Sometimes you just can’t find the right word, so you have to create one.
My daughter’s high school English teacher was looking for a word that encompassed “huge” and “gigantic” with the added sense of enormous, sweeping scope. So he coined “hugantic” (pronounced hew-jan-tic).
Now that’s BIG.
We faced a similar dilemma finding a name for this issue’s theme. How do you describe the assignment of today’s preacher, to communicate an ancient-future message that God is, God loves, and God can be known. And further, that God is currently at work, as he has been since the world began, to redeem good out of evil, to transform self-centered people into saints who fully engage life in the present but are never satisfied with simply an earthbound worldview, because they know that eternal glory is the reason they exist.
And that’s just the message. The other half of the assignment is to spread that good news, embodied in the person of Jesus Christ, to listeners who are ever-changing. To a world ever more complex.
How do you put that in a word?
Not long ago, some of our editors met with John Ortberg, a teaching pastor at Willow Creek Community Church and a frequent contributor to LEADERSHIP. John described the recent shift in the media from “broadcasting” to “narrowcasting.”
Fifty years ago, all radio stations offered “block programing,” a variety of music, news, comedy, and drama, assuming the whole family tuned in together.
TV networks took over that approach, and many predicted the death of radio. But radio stations adapted, going after narrower and narrower niches, with great success. So we have news talk or sports talk or shock jocks or the professionally opinionated Rush Limbaughs or Dr. Lauras.
Music stations are even more finely defined: classic rock, soft rock, lite rock, oldies, alternative rock, easy listening, classic country, new country, jazz, R&B, hip hop, and …
The emergence of VCRs and 500 cable channels has now forced TV from broadcasting to narrowcasting. Prime time network TV viewership is a mere 1/3 of what it was in 1980, the year we launched LEADERSHIP.
Today’s assumption is that each member of the family wants to watch something different, and communicating means aiming for a more and more precise subset of the whole.
This trend presents preachers with a dilemma. Each congregation is populated with multiple needs, preferences, and life situations. Each church may be only slightly less segmented than the radio market.
So what do we do? Follow the lead of radio program managers, aiming for a narrow subset of the whole, effectively ignoring the majority? Or do we try to speak to everyone within earshot, and fear we’ll reach no one in particular?
This issue of LEADERSHIP assumes that neither is an option for preachers of a timeless message with eternal importance. We neither broadcast nor narrowcast. Ours is a unique role. We Wordcast.
Our calling is (1) the Word—given by God through prophets and apostles and Jesus Christ. The Word is as old as Mount Everest and as contemporary as the latest attempt to reach Everest’s summit.
Our calling is (2) casting—to cast that Word far and wide, near and narrow, as we have opportunity. Jesus’ parable of the sower describes reality: we cast seed freely, hoping to find fertile ground, but recognizing that the Word will not be welcomed by all.
We’re called to Wordcasting. In this fragmented world, that’s a hugantic assignment.
Marshall Shelley is editor of LEADERSHIP.
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