Tex Sample in The Spectacle of Worship in a Wired World focuses on electronic culture and its practices. "Electronic culture" is a better term than "post literate culture" because there is actually more print today than ever before courtesy of the internet. However, it is an "electronic literacy." Following the claims of McLuhan and Ong about media "reconstructing" lives he distinguishes three practices which converge characteristically in the electronic era. They are "images", "sound as beat" and "visualization." "Images" have what he calls a "rich particularity" which have opened up new ways of engaging with the world. "Sound as beat" has "encoded" all generations since 1945, and "visualization" is particularly associated with the screen and relates powerfully to sound. Sample rejects the thesis that this amounts to a return to primary orality. "Electronic culture is not simply some reprise of orality"(1998,49). Rather, by powerful integration of image, beat and visualization there is a new multi-sensory culture. He uses the practices of "spectacle" with its multi-sensory soul music and dance to emphasize how "meaning" is conveyed through experience in the electronic context with its practices of convergence, bonding and commitment (106).

Combining some features from these analyses I have summarized the three communication eras and some of their distinctive features for preachers in diagrammatic form. Here, starkly, the dangers of over simplification are obvious. Transitions are much more complex than any chart can capture. For example, long after the onset of literacy, people continued to read out loud in order to hear the words. Others question how much "secondary orality" is to be regarded as a separate era, since it expands literacy through the far more extensive "electronic literacy." Yet Fig. 3 does identify major communication shifts which raise very important issues for traditional expository preaching.

Flight, Fight or Befriend?

How is traditional expository preaching going to respond to the challenge of these culture and communication shifts? "From a communications perspective ... we live in the period of the greatest change since the formation of the church" (Boomer-shine in his foreword to Jenson 1993, 13). Some preachers believe that they can avoid the issue. For the present they have well-established congregations with biblical literacy and high expectations of traditional preaching. As we shall see shortly, during this time of cultural transition, traditional preaching will continue to thrive in many places, but this must not blind us to the overall reality of a declining church which is failing to communicate with younger generations.

Some have taken a hostile stance, especially against the obvious dangers of accommodating the Word of God to culture. Though Biblical preaching needs to engage relevantly with culture it must always be safeguarded as a unique form of communication. It is sui generis -- its words are grounded distinctively in the Word of God and delivered through the work of the Holy Spirit.