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The Church in the Marketplace- being present

The Church is called, I believe, to using the available means of communication; the medium of the day. Jesus did it with the story and the parable, using agrarian concepts to which the people could relate. Paul did it with Greek references and writing and traveling throughout the Roman empire. The Reformation leaders used the presses, and so goes the story. The "later" media (in which we can even include radio and television, since they have come into use only in this century, television only in the latter half of this century). These "later media" have not , in the estimation of the academia, achieved the level of sophistication of the print media, a much more "established" mode of communicating . (Dating back 500 years instead of 50, and with the backing of the world of written language which preceded the automative technology of print by several hundred years but served to build the reputation for the communication of ideas via words on a page.).

The "later media" often come under attack for their lack of depth, as communicators thrust themselves in to the world of new media forms without fresh ideas for the kind of medium they are wielding. There are plenty of examples of porting over content from the old media into the new, as we saw in earliest television shows letting us "see" the radio stars do their thing. The next logical step was to show the pictures of the stories, and begin to bring the theater onto the screen. The religious community often falls into this trap, simply "airing" a worship service or a talking head.

The latest media, the online world, has brought together a variety of forms. It is not necessarily out of place to post textual information online, provided it has some content which is valuable enough to access and view or download. But there are also new forms emerging which enhance the traditional textual presentation. Hypertext in the form of HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) on the World Wide Web of the Internet has become the hottest part of the Internet.

Hypertext can enhance all aspects of Internet usage. e.g. With Email systems, hypertext can provide a way to customize one's view of their email. It can also provide a way to jump directly to referenced messages, reducing the need for long quotations, thus economizing on the size of email boxes.

Information documents can refer to passages within other documents, and point to other archives of related information, as if one were able to jump between the bibliographies of several books to related discussions, but in a more immediate way. One need not go and find the referenced document. The very act of making the reference takes one directly to the reference so it can be viewed in full, along with whatever further trails that can be found from there.

As Internet bandwidth increases, and user hardware capabilities increase, further enhancement in the form of multimedia is easily incorporated.

The Web may well be the carrier of future video-on-demand, where one can view or download entire digital movies. Several movie studios and TV networks have web sites which are now used for marketing their offerings, but will soon provide archives of clips for promotion (some do now, but the time to download is almost prohibitive for the modem user) as well as full-length offerings (for a fee).

All of this is to say that there is a new way of communicating developing on the Web that the Theological Community must heed and learn and begin to utilize.