Non-Serious People?

This past week I’ve been reading T. David Gordon’s modern classic, Why Johnny Can’t Preach: The Media Have Shaped the Messengers. It is a good book, challenging, helpful, and clear — the subtitle gives the thesis away. 

Gordon argues, in a nutshell, that preaching is worse today than in past generations because the assault of digital media has made us all dumber. Because the general population can’t read and write as well as we used to, thanks to all the screens, pastors can’t either. Most sermons, he claims, have no flow, no outline, no clear point, just rambling.

I’m in no position to assess the state of preaching across the nation, but nobody can argue against the fact that “human sensibilities are shaped by social environments.”

But what is the particular shaping of our current environment? What kind of people is all our digital media making?

The answer is non-serious people. 

Gordon published the book in 2009, and a lot more has been discovered and written since about the effect of so many screens on kids, but even then he quotes David Denby (who wrote in 1996!) — 

Even if the child’s character is not formed by a single TV show, movie, video or computer game, the endless electronic assault obviously leaves its marks all over him. . . . The child survives, but along the way he becomes a kind of cynic; or rather he becomes an ironist, a knowing ironist of waste. He knows that everything in the media is transient, disposable. Everything on television is just for the moment—it’s just television—and the kids pick up this derisive tone, the sense that nothing is truly serious. (41)

This was long before endless videos at one’s fingertips. Now there’s the constant swiping, one meme after another, everything a joke. Gordon writes, prophetically, 

What kinds of ministers does such a culture produce? Ministers who are not at home with what is significant; ministers whose attention span is less than that of a four-year-old in the 1940s, who race around like the rest of us, constantly distracted by sounds and images of inconsequential trivialities, and out of touch with what is weighty. It is not surprising that their sermons, and the alleged worship that surrounds them, are often trifling, thoughtless, uninspiring, and mundane. (43). 

Again, note his comment “out of touch with what is weighty.” He’ll say later that our greatest need is a “sensibility for the significant; a capacity to distinguish the weighty from the light, and the consequential from the trivial.”

I’m reading all this, mind you, with our sermon text for Sunday ringing in the back of my mind — John 3:18, “Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe is condemned already, because he has not believed in the name of the only Son of God.” There have never been more consequential words ever written, and I plan, God willing, to preach it plain. 

I want us to be joyful people — deeply, wonderfully, over-flowingly joyful disciples of Jesus. But also serious about serious things. The Gospel of John takes us there.