Digital Evangelism Issues

John Cleese, creative writer, actor and comedian, has produced much memorable comedy. The classic TV series Fawlty Towers (1975-9) is widely regarded as one of the best television comedies of all time. It has dated little in nearly 40 years, and is available as a remastered DVD set.

So you might think Cleese could teach us something about creativity – and you’d be right.

Below is his 36-minute talk on how to bring out your creative side. Set aside some time to watch it!

Eric Dye, of the excellent ChurchMag, writes,

“A few nights ago, my wife and I watched this video of John Cleese speaking about creativity.

It. Was. Amazing!

There were so many different things I got from this video. From how business are run, to education, to my own creative process.”

Creatives have not always been given freedom to use their gifts in evangelism and discipleship. Or even humor.

Does this talk resonate with you? Please add your comments.

Check our free books about humor and other related blog posts.

Photo credit: FlandersDC/Flickr | Creative Commons

In UK, we have a builders merchants called Travis Perkins. They are a great place to buy timber and other materials, and doubtless a business of the utmost probity, named after two companies that merged.

But it is interesting to consider the hidden color, the resonance, in this name. No word exists in a vacuum. Words only have life because they create an image in our minds. And this image, different for each of us, will be an amalgam of our previous personal experience plus an overlay from our history and culture.

‘Travis Perkins’, a British broadcaster has pointed out, sounds like a rakish West Country sailor in 18th century Britain. (Phonetically he’d be ‘TRARviz PURRRkinz’!) Ostensibly a fisherman, but not averse to fixing a deal in Old Jake’s harborside bar to bring over a cargo of French brandy, dodge the Revenue cutters (patrol boats) and land the smuggled goods in a remote cave!

Not, perhaps, quite a pirate, but hey, this is an unmissable chance to bring you a classic radio comedy sketch about pirates! Scroll down to play.

Alternative words

Although Shakespeare wrote: A rose by any other name would smell as sweet, the experimental truth is that it would not – if the other name had not yet built up the memories and associations of ‘rose’.

Many Christian terms may indeed smell sweet to you, but to others, they may reek of negative things due to people’s past experience. Yet rephrase them in neutral or contextualized language, and we can immediately transform them into a positive sweetness for others too. In evangelism, we need to be acutely aware of how our words and tone are perceived by others, and wherever possible avoid christianese and jargon, and choose neutral meaningful alternatives.

Who’d be a Bible translator?

Translating Hebrew and Koine Greek into other languages, even English, and especially non-European languages, is a hugely challenging task. Many words have no direct equivalent in the target language, or alternatively have multiple nuances which one word cannot capture. (That’s why the Amplified Bible brackets or square-brackets additional meanings or definitions.)

Every year it seems, somewhere in the world Christians have a public and sometimes vitriolic dispute about Bible translation issues. And often translators 50 or 100 years ago, with the best motives, made translation decisions which communicated poorly or were even glaringly inaccurate or misleading. Yet national Christians sometimes resist much more accurate modern translations as somehow tampering with God’s Word.

Christians who have not learned a second language can fail to understand that word-for-word translation between any two languages, even closely-related ones, is often misleading and sometimes impossible, and that languages are constantly evolving.

Here’s an abridged article from the International Journal of Frontier Missions which explains some of these complexities. See also Can You Get Here From There? and Persistent Problems Confronting Bible Translators.

For in-depth books on translation issues, see The Challenge of Bible Translation and Bible Translation. It is a hugely complex and sensitive task.

In fact, the Bible is surprisingly resistant to sub-optimal translation. (And of course, all translations are inevitably sub-optimal.) Around 80% is broadly narrative story, wisdom or poetry, in which truth is embedded rather than presented as systematic apologetics/life instruction. It’s more like a hologram than a normal photo. Chop off half a photograph and you’ve probably lost essential information which cannot be inferred from the surviving half. Cut a hologram transparency in half, and the image remains intact, though at lower definition.

Photo: Smugglers Inn, Holcombe, Devon. Used under Creative Commons from Geograph.co.uk

History of church movements, from Trevin Wax’s blog at Gospel Coalition.

Click on graphic for larger version

So that’s it then. We can get out and do something else!

Cartoon by Dave Walker. Find more cartoons you can freely re-use on your blog at We Blog Cartoons.

Humor is important in evangelism. Get free e-books about Christian humor.

But seriously…

Seriously though, the digital opportunities have never been greater. Gordon Marcy highlights this in a thoughtful analysis: Three essential ingredients for transforming digital ministry.

And perhaps our biggest challenge is keeping up with the mobiles, which are set to overtake laptops and PCs for web access.

And indeed, the world many of us knew is passing. As Mike Frost has commented, “Christendom is over. Get used to it.” This post The oddness of living post-Christendom is very insightful.

Yup, that’s me. Online displacement activity.

There is, by the way, a word in one language which has a similar meaning to mañana, but without the same implications of urgency!

Cartoon by Dave Walker. Find more cartoons you can freely re-use on your blog at We Blog Cartoons.

Humor is important in evangelism. Get free e-books about Christian humor.

“It seems only yesterday.” Well, not quite. Email goes back quite a way (as the infographic shows)!

Here’s an exercise when you have nothing better to do: work out the average number of emails you send each day, and multiply it by the number of days since you first became an internet user.

And, for laughs, just think about to how clueless we may have felt when we started online. And how much help we perhaps needed, as illustrated by Norwegian TV’s ‘The First Tech Support Call’. This is the best version (downloadable from YouTube) which includes the final punchline:

If you are a newcomer to the Web, or want to help someone who is, check the BBC’s Getting online one click at a time free e-book, available on our free book page.

Many a true word is spoken in jest… Which is why humor is so important in evangelism. Get free e-books about Christian humor.

Seriously though, there are good reasons to get a smartphone including the discipleship and evangelism opportunities it gives.

Cartoon by Dave Walker. Find more cartoons you can freely re-use on your blog at We Blog Cartoons.

Effective communication has many strands.

One is listening, asking questions and checking for feedback that the message we communicate is actually understood.

A couple in UK arranging their marriage service requested the organist to play ‘the Robin Hood theme’ for the bride to come up the aisle. This was readily agreed to. No problems. Here’s what they wanted – the Bryan Adams song Everything I Do, I Do It For You. But this is what the organist, doubtless of an older generation – you are probably ahead of me by now – understood and played. Yes really.

One area we must avoid is christianese jargon. If our words have different meanings (or no meanings) in the minds of our hearers, we have mis-communicated.

Most humor makes a serious point. Having sent a couple of potentially important emails that were either quarantined for no apparent reason, or completely lost, the cartoon below has some truth. It’s always worth checking later if an important email arrived, as well as encouraging people to put your email address on whatever approved list/positive filter they have. I also use a large array of ‘never send to spam’ keyword filters in my Gmail, so that I virtually never have incoming legitimate email quarantined.

With installed email programs (eg. Eudora), opening a queued email to check what you said or add something, will unqueue it. Unless you re-queue it, it won’t be sent. Check your outbox frequently so see that messages are not stuck there for this, or other, reasons.

By the way, did you know that you can use Gmail, both in and out, in conjunction with your POP3 own domain-name email. It’s a great way to send and receive email, have the advantage of probably the world’s best quarantine and filter system, as well as access your email from any computer anywhere in the world, and have a permanent archive of all emails, even if you lose them from your POP3 mailer on your own computer.

Cartoon by Dave Walker. Find more cartoons you can freely re-use on your blog at We Blog Cartoons.

Cartoon by Dave Walker. Find more cartoons you can freely re-use on your blog at We Blog Cartoons.

Humor is important in evangelism. Get free e-books about Christian humor.

Outnumbered is a BBC sitcom about a long-suffering couple with three smart children. Sadly for those outside UK, it is not streamed or archived on the BBC site (it does have some clips here and here) but it is available worldwide on DVD (Region 2).Here’s an incredibly funny clip that has gone viral, with 9-year-old Ben slow-grilling a minister:

Andy Hamilton, one of the very gifted writers of the series, is not a professing believer, but spoke at the Christian Greenbelt Festival last summer. Remarkably, the show is not fully-scripted, and much of the children’s acting is actually improvised.

We need to be aware of online resources that can help us answer these difficult questions. Among the many useful helps, check BeThinking.

Humor is also a wonderful vehicle for truth – see our page about humor that includes two free e-book downloads. We offer other free e-books on many aspects of communication and evangelism.