The Next Logical Way to Expand: Improve Communication

Television As A Communication Tool

After you have spent some time using television as a method of getting the word out, and have become comfortable with using it at it's simplest level, you may want to explore its use as a means of improving communication both within your congregation and the larger community.

In our busy lives in this society, working on the improvement of communication is a constant issue for most ministries. Community Television is a very good tool for facilitating communication, and its use requires very little in the way of extra skills, once the initial skills from level one are mastered, because this is more a matter of expanding application rather than expanding skill base.

The words "community", "communication" and "communion", all come from the same root. Communication and communion are what community does, or at least, they are what a community can do when it is operating at its best. The opportunity to enjoy good quality community is always in high demand by at least some people. Unfortunately, in our congregations, people who have very little communication with each other at a significant level, have to suffice with communion with God, and miss out on the enrichment which comes when we have quality communication with Christ's body around us.

Of course, we have to be careful about protecting people's privacy when using community television as a means of improving communication, but that still leaves plenty of room within which to operate. There are endless ways to use Community television in this way, but the following are provided to give some ideas, based upon typical communication problems in church and community.

Where Do You Work Anyway?

• As our communities get larger and our rural areas more spread out, the contexts in which we live and raise or families as well as conduct our work activities are often different. At one time, the community we lived in and the one we worked in completely overlapped for all of us. We knew what each other did for a living, and the struggles we each faced in our occupations because we met each other each day in the course of carrying on our business. Now we work at great distance from each other, and we have little idea of the challenges our neighbors are facing. When we arrive at Church, we ask "how are you doing?" but rarely have any idea what we are asking. One rural agricultural worker commented that throughout his working life he has always worked no more than one day's journey from home, but that the number of miles he travels in a day has increased dramatically. In cities people often do not know their neighbors and find that their "community" is scattered throughout the various districts of the city.

  Solution: Use Labor Day to celebrate peoples' occupation and/or the things they are into. In one case, I helped a congregation do this by taping their singing for a couple of weeks as background music. I had a sign-up sheet circulated for those who wanted to participate, with their contact information. Ninety people signed up. I arranged for the minister to do a "going to the world" type of benediction / commissioning the week before and taped it as well as the people leaving Church. During the week, I shot ten seconds or so of each of the people on the list at work or doing their favorite activities, and assembled them on a tape with the music in the background. On the next Sunday I taped them coming back into Church, and taped the pre-arranged "call to worship" in which the minister spoke of coming together to worship from our places of work and our various activities. Then while the congregation opened the worship, I tagged on these final shots to the tape I had assembled as a closing for the show. By the time "sermon", period came around I was ready to show the finished product on a projection TV. The opening was the minister's benediction and the people going out to their places of work, shots of the people at work, and then returning with a call to worship suitable for Labor day. A celebration of applied Christianity in their church.

  All this was done on a borrowed camcorder, a tape recorder, and a VCR. I kept the music separate from the video and played them back them simultaneously in order to add in the opening and closing pieces, and simply brought up one volume and dropped the other when appropriate. Later I edited the two onto one Videotape for archive purposes.

  I repeated this activity several years later in two small rural churches just after my arrival in that area. It was a great way to get to know the congregation quickly, and see many of them in their places of work, special activities. In this case, I mixed together the shots of the people working, as they were from the same larger parish. However, I did not add the music until showtime. Then we taped the people singing the Klusmeir hymn "Worship and Work Must Be One",.(7) and played it as background to the visuals. That localized the tape while keeping the visuals affirming the larger pastoral charge. Once again, I made a composite of each later for archive purposes.

  One word of caution here: it is important to watch for "editing effect" when arbitrary hymn music goes behind visuals, so nobody is embarrassed. Listen through the production and change things around if any unfortunate match-ups occur. For example, on my first production, I had a fellow in a furniture store demonstrating a recliner to one of the female clerks. Just as the chair tipped back, the hymn words came up with "...as I look into your loveliness..." Needless to say, I made some changes.

  The other thing to watch is that in some cases permission needs to be obtained to shoot on location. I simply had the people clear it with their organizations, and checked that it had been done when I telephoned to arrange each shoot. There were questions asked in a steam plant (for safety), in an air-traffic control tower (for security) and in a grocery store, (for privacy of other customers).

  This is a lot of work, but the return on it is extremely high. The same activity could be broken up an done over the year, featuring a one-minute documentary on people, perhaps with an interview, and shown as a clip within the community TV service as well as projected in the live service. "Editing it in" would keep the quality up on the TV version. Simply having people show up to church in their working clothes on labor day is a very simple variation of this technique if it is explained on the Community TV version. One minister had an agricultural display (i.e. a penned-up cow) on the parking lot to celebrate agriculture on Labor Day once. This also makes good footage as part of the TV version.

Out Of Sight, Out Of Mind

• Once I went to a funeral of a person who had been a pillar of his church for most of his life. However, by the time he had died, most of his peers had already died, and he had been homebound for quite a few years. Someone commented that if he had died twenty years earlier, the Church would have been packed. Instead, there were just a few friends and family at the funeral. Once people are out of sight, they are often out of mind. This is also true of people on different shifts, people who worship at the "other" worship time, people who teach Sunday School during Church, Travelling salespeople and truckers, and people in long-term medical care. There is a constant problem of keeping the community aware of one another.

  Solution: mini-documentaries Using the above technique, mini- documentaries can easily become a regular part of a service of worship in which those members who are out of sight are no longer out of mind. Combining this with a phone jack in the pulpit (or a long phone extension cord) enables one to then phone to the person and have a chat live which enhances the effect. Coordinating the showings with the week a traveling worker is back home enables human contact as well. All this is easily included on a community TV version as well.

What Do You Think About What He Just Said?

• The first I heard about this technique, was an account given by a couple of my fellow Theology students about thirty years ago. It seemed that there were a few marginalized people in Winnipeg who were having trouble with the welfare system. The students took a videotape camera and taped these people talking into the camera about their problem, in order to play it back to the welfare staff. Then they showed it to the staff but recorded their responses watching it. Then they went back to the welfare people and showed them the new tape, but taped them watching the tape and got their responses. After about two or three trips back and forth, they were shut down...but they did manage to get the communication flowing!

  If this technique was combined with community TV it would be a very powerful tool, and one would have to have a very good reason for doing it, but it would certainly be interesting to see the degree to which people actually heard each other. As occupational rehabilitation people know, finding the hardware to bridge the communication gap between people who have been put out of the communication loop through illness (such as stroke), or misfortune (such as job loss)is the easy part. : getting the people to walk over that bridge is a far more difficult thing. Jesus talked about three situations of broken communication in Luke 15 - a lost son, a lost sheep and a lost coin. One broke off communication through self will, one through wandering off and one, like the first two still had value as a coin, but somehow got out of circulation. Community Television is a powerful tool for starting to restore those members of the community to both communication and communion.

Brandon Issues Which May Be Addressed In Part By Improving Communication With Media

• Sniff Do some programs on the techniques of confession and repentance and forgiveness, and their effects on the "handles" others have on us, to facilitate communication between the folks who often just lack the techniques of reconciliation.

• 49/51% Racist Our town has many international students. Do some programs with them and about them designed to bridge barriers to the community with understanding.

• Under High Economic Pressure Start doing some features on unemployed people with skill sets, and employers with special needs, or issues in the community which need someone to address, soliciting ideas on how this might be done...to generate new jobs to do such tasks.

• Aging Population Conduct a Bible study or small group live in a studio with phone-in opportunity. Care must be taken about what is said in public or on the phones as such groups often get personal, but a skilled leader with mature participants could make for a good encounter

  Similarly, a phone-in talk show after everybody has watched a network production (including a studio group) allows shut-ins to engage in meaningful discussion about any number of things.

• "Shoots" Its Leaders Some very creative activity is taking place in some churches where they have people taking one hour shifts at prayer 24/7 for their community and its leaders. The prayer-room has several tables or centers to help people focus on things like "education", hospital" etc. with the names and photos of staff involved and interview material with those people as to what their challenges are currently which need prayer...so people know that "someone knows that I'm out here". Usually several people take it upon themselves to keep the material on the centers fresh by going around and interviewing key people. A Community television program could also make such material available so that others in the community might know what the concrete issues are which need our prayer and awareness. Of course, confidentiality needs to be preserved, but that still leaves much room for action.

• Labor Factor One person in a local church made a holiday trip to Cuba. He and his wife spent a month there and sought out a local church that was struggling. His video was shown in his local church and it brought thundering home the gross economic inequities across the world, which are out of our sight and therefore out of our mind. The effect of his videotape, with his family in it, was to open up communication between the local congregation and the congregation in Cuba. People believe TV. One does not have to go far to gather material about the difficulties that many people struggle with each day.

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