Walk into Room 5 and the first thing you are likely to notice is the flat-screen television. We have similar installations in the Youth Room and the Middle School classroom. They’ve become integral, even essential, to our teaching, our learning, and how we share information.
I use the installation in Room 5 almost every week. My two Bible Study groups have watched DVD presentations ranging from biographies of Martin Luther and the apostles Peter and Paul, to Oxford Professor Diarmaid MacCulloch’s superb series, “Three Thousand Years of Christian History.”
In addition to learning from DVDs, I have created numerous curriculum presentations on my computer, including sessions on Worship, Forgiveness, Prayer, The Book of Revelation, and The Reformation among others. With the combination of television screen, computer, and resources available on the Internet, I can create compelling materials and curricula tailored to each class’s interest.
Both the High School Sunday School class and the High School Youth Group use the television and DVD player in the Youth Room. It is a helpful teaching tool, especially for our young folks who do most of their learning in school using monitors and screens. The installation has even encouraged the Youth Group to host a monthly “Friday Night Movie Night”, to provide our young folks with a safe place to gather to watch a film, have some popcorn and enjoy a relaxing evening.
The installation in the Middle School room is used by both the Middle School class and the Middle School Youth Group. It’s also been used by our Early Learning Center, and it is used from time to time by the support group Families Anonymous to view DVDs that help them cope with family members struggling with alcohol or drug addiction.
All three installations have proven themselves to be good investments for teaching and for learning. And, the extra blessing in all this is that all three installations were donated to the church: televisions, DVD players, and even the mounting hardware. Studies have shown we retain far more information when we combine the visual with words, and certainly the generation coming up is doing almost all of their learning on screens. We’ll continue to find new and better ways to teach and learn using sight and sound, as well as words.
We still learn by reading, of course, and the members of our Session are busy reading two books as part of our planning process to help us think about the future. One group of our Elders is reading, Christianity After Religion: The End of Church and the Birth of a New Spiritual Awakening by Diana Butler Bass, and another group is reading You Lost Me: Why Young Christians are Leaving Church and Rethinking Faith by David Kinnaman. Ed White recommended both books to us as resources to help us think about the many ways churches of all denominations are adapting to change. If you are interested in reading either of these books and participating in the conversation, let me know and we’ll get a copy to you.
We need no technology to help us celebrate the promise of hope, rebirth, and new life that is ours in Easter. Our Lord’s resurrection reminds us that the Living Christ leads us here and now into the future, a place of endless new beginnings. Come follow our Lord into the future not just on Easter, but every day, singing “Alleluia!”
He is Risen!
Pastor Skip
