Preaching: You also assert that what you call the “conventional church” is increasingly losing its hearing in the culture. What is behind that and how do we respond?

Martoia: This is a challenging issue, and I think in some ways preaching sits right in the center of it. Look at the way are architecture is set up in most churches and the way our learning models are set up. The American churches are in many ways in cahoots with the American education model, which is without a doubt a post-enlightenment project where we have a “sage on stage” that delivers the gemstones and we in the congregation sit and listen and nod our heads and say, “Yes, that is excellent,” and we walk away and say, “Good, I heard another message.”

The challenge that besets us is that for all the information we are delivering in a typical church on a weekly basis, it seems that there is a disproportionately small amount of life change. Some say there is an inversely proportional amount. If you come out of a traditional church context, you have Sunday morning, Sunday night, Wednesday night, get into a small group, do your own personal Bible study, read some Christian books. Take a look at the five, six, eight, ten, twelve, fifteen inputs we’ve got going into our life – we ought to be life change giants, we ought to be experiencing profound and deep transformation.

Yet guys like Gallup, Barna and Princeton Research all seem to indicate the amount of life change and the amount of transformation going on inside of us as Christ followers is hardly different from those who are not Christ followers. So something is amiss with the way information is being communicated or with the content of the information that is being conveyed. I think probably it is a little bit of both.

On the one hand, we probably have some concepts that are a bit dry and worn out; they’re ineffective. It may be that we have a ministry model that is engaging a small percentage of the people in terms of learning styles. You know, I love to sit and listen to lectures, but educational theorists say that there are only eighteen percent of us that like to listen to lectures. Most of us learn in totally different ways. What does that mean to the church? That means we have to start thinking about how we get people in a learning situation so they can experience life transformation, not just as a stream of information but somehow as information into action. That is going to be a monumental task in the next several decades.

Preaching: Let me press you a little bit at this point. The evangelical megachurch still seems to be growing dramatically. There you find what you’ve called the “sage on stage” surrounded by professionally done music and staging and all these kinds of things. It appears that a lot of the numerical decline is in the smaller church setting, which one would think would be a more conducive setting for community and some other types of learning models we are talking about. All the folks that are moving into these evangelical megachurches – do you argue they represent the last gasp of a dying culture, or are they just the eighteen percent? Or ignoring numbers, is it that people are still attracted to that model, but once they get there something is not happening that would have produced life change?