My new media for urban ministry purpose statement
Huri Cañas
I’ve always been the kind of person that when something new comes out of the market, I patiently wait to see how that thing works on others, instead of running in order to get it, and when the general use and acceptance of that new thing is inevitable, then I move to get it. Some examples of this are the cell phones, internet or Facebook. The same thing happens in the Christian world, where thousand of Christian ministries are using New Media resources in order to spread the Gospel. Now I admit that I’ve being favored by it, taking advantage of great resources such as E-sword or John Macarthur’s Bible systematic studies available on his website (gty.org). That is why it’s important to me to explore the new tools at hand and with a great potential of massive outreach in order to make known the Good News to a larger number of people.
When my advisor recommended this class, I immediately thought it would be an excellent communication tool for the ministry God has for me and my wife in the future, for example:
- How to create documentaries about the life conditions of the Honduran community, in order to raise funds in order to help them.
- How to create radial programs in order to reach children and adults with Christ’s message
- How to establish a platform of information and discussion (through a blog or website) about controversial topics of current relevance in the Honduran churches (false doctrines, charismatic movements, the church and the government, etc.)
- Create ideas of how to improve the delivery of the gospel in our church here in Indianapolis
I am aware that New Media’s main goal always should be to communicate the Word of God in a powerful way in order to have a great impact to the audience, but without compromising the message’s integrity. Thus, the exhortation we find in II Tim. 2:15 should be taken into consideration: to handle correctly the word of truth.
Lastly, I must confess my position of “keeping it simple” when it comes to the time of imparting the Word in the worship service. I admit there are many great tools that help to improve the comprehension of the message to an audience, and not being flexible on this shall result in a poor results, just like Len Wilson says: “… when we decide to make it simple to ourselves, we are making a decision to make it more difficult to our congregations” 1. But sometimes there are good reasons to be a “iconoclast-minded”, when it comes to churches and ministries from the third-world countries, where special considerations should be made. Here are some reasons:
a) Old-school mentality from a great percentage of people in many congregations for different reasons: association of the new media tools with the secular world, a sense that the new is too complicated to understand or keep up, the “threat” of putting the Bible away, etc.
b) Constant blackouts. If a good part of the worship service depends on electronic devices, the whole worship service falls apart without power.
Probably there are other important considerations to take into account, many of them foreign to the knowledge of the average American person, but at the same time, I think maybe this could become a challenge of how New Media could fit in different environments, in order to improve the delivery of the Gospel.
1 “The Wired Church 2.0”, pag. 5
