Broadening Your Bandwidth: See and Say

By Jay Akkerman

Aren’t family communication habits fascinating? For so many people, yelling seems to be the preferred way to get their point across. Yet in other homes, volumes are communicated in the subtleties of what is not vocalized. For some, gesturing comes as naturally as breathing and others are big on note writing or just gabbing around the kitchen table with a cup of coffee in their hands. Take a look around and consider, “What are your family’s communication habits?”

My family’s been joking for years about how we invariably kept a pile of napkins and ball point pens close at hand just in case someone needed to draw a picture of what they were describing at the dinner table. To this day, my mom is notorious for sketching on any stray envelope within reach while talking on the phone. In fact, I’m scribbling out these ideas on an airplane napkin at 28,000 feet!

It’s no wonder that the “See and Say” was one of my favorite toys as a kid. In recent years, Mattel gave their classic a facelift, but the basic design remains virtually unchanged: just point the arrow spinner at Old McDonald’s cow, pull the string, and listen for those classic words, “The cow says ‘moooooo.’” Sight married to sound. Ever since, I’ve had a compelling need to see what I’m saying.

Come to think of it, church history is full of times when seeing was directly tied to what scripture was saying. From the earliest days, believers have used a wide array of visual means to communicate their faith. Whether it be the Ichthus symbol, ancient mosaics, medieval art, stained glass, or architecture, we’ve had a long history of helping people see what God is saying.

For most of the past two millennia, the church’s communication style centered on taking the gospel to a predominantly illiterate world by broadcasting on several sensory channels. Yet in so many of our churches today, preachers subject worshipers to verbal overdose by emphasizing predominantly informational preaching over more dynamic, transformational ways of communicating the gospel message.
So what are your communication habits? How much of your teaching and preaching centers on you actively talking and everyone else just passively sitting and listening? Do you begin every message with a joke or always end with a poem? Has alliteration become a fixation, or is your unspoken priority just to have people fill in the blanks of your three-point outline? Bottom line: how deeply do you communicate the message of scripture in creative, compelling ways?

Fortunately, the Bible is full of rich opportunities for multisensory preaching. Take Jeremiah 18 as a case in point: rather than simply talking about how a potter throws clay on a wheel, why not show them? Why not offer them a close-up graphic of a potter working the clay, show them a video of you learning from a local pottery teacher, or better yet, actually invite a potter to throw a pot in front of them while you’re preaching from this passage? It may mean a little extra work on the janitor’s part, but by wedding sight with sound, you’ve broadened your preaching bandwidth.
Jesus was a master storyteller who used all kinds of object lessons to drive his point home. He called fishermen to snag people in their nets, contended to be the bread of heaven, said the kingdom of heaven belongs to the childlike, and instituted a supper with his body and blood as the main course. All graphic, visual connectors. So how can you learn from the Bible’s characters, its message, and the church across the centuries to broaden your preaching bandwidth? Begin today by discovering your own communication habits, then strive to help your church see what you’re saying.

As teaching pastor of New Hope Church in Phoenix, Arizona, Jay communicates each week using visual media. He can be reached at jay@lifepuzzle.org.