Now I'm doing it...

I wrote recently about the tensions between written religious texts and new media interpretations. Now I'm wrestling with the converse. Part of the data gathering includes audio recordings of interviews. I'm a baaad typist so transcribing takes me a long time. I may resort to hiring someone to assist with some of that work, although there is a benefit to being immersed in the interviews word by word by word.

Why do I think this is important? Because transcribing is an interpretive process: when I convert spoken word to written text I..."flatten it out" in some respect. Verbal communication consists of the words spoken (sounds which placed together have a symbolic meaning for the speakers of that language). It also consists of intonation, and emphasis. I can speak the same words with mirth, disdain or sarcasm and convey very different intents to my hearers. If I speak them loudly or softly, the force might be greatly changed. And there is context to every speech. Imagine the force of Churchill's words "we shall never surrender" as he stood in Parliament on June 4, 1940. Or the power of Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I have a dream." More than just spoken words; words with conviction and words with context. When I read the transcription I might not "hear" that.

There are approaches to analysis, such as conversation analysis, that try to capture as much nuance as possible in transcription with systems of symbols (like Jeffersonian transcription). I'm not concerned with the structure of the conversation so I don't need that level of detail. But I still need to transcribe with great care; I'll listen again and again to the audio tapes until I can almost recite them. Each time I will hear something else I missed before. I want to be fair to my informants.

Listening. More important than asking the right questions. I often tell my kids that: don't ask the question if you aren't going to listen to the answer. But I'm so used to reading, I need to re-learn the art of listening lest I fall back into the comfortable world of the printed page. I'm listening....

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"Know thyself" Part 1

The Greek aphorism gnōthi seauton has been attributed to a number of ancient philosophers but regardless of authorship its call to introspection remains true: know yourself. Were it only so easy.

It s not just individuals that must do this. Churches need to know themselves as well. They need to know what they believe and they need to know their history. I'll come back to beliefs in a later post.

Churches have histories like people. Even in Canada, some churches go back 300 years. That's a lot of ministry. I remember rooting around in the basement of Emerson Baptist Church when I ministered there, the second oldest Baptist church in Western Canada. Like the show Ancestors in the Attic, exploring the old records and artifacts gave me a great sense of why the church (and community) had the character it did. The stories of the first meetings down at the local pub with barrels and planks as seats. I found posters for the church family picnic in the 1920s at Grand Beach, Lake Winnipeg. The whole congregation would jump on the train and ride to the lake for the day. Sounds like it was a lot of fun. I found Temperance movement posters as well; though interestingly, by the time I was there I might be offered either coffee or a beer when I went on a pastoral visit. Not typical Baptists! The baptism and death records traced the waves of immigrants (Mennonite, German, Ukrainian, Russian etc.) and the hardships of families as small pox and influenza struck down scores of members. It testified to the hardiness and perseverance of this congregation. It also hinted at some of the longstanding struggles and weaknesses they faced as a congregation. It helped me understand today.

I've been on the lookout for church historical documents. Because of my previous pastoral experiences, I think the history of a congregation is an important source of information for present day decision makers. I enjoy hearing the church stories of days gone bye. Sometimes when change is needed it can be frustrating to hear "but we tried that 27 years ago, and it didn't work!" Yet that shared history also seems to give security and a sense of identity to the church. It can highlight problems and needs to be addressed.

So who is the keeper of your church's history? Who gathers together the stories and the legends? How will we decide where we are going if we don't remember where we have been? Hmm.

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The Word spoken...

I went to see Jim Carey's "A Christmas Carol" and was inspired to re-read the book. The movie seemed to be undecided whether it was to be a literal interpretation of the original Dickens story or something new (and Jim Carey-ish.) A good movie but not the same as the book. I've been thinking a lot about the debate between the print and new media in religion.

The peoples of the Book (Muslims, Jewish and Christians) have an text centered faith rooted respectively in the Koran, Tanakh, and Christian Bible each sharing significant Torah traditions. I'm interested (at present) in my research with Christian protestant evangelicalism and its use of information. In this theological tradition, there is an idea of a "received text" that is divinely inspired and canonically fixed (the church believes it was now closed and could no longer be edited, or added to.) There is also the belief in the inherent power of the words of scripture. This dominance of the text is strongly evident in the evangelical church where even decorative features in churches tend to be "text heavy." Information = written text. There have been challenges to this idea. I think back to the use of stained glass windows during the middle ages to educate and inspire largely illiterate church goers in the stories of Scripture. I remember reading some years ago (1985, I think) Frankie Schaeffer's book " Addicted to Mediocrity" where he challenged evangelicals to take the creative arts seriously as a form of faith expression capable to educating, inspiring and evangelizing. Time has moved on and we now live in a multi-media rich environment, often amateur driven. Faith is being expressed in these forms. Will spoken word begin to take predominance over the written text? It is happening with other forms of written communication (i.e. newspapers). How will this substitution in form change the evangelical theology around the primacy of the text? What about other forms of visual media? One of the first tasks of Christian missionaries among new people groups was literacy training. Besides aiding community development, teaching literacy also meant people could read the Bible. It was an essential part of faith development. Now one sees the widespread use of video dramatization of the Bible for evangelism.

So my question of the day: if the Bible was being created today, would God have used multimedia or is there something about written text?

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