There are many implications for preachers in this seminal work. In particular, I will focus briefly on three authors who have developed Ong's work with regard to religious communication. Such brevity inevitably runs the risk of over simplifying their distinctions and missing their nuances and each author's contribution deserves detailed reflection.

Pierre Babin in The New Era in Religious Communication analyzes how faith has been communicated differently through these three eras and offers some general observations. He is particularly interested in the ways in which contemporary young people learn within the context of worship. Babin contends that within an oral culture faith is communicated by a process of "immersion" which involves memorization by symbolic procedures and dramatic presentation of images. This he calls "right brain" communication.

By contrast, faith in the age of print media communicates by the printed catechesis of doctrines with a "left brain" cerebral form of faith. However, in the age of electronic media both "right brain" and "left brain" are stimulated by audiovisual media and data-processing information. This he calls "stereo communication" which involves heart and feelings as well as intellect and reason. Electronic media makes an impact primarily through modulations and vibrations. "Our imaginary and affective framework is determined by audiovisual language." He therefore contrasts conceptual language of enlightenment communication (Modernity and print), with symbolic language of post-enlightenment communication (Postmodernity and electronics).

Richard Jensen in Telling the Story and Thinking in Story; Preaching in a post literate age relates the ideas of McLuhan, Ong and Babin directly to types of preaching. He claims that the invention of printing led to "Gutenberg homiletics" which "predisposes a didactic form of homiletics. The linear message of print helped to create a linear approach to the task of proclamation" (1993,7). Traditional preaching, which he terms didactic preaching, exactly fitted communication styles for the literacy era. Its linear progressions of thought were structured in space, propositional in content and analytical in style. Such preaching is thinking in ideas. "Preaching becomes the task of translating eye information (that which is in the book) into ear information ... passing along the true and essential doctrines and information."

He finds such preaching is inevitably in trouble in the "post-literate era" which he dates from 1985 when more videocassettes were rented from video stores than books were checked out of libraries. "I am seriously proposing a kind of paradigm shift for preachers shaped by the literate world's approach to preaching" (10). This shift requires new thought processes of "story thinking" which harnesses key qualities of the earlier primary orality before printing.

For Jensen, preachers today have to "go back to the future" as they relate "thinking in story" to the post-literate electronic context. Sermons need to 'stitch stories together' with features such as repetition and "metaphors of participation." They should be situational rather than propositional. Interestingly this is echoed in the claims of Webber for an "ancient future faith."