The Case Against Video Preaching

Every Sunday across America significant portions of Christians show up to a church gathering only to receive the preaching of God’s word via a disembodied pastor on a screen. In such multi-site churches, the pastor is present and embodied somewhere, often preaching to a group of local Christians at what is sometimes called a “broadcast location.” The pastor and sermon, however, then digitally go elsewhere, being beamed out from their original location to be viewed at numerous other churches “campuses.” Let me start by saying that, in many respects, I appreciate various multi-site churches. They often have dedicated ministries of outreach and mercy and I am friends with many godly Christians who attend such churches. Yet I want to write to question the normalization of disembodied video preaching, something which seems to be becoming an increasingly common trend. 

As researchers point out, each year megachurches take up a larger and larger slice of the pie of American Christianity. Big churches are getting bigger, while small churches are getting smaller. As this trend continues, it means that an increasing proportion of American Christians are likely receiving the teaching of God’s word via a video, as many megachurches rely on the multi-site streaming model. At most campuses of such churches the band is live, and there is likely even a local “campus pastor”—though he might rarely preach—but the teaching of God’s word, for many congregants in these churches, is done mostly via a screen. 

I believe this is a tragedy. It is a tragedy because it is not what God intends. And while video preaching is often done out of good motives, I want to argue it is ultimately a short-sighted strategy that in the long term will prove an ineffective way to see the church grow to maturity (Eph 4:13). God desires his people to receive the preaching of his word, not via screens, but through embodied, face-to-face messengers of the gospel, for that is the way he himself designed the gospel to go forth.

The Biblical Model: Face-to-Face Communication

If we want to understand how God wants his word to be communicated, we must start with how he communicated his Word—that is, his Son, the embodied gospel message himself.

God, in sending his Son, did not send a recording; he did not send a video. Yet he could have. While that might seem like a trite counterfactual statement to make, I don’t believe it is. God could have communicated the gospel via a voice from heaven, or via the proclamation of a disembodied, angelic messenger. After all, nothing is impossible for God. But it is significant that he did not, for the Bible itself sees this as significant. So how did God choose to communicate the gospel? 

God the Son took on flesh and communicated his message face to face. And the Bible reflects on the importance of this mode of communication. The apostle John, writing of Jesus, speaks of him as “that which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we looked upon and have touched with our hands . . .” (1 Jn 1:1). Jesus was not a disembodied preacher or messenger; he was a person capable of being heard, seen, and touched. Jesus, in other words, was experienced by John’s senses. And this, importantly, shaped not only John’s experience of Jesus, but also his view of Christian ministry.

John, due to his embodied, face-to-face experience with Christ, believed that Christian ministry should also be embodied. He therefore later wrote, “Though I have much to write to you, I would rather not use paper and ink”—or, we might add, streamed video—“Instead I hope to come to you and talk face to face, so that our joy may be complete” (2 Jn 12). And this was not a one-off sentiment for John. Rather, it was a theme he returned to. “I had much to write to you, but I would rather not write with pen and ink. I hope to see you soon, and we will talk face to face” (3 Jn 13-14).

Some commentators see John’s sentiments here as solely a nicety of first-century letter writing; a rhetorical device mostly empty of real meaning. If this were the case, John’s stated desire to see his recipients “face to face” would not be all that different from something like a lengthier form of the ubiquitous sentiment “Best,” with which so many of us sign off on our emails. But this seems to me to be entirely too anemic an understanding of John’s words, especially given how he connects face-to-face communication to joy, one of his favorite themes. 

The deeper reason, I think, that John believed in a face-to-face, embodied model of Christian ministry was due to a holy logic that pervades the New Testament: as with Christ, so with his disciples. Jesus was crucified, so too are we (Gal 2:20). Jesus was resurrected, so too will we be (Rom 6:4). Jesus suffered, so too must believers (Phil 3:10). And to extend this logic to Christian ministry, Jesus preached face to face, so too should we. John’s personal experience of how God communicated his message, in other words, shaped his view of how God’s message should be communicated.

Nor was John alone here. The theme of face-to-face communication resounds throughout the Old and New Testaments. Moses had the highest experience of God among the Old Testament Israelites, for the Lord chose to speak to him “face to face, as a man speaks to his friend” (Exod 33:11). Paul, though he condescended to written communication with the Thessalonians, prayed “most earnestly night and day that we may see you face to face and supply what is lacking your faith” (1 Thess 3:10). Some things, it seems, could not be supplied by a written letter. Rather, they could only be had via an embodied encounter. Much of the American church, however, seems to have forgotten this.

Technologies of Communication

But what, you might ask, do we make of the Bible itself being a written document? After all, the apostle John, despite expressing his preference for face-to-face communication, did write an epistle. So too the apostle Paul with the Thessalonians. Is this not evidence that the apostles made use of the best technology of their day to communicate the gospel, just as multi-site churches are attempting to do with video preaching? John Dyer helpfully explains,

John was comfortable using the communication technology—pen and ink—of his day, but he did so with a set of values that were contrary to the tendencies built into the technology of writing. . . . [John] was able to use technology in service of the embodied communal life that Christ taught him. When John could not be physically present with his community, he was comfortable using technology to communicate with them. But he was always careful to state that he considered technologically mediated relationships to be inferior to embodied relationships.

Making discerning use of the best technologies of our day to communicate the gospel is doubtless both a wise and licit undertaking. Something the apostles never did, however, was use technologies to replace or supplant the biblical norm of embodied preaching. Paul, in a written letter no less, asked his readers, “How are [people] to hear [the gospel] without someone [embodied] preaching?” (Rom 10:14). If we gave little thought to our theology of technology, we might be tempted to argue with Paul and think that people could hear the gospel simply from reading his epistle to the Romans, itself the greatest exposition of the gospel ever written. But the implied answer to Paul’s question is clear. Without an (embodied) preacher, people cannot hear the gospel. “Faith,” he makes clear, does not come mainly from reading, but from “hearing” a preacher proclaim the message of Christ (Rom 10:17). 

Paul’s logic here draws us into the Bible’s unbreakable connection between the message and the messenger. Each of us knows, deep down, that face-to-face communication carries with it something irreplaceable. One key aspect of this that Scripture expounds on is the fact that the gospel is not only a message but is intended by God to be embodied by a messenger whose life we can observe. That is why Paul, who desired to be face to face with the Thessalonians, reminded them of “what kind of men we proved to be among you for your sake” (1 Thess 1:5). He knew it was important that he and his coworkers in ministry shared “not only the gospel of God” with the Thessalonians—they did not only preach to them—“but also our own selves” (1 Thess 2:8). Paul’s life, in other words, validated his message.

This connection between messenger and message is everywhere throughout Scripture. Negatively, false teachers are known to be false not only by their words but by the observable fruit of their lives (Jer 23:22; Matt 7:15-20; 2 Pet 2:1-3). Positively, Paul instructed Timothy that through the combination of his godly life and his godly teaching he would save both himself and his hearers (1 Tim 4:16). This clear, God-intended connection between message and messenger was what led Paul to regularly exhort those he taught to imitate his life (1 Cor 4:6; 11:1; Phil 3:17; 1 Thess 1;6; 2 Thess 3:9).

In contrast, no video preacher can honestly repeat the words of Paul to a group of non-local congregants: “What you have learned and received and heard and seen in me–practice these things” (Phil 4:9). The preaching of the gospel, biblically speaking, requires an embodied messenger with an observable life, patterned after the life of Christ himself. As German theologian and martyr Dietrich Bonhoeffer once wrote, “God does not want the word to be proclaimed by phonograph records, but rather by witnesses.” 

The danger in video preaching, I believe, is making disembodied preaching, preaching where the congregation cannot know the life of the preacher, a norm rather than an exception. If preaching is simply a message divorced from a messenger, then why not use AI to create fresh sermons based on databases of the best preachers of the past century? Or perhaps in a few years we will have hologram technologies allowing non-local preachers to feel visually “present,” such that the distinction between embodied and non-embodied feels paper-thin. What would be wrong with that? From a biblical point of view, the crucial ingredient would still be lacking: face-to-face relationship that provides an observable link between the message and the messenger. Christ was embodied; so too must be his preachers. And no technology of mediation will ever allow our bodies to be in two places at once. 

The Extinction of Experience

Our contemporary world, in contrast, increasingly pushes us away from face-to-face experiences, and video preaching is but one more capitulation to this trend. In this vein, author Christine Rosen writes of “the extinction of experience” that we are all currently going through. In our ever-more digitized world, we are moving more and more toward mediated experiences of reality, and away from unmediated experiences. Rather than cooking a delicious meal on our own—using our own senses of smell, taste, and touch—we’d rather eat fast food while watching a TV chef sear, simmer, and serve something up. Rather than going on a road-trip of our own, we cozy up to Youtube to live vicariously through a Vlogger’s journey around America.

This draw to mediated (non face-to-face) experiences is changing the way we relate to nearly everything. As recently as twenty years ago, Rosen notes, one friend attempting to recall an experience to another would often end the story by somewhat exasperatedly concluding, “You had to be there.” Such a sentiment gave recognition to the irreplaceable nature of an embodied experience. Nowadays, in our increasingly digitized world where we ubiquitously document experiences with smartphones, we would be more tempted to try and pull up a video. But Rosen wisely writes, “If the worry during the Enlightenment, as mathematician Isaac Milner wrote in 1794, was that ‘the great and high’ have ‘forgotten that they have souls,’ then today the worry is that many of us have forgotten that we have bodies.” We increasingly are being pushed toward mediated, disembodied forms of experience, and the multi-site model of video preaching unhelpfully furthers this trend. 

Docetic Ministry

The early church was often assailed by a false teaching called “docetism.” Coming from a Greek word that means “to seem” or “to appear,” the docetists taught that Jesus Christ only seemed to have a human body, but in reality, he did not. When John writes of people who did “not confess the coming of Jesus Christ in the flesh,” he writes to combat something like an early form of docetism (2 Jn 7; note also 1 Jn 4:2-3). John’s opponents did not deny that Jesus had come, but they saw no significance to his being truly embodied in human flesh.

Churches that utilize video preaching, it seems to me, do not have a docetic understanding of Christ, but they do have something like a docetic understanding of Christian ministry. They have severed the biblical link between Christ and his messengers. They see no significance to the preacher—the messenger of Christ—being truly embodied. The preacher does not need to come in the flesh; he can come via a video screen just as well. When this is done, pastoral ministry effectively becomes not only disembodied but also intellectualized, severing the preaching of the word from the embodied shepherding of the preacher. Video preaching thereby risks making preaching into little more than a glorified transfer of information. It is no wonder churches have trouble convincing parishioners to come in-person.

Yet just as a shepherd cannot lead his flock without being with them (a video certainly won’t do the job!), neither can a pastor shepherd his flock without physical presence. “I know my own and my own know me” is, after all, the cry of the Good Shepherd himself (Jn 10:14). And since the Good Shepherd serves as the model for his undershepherds (1 Pet 5:1-4), then just as Christ came in the flesh, so too must his preachers.

The Effects of Video Preaching

So what is the upshot of all this? Why raise such an objection against the method of so many churches that, at least by outward metrics, seem to be obviously “succeeding”? Aren’t many video-preaching megachurches, after all, oftentimes the best churches in town at reaching non-believers with the gospel? Don’t they have larger amounts of resources that can be used for kingdom purposes?

I do not wish to deny any of the good that many multi-site churches are doing. I know people who have come to faith in Christ through preachers on a screen; I know multi-site churches doing marvelous ministries of mercy and outreach. Yet we must not allow a short-sighted focus on visible results to cause us to forget our theology. The Bible calls for face-to-face ministry, for ministers to be embodied. That alone should be enough. But since we in our day often look for more pragmatic reasons, let me mention a few practical dangers as well.

First, churches that utilize video preaching, whether they intend it or not, are practicing a system that bolsters the problem of celebrity, which Katelyn Beaty helpfully defines as “social power without proximity.” Giving one person the power that comes with regularly preaching to thousands is not only potentially unhealthy for the preacher, it is unhealthy for the church. How many of a church’s congregants, for example, can know the life and conduct of such a preacher in the way that the Thessalonians knew of Paul’s (1 Thess 1:5-6; 2:1-16; cf. Phil 2:22)? One need not think long to come up with myriad situations in recent years where such power without proximity has contributed to a pastor’s moral downfall.

Further, why would such churches not allow and even intentionally raise up other preachers to preach on Sundays, rather than so bolstering the status of one leader? Sometimes the arguments made against sharing the pulpit are pragmatic, even if clad in spiritual language. A certain preacher has an “anointing”; God “speaks through him” to a higher degree, and so on and so forth. Ultimately, what such objections reveal is a human-centered view of ministry that locates the power of the preached word in the messenger rather than the message. And video preaching also, and I would argue inevitably, fosters a culture of consumerism. If “the medium is the message,” as Marshall McLuhan famously stated, then sitting and consuming a video sends a vastly different message than experiencing an embodied, imperfect, flesh-and-blood human being.

Yet video preaching is also detrimental to Christians and church members. After all, they are the ones in the seats consuming the teaching. While we sometimes try and convince ourselves that there is no difference between embodied and video preaching, the former not only forces prudent questions about the size of congregations, but also can helpfully commit us to churches where the preacher is not always amazing, where our stylistic preferences are often not met, and where we must deal with all the messes that embodied relationships bring. For so many semi-anonymous attendees of multi-site megachurches, who will visit them and pray with them beside a hospital bed? If they are lucky, they may know one pastor, but he is almost certainly not the one who teaches the Scriptures to them on a weekly basis. When tragedy strikes, who will conduct their spouse’s funeral?

Churches today have an opportunity to buck our societal trend toward mediated, digital experience. Churches have a chance to demonstrate that not only souls but also bodies matter. Churches have a chance to reject the consumerism implicit within multi-site preaching and instead let God’s people be shepherded by messengers whose lives can be known by their hearers. Churches have a chance to showcase the beauty of face-to-face relationships, including relationships of spiritual care between pastors and congregants, even as our world seeks to remove human interaction at every turn. If churches are to do this, however, they must reject the pragmatics of video preaching and return to the biblical ideal: face-to-face, embodied preaching. My hope is that, in the future, our cities would be dotted not with multi-site campuses of churches streaming disembodied preachers, but rather with congregation after congregation of Christians receiving the teaching of God’s word via a local, embodied pastor.