Those sorts of tie-ins cause people to go, “I go throughout my day and the world is trying everything it can to get me to go buy its Big Mac. What do we do to each other to get us to press into God?” I think the other genius thing about Encounter is the team was able to make what appeared to be obtuse connections that ended up being very powerful and memorable.

Preaching: What do you think preaching is going to look like in the next generation, as we go through the kind of cultural changes now underway?

Martoia: I think my guess is as good as anybody’s! Homiletics was once three points and a poem. Now I think great preaching is going to do a couple of things. One is move away from giving pat answers. We’ll ask more profound, probing questions so that the hearer is able to engage the learning experience themselves, even though it is still dominantly rational and linear, deductive.

When my child comes asking for me to help them with algebra problem number eight and says, “Dad, can you give me the answer?” I say, “Yeah, here it is,” which is often what we do in preaching. But instead we can ask some really good questions, so that when it comes to number nine on the algebra worksheet they are not asking for the answer again, but applying the questions that I asked so they can come to some conclusions themselves. I think that is already becoming something that is highly valued.

Second, for lack of a better term, I think we are going to see more of an Oprah-fication of preaching, if I can be so crass, and venial. I think we are going to have to do far more of an interactive sort of speaking. The African American community does a much better job at this than we do in the Anglo community. I wonder if we don’t need much more interactive questions posed and popcorn answers given, almost conversational preaching.

Some people say that just isn’t practical. I understand why we say that, I recognize there are risks inherent in that, but I don’t know if the investigation of new preaching styles is nearly as risky as staying on the autopilot course we are on, which doesn’t seem like a very viable solution at all. Let’s do what we have always done and turn up the volume – that doesn’t seem like an effective solution at all.

I wonder if we are going to need to experiment with those sorts of changes, where we may make preaching in the postmodern age look fundamentally different from the modern world. Sage on stage, lecture – what will it look like? I think it might be a little different from that; we will see though.

We have piloted just a little of this. What happens when the typical speaker or narrative communicator walks out on stage, does a ten minute wind up, everybody has some conversation, perhaps have a computer terminal within the group of the six of them. They log in and give preliminary popcorn learning that is downloaded into a database. The sage on stage walks back out, shares some corporate learning that is being shared at the tables. This could be in a group of 100 or it could be a group of 10,000; it is doable. What would it be like if we kept technology not for glitz but for communication, so that we could really come to learn together and come to know together? I think those things hold some possible promise, at least for exploration.