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April 5, 2013

Tell-a-vision

The title, said quickly, sounds suspiciously like one of America's favorite past times: television.
At a workshop at the annual Episcopal Communicators conference this week, the presenter talked about his early days in broadcast news. How do I create a news story, he asked his boss and soon-to-be mentor.

The answer: tell-a-vision.

In the broadcast business, this wisdom translated into giving voice to images, to telling the story through pictures and narrative. It is a good lesson for novice videographers, and I scribbled it down furiously.

But the phrase has grown on me this evening. The idea of telling the vision is pretty compelling -- of being tellers of our own stories, of how God moves in and through us, of what it means to believe in a risen Christ, of how it feels to witness miracles and to pray and to love.

As bearers of and participants in the institutional church, we have a responsibility to tell that vision too, to talk about what it means to be part of a faith community, to explain our traditions and funny words, to talk about apostolic succession and why we believe only bishops have the authority to confirm and ordain. At times, we do a decent job of showing the vision of church, especially with our outreach to the poor, but we are still too often tongue-tied when it comes to telling the vision of Christ's church made manifest in today's world.

So my Easter challenge for today is to think about how I might tell-a-vision when I turn on the television. Instead of fast forwarding during the commercial, I challenge myself --and you --to spend those spare minutes thinking about how to tell your story, how to answer the question about why you believe or why you attend church. If you can't come up with an answer in the commercial break, then it may be time to turn off the TV.