, X, and other social media platforms, YouTube has privacy controls that enable users to limit their audiences in different ways, but few Christians know they exist and fewer make use of them. The potential exists now exists (by way of an easy Google search) for hostile viewers to come across sermon material they deem offensive and quickly share their outrage with other equally hostile members of their own activist communities. YouTube will even help them get the word out there with a quick-and-dirty auto-generated transcription they can clean up for themselves.
Hate Speech and Human Rights
In Canada especially, YouTube or Zoom evidence of anything that might be called “hate speech” is potential fodder for lawsuits or, more dangerously, applications to the Human Rights Commissions, which can be prohibitively expensive to defend, and which offer none of the protections of the civil or criminal courts. Savvy haters know lawfare is the most effective way to hit big churches where it hurts, put little ones out of business, and get the rest to proactively self-censor anything that might offend the LGBTQ crowd, feminists or race-baiters. This means Christians need to be increasingly aware of the content they are uploading. Sadly, this is frequently not the case. Most often the person tasked with maintaining the audio and video archives for a local church is operating without a lot of hands-on direction from church leadership and is young, relatively undiscerning or less attentive to sermon content than others might be because he has to deal with technical issues.
Anything controversial we write at Coming Untrue is, of course, subject to the same concerns. The difference between our writers and a local church, however, is that individuals possess limited assets to target through lawfare. Losing a civil lawsuit or Human Rights complaint would be no fun, but wouldn’t benefit the plaintiffs much no matter what the judges ruled. A local church, however, may own a building worth millions, and a lawsuit against Christians would generate big publicity. All of these make churches potentially appealing targets for activism.
Going Viral by Accident
A new, potentially unsaved and perhaps hostile audience on YouTube opens up unexplored moral and practical questions for church leadership like this one: As an audience member, have you ever been asked if you’re okay with being filmed for the internet? I’m pretty sure you have not. No, somebody makes that decision for you without giving your opinion any thought, usually a teen or twenty-something panning the room, or a techie setting up camera angles before shooting the speaker.
How would you like to attend a local church, find yourself sitting in the front row in full view of the cameras, then see your face all over the internet on a video clip that’s gone viral because the speaker said something with which you absolutely do not agree? Many Christians would not be thrilled, and I find their concerns quite reasonable. The first few rows of many church buildings traditionally go empty in any case, but these days I know people who deliberately choose to sit at the back of the auditorium where the camera is less likely to catch them. Such concerns may seem a bit paranoid until legal issues surface, but they are distinct and increasingly likely possibilities to consider.
Curating Cowardice?
Another question: Is it cowardly to carefully curate your church’s public content to avoid potential offenses? Shouldn’t Christians speak the truth and let the chips fall where they may, no matter the cost?
It really depends on the purpose of the video. If it’s intended to edify believers, offending random unsaved people is not your goal, and there’s nothing unreasonable about ensuring that doesn’t happen unnecessarily by treating video and audio of sermons differently depending on their intended audiences. That may involve using available privacy tools to make some videos “for members only”, or using a video host other than YouTube as your primary means of distribution. The difficulty is that accessing a message may become too complicated or technical for older Christians unfamiliar with the technology, and become a barrier to their prayer participation in the local church.
If the video is intended to challenge unbelief, by all means go for it, but do it under a different set of standards and with all possible negative outcomes carefully considered in advance. There’s a difference between contending for the faith with the risks taken into account and being blissfully ignorant of the consequences your actions may produce. Currently, I am seeing far too much of the latter.
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