My Apprenticeship

"When you put words on the screen, give them some kind of movement." "Use your white space." "This alley is really good for shots." "It's fine--it will look cool once we grayscale it." "Tilt the camera up . . . further . . . that's right."

I wasn't thinking about it as an apprenticeship; we were just working--intensely and every spare minute for about ten days just before the MC moved out of town and handed his media responsibilities off. We spent nearly all of the ten days filming and putting together a series of videos for the coming weeks, and mostly I absorbed his commentary as technical instruction, indisputable and inevitable in that way.

But this weekend I visited a megachurch that is in many ways as far from my church as you can get within the same theological framework. It's very close to here (just over two hours away), but it's worlds away from us in its population and resources. I'll probably write more about the visit, but right now, what I've been thinking about is the difference between what they do with their media, and what our church has done with ours.

They use video much more than we do, for everything from the clock that counts down at the beginning of the service to the announcements to the sermon itself. And yet in some ways, I felt as if they actually used it less--their videos were strictly functional, and so while they used video as a means of conveying information, they did not use it as an art form. It's as if their church and ours were both given brushes and palettes and told to signal their presence to the community, and that church painted a sign that said, "This is our church" while for us, the MC painted a bunch of images that represented the pain and joy of our people.

As I thought about all of this, I realized that the whole time we were working, the most important thing the MC imparted to me was not technical instruction, but rather a way of seeing the world, a way of conveying our identity as a church. Our videos--the ones that I like the best (and I can say this because the MC made them long before I came into the picture)--are simple, unadorned testaments to what God has done among us, in our lives, before one another's eyes.

I don't have the skill, talent, or inspiration that the MC has in spades, but I am praying that whatever I have will be enough for God to work with for now, and I am keeping everything I've learned in mind.