 Good afternoon. My name is Henry Jenkins. I'm the director of the Comparative Media Studies program here at MIT, and happy to welcome you on behalf of David Thorburn, the organizer of the communication forum. He's on leave this term, and I've sort of stepped in to fill his shoes at presiding over these events. This event is one that I think is very special to me, that I felt for some time that academic institutions should be involved in dialogue with the Christian movements around the country, that it's very important for us to have communication and respectful listen and hear from each other, particularly in the kind of divisive political climate that our country has been in for the last eight years or more. It's all the more important that we hear and listen and understand a range of perspectives around the country, somewhere which don't often necessarily get brought into a university space. What I'd ask in the program today, we're bringing people who represent different perspectives within the evangelical movement, as well as scholars who are looking at it, and that seems like a very important thing for an academic institution to be doing. I'm sure there are people in the audience who don't necessarily agree with everything that's said by every speaker. In the podium, I suspect that all the people on the podium would necessarily agree with each other, that the most important thing we can do is to respectfully listen, talk about our disagreements, but do so in a way that expresses an eagerness to learn and understand from each other, that we need to understand why we may disagree or why we may agree with each other more than we need to necessarily make sure that everyone feels the heat of our disagreement. This program was designed to be about the evangelical use of media, which is a topic that I've written about, as well as some of the panelists up here. And it seems to me that it's a very important topic for us to consider. These are very powerful organizations. They exert enormous role in popular culture today. There are an entire parallel media industry out there that produces a large number of stuff that touches a large number of people in very powerful and significant and meaningful ways that we in the media studies world need to understand better than we do. It in fact can contribute, understanding that space can in fact contribute to our understanding of many other significant issues that we work on regularly, such as how niche media works and how different niche audiences, how viral marketing works, how different communities of interest use media and use the forms of popular culture to express to themselves their core values and their core beliefs. So that's the spirit in which I hope we can enter into today's discussion. That said, let me have wanted to thank Tim Stoneman for helping us organize the panel today. Tim is a National Science Foundation postdoc fellow in the Science, Technology and Society program here at MIT and he does historical work on evangelicals, media technology and globalization. I also wanted to turn you over to our moderator for tonight's event, the Reverend Amy McGreef. She is a coordinator of the Technology and Culture Forum and an Episcopal Chaplain at MIT. She's a graduate of Princeton University and the University of Madison, as am I, and holds a Masters of Divinity degree from Seabury Western Theological Seminary. Thank you. Thank you, Henry. Good afternoon. It's always a pleasure to be at the Communications Forum. Technology and Culture Forum has partnered with Communications Forum through the years and it's always a pleasure. So thank you for this event tonight. This is a topic that I think is very important and I'm looking forward to learning quite a bit from our three wonderful panelists this afternoon. As part of a Christian denomination that's been very ambivalent about the use of any media more advanced than the Mimeograph machine, I know that I personally have a lot to learn from everybody up front. The Episcopal Church finally got a decent website last week. I'm not kidding. Last week, we finally got one. I was looking this last week through the archives of Technology and Culture Forum, which is part of our ministry here at MIT, and TNC tries to bring ethical issues in science and engineering into the conversation here at MIT. And what I noticed is that from the time TNC was founded back in 1964 until the late 90s, we never had any event in any of those years that used the word evil in the title. But since the late 90s, we've had several events that use the word evil in the title. That was part of the publicity for the event, part of the conversation at the event. And I think that's just one small example of how the evangelical movement has really affected our culture and the terms of the debate, the terms of political discourse. That's a term that back in 1980 would have been sort of considered out of date, not welcome in a place like MIT. But now it's back, it's part of our discourse, our president uses the word evil quite a bit. And we hear it a lot in the media, people talking about that term. So just an example of I think the tremendous impact that evangelicals have had on so many aspects of our life together through their persistent and very well-funded and very innovative use of traditional and emerging media. So this afternoon, as Henry said, I hope that we'll get into lots of different aspects of this topic, political aspects, social aspects, cultural aspects, media aspects, and theological aspects. My guess is that some of you come with strong expertise in one or more of those areas, but there might be one or more of those areas where you feel not as well-prepared or conversant. But please don't let that stop you from coming up to the mic and asking a question. This is a great chance to learn from some really wise people. So this afternoon we're gonna have three speeches, three presentations, each of which will be about 15 or 20 minutes. And then we'll have lots of time for conversation after that. There are two mics set up in the aisles here. And if you have a question, during our Q&A session, please do come up to one of those microphones to ask your question because we're being videotaped and audio taped. So we want your voice as part of the historical record for this afternoon. And also please know that if you have friends or colleagues who couldn't be here today and you'd like to tell them about this event or if you'd like to refer back to it in the future, the videotape of tonight's event will be available through MIT World. And the audio cast will be available through the communications forum website. And you can also get a podcast of tonight's event through the CMS website. So three ways to access tonight's event. Now let me introduce to you the three excellent panelists that we have to lead our conversation. I'll introduce them in the order in which they're going to speak. And then they'll just speak one after the other. Our first speaker this evening is Diane Winston who holds the night chair in media and religion at the Annenberg School of Communications at the University of Southern California. She's the author of Red Hot and Righteous, the Urban Religion of the Salvation Army and co-editor of Faith in the Market, Religion and the Rise of Urban Commercial Culture. So welcome, Diane. The second speaker tonight will be Gary Schneeberger. Gary is a special assistant for media relations who focus on the family founder and chairman, James Dobson. He oversees the internal and external media efforts of the International Evangelical Ministry's Government and Public Policy Division as senior director of the radio program, Family News in Focus, and the daily email service, CitizenLink and Citizen Magazine. And finally, our third speaker is John Walker, a communications consultant for Rick Warren and the Purpose Driven Life Ministries. John has served as pastor of strategic communications for Saddleback Church and vice president of Story for Purpose Driven Initiatives. John is the founding editor of Rick Warren's Ministry Toolbox and the principal author for a book on Christian ministry called Better Together. So welcome to all of our speakers and we'll begin with Diane. Thank you, Amy and Tim and Henry. It's a pleasure to be here. I'm wondering how many of you have seen the movie, The Ruling Class? Well, those of you are gonna have a busy night because you should go out to blockbuster and rent it. It's a fabulous movie. In the movie, Peter O'Toole is convinced that he is Jesus Christ. He's a son of a British royal family and much to the consternation of his parents, he goes around acting and saying that he's Jesus. So to try to dissuade him of this notion, his parents convene a very high level gathering of clerics and jurists who are supposed to help them see the truth. Finally, the archbishop turns to him and says one last time, please sir, could you please tell me why it is you think you're the son of God? O'Toole opens his baby blue eyes very wide and says, well, whenever I pray, I find I'm talking to myself. Well, that's how those of us in religious studies have felt for a long time. So I am really excited to be here at MIT to talk with you about a subject that I'm passionately interested in, which is evangelicals in media. For the past 250 years, evangelicals have driven the use of most mass media innovations in this country. Let me repeat my hypothesis to you. For the past 250 years, evangelicals have driven the use of most mass media innovations in this country. Yes, evangelicals have been early adopters envisioning and pioneering the use of mass media technologies, which have been subsequently taken up by secular society. Before highlighting the work of this evangelical vanguard, I wanna situate historically and sociologically exactly who and what I am describing. Evangelical is a notoriously imprecise term, but the classic academic formulation says they are protestants who, one, have had a born-again experience leading to a personal relationship with Jesus, two, accept the full authority of the Bible in matters of faith and the conduct of everyday life, and three are personally committed to spreading the gospel. According to most estimates, about 25 to 40% of the American population are evangelicals, which tells you that they're a very diverse group. There are evangelicals here in Cambridge. There's a thriving community in New York City, as well as in the South and in the Midwest. LA, where I live, is a hotbed of evangelical growth and creativity. Evangelicals can be Anglo, they can be Latino, they can be African-American. Some are filthy rich, and others are desperately poor. Some smoke and drink. I was waiting for you guys to interrupt me. Yes, but some do smoke and drink. Others are teetotalers who issue dancing, movies, cards, and all forms of popular entertainment. Still others use R&B, hip hop, and heavy metal to share their message. Some are rabid right-wingers. Others are feminists, tree-huggers, and anti-war progressives. The community is as diverse theologically as it is demographically. We can talk about this more later, but in brief, evangelical is an umbrella term for at least four distinct subcultures. These are, one, fundamentalists. They're the most doctrinally and culturally strict. They developed in the early 20th century as a reaction to modernism in the country's seminaries and denominations, and they tend to be socially and theologically very conservative. Pentecostals are similar theologically and culturally to fundamentalists, but the heart of their religious identity rests on experience rather than the defense of doctrine. They believe in a second baptism, which leads to the gifts of the Holy Spirit, which are traditionally speaking in tongues, a gift of prophecy, and faith healing. Charismatics are the spiritual heirs of Pentecostalism. They're more middle-class and less doctrinaire. It's a relatively new movement, and they can be found among mainline and Catholic churches, as well as many independent churches. Many megachurches are charismatic. And finally, Neo-Evangelicals are a splinter movement within fundamentalism, starting in about the 1940s. They retain the basic tenets of the faith, but they're not traditionally anti-intellectual, nor are they world-denying. They try to engage the world. Billy Graham is sort of the father of this movement, and today it would include everyone from Jim Wallace to Rick Warren. Now I wanted to give you some background as to who evangelicals are today. And I want to also remind you that for about 150 years, from the 1740s up through the late 19th century, most Americans were evangelical. That's not to say they were fundamentalist or Pentecostal. Those are 20th century terms. But rather, they were Christians who believed in a personal relationship with Jesus, who believed in an authoritative Bible, and they believed in the utter importance of spreading their faith, which is a good place for me to start. The Great Commission, the mandate at the heart of evangelicalism is from Mark 1620. And it says, go into the world and preach the gospel to the whole creation. Preaching the gospel is telling Jesus' story. That's what religious people do. They tell stories that make sense of the world and offer meaning for our lives. And most of them think or hope that by sharing their stories, they will convince others of its truth. So for evangelicals in the 18th century, as much as for those in the 21st century, getting the story out is of paramount importance. Now just as an aside, I want to remind you of the backstory to all this. And that's Martin Luther, the rebellious Catholic monk who instigated the Protestant Reformation. Luther totally got the importance of circulating the story. He used the printing press, which was then an innovative technology to turn out sermons, treatises, pamphlets, and devotional writings as well as a Bible. It took the Catholic Church 30 years to get what Luther had done, and by then, they'd lost control of the narrative. That's important because Martin Luther's Reformation revisioned religious authority. Sola Scriptura, which is the belief that each person can interpret the Bible for him or herself, meant that the institutional church no longer controlled the story. Anyone could put it out there for others to read. Okay, so let's jump up to the 1740s and to an idiosyncratic Englishman who intuited his religious vocation while reading a play to his little sister. George Whitfield was the first transatlantic rock star. He preached and people listened. At a time when most people received religious instruction at church, Whitfield organized outdoor revivals that drew monster crowds. At one gathering in Philadelphia, he had something like 30,000 spectators. Whitfield was successful because he was an astute marketer and promoter. He used the secular media to tell his story. Benjamin Franklin, who was the editor of the Pennsylvania Gazette, was a close friend. Now, as you all probably know, Franklin really had no particular interest in religion, but the men shared an interest in using communication to improve human behavior. Whitfield's initial success in England was carried to America by the press, so he was already quite well known when he arrived here. At that time, most publications were regional. Few reported on events that span the colonies, but Whitfield quickly became a national, or should I say colonial, news story. His coverage knit the country together in a way that some scholars believe was a really important precursor to the revolution and to making a national consciousness possible before the revolution. Whitfield's successes in Philadelphia paved the way for his crusades in the South. He encouraged secular journalists to write about his work. He planted stories about his philanthropic activities, and he also published his sermons. He was known for preaching extemporaneously, but in the back of the open-air crowd, there would be agents selling the sermons. That's because he printed them out ahead of time so that he could sell them to crowds. Whitfield started his own magazine that anticipated, by almost 100 years, the Penny Press, and he used it to publicize his tours, his writings, and his projects. Whitfield was the first modern religious celebrity. Today, we're very accustomed to PR blitzes, fanzines, and swooning crowds, but believe me, it was quite a novelty in the 18th century, and it happened because one man was able to use a fledgling media network to tell his story and God's. Whitfield's success marked the introduction of evangelicalism in the United States. Within 50 years, the movement he unleashed was increasingly keen on deploying media to spread God's words. So let's take a look at the career of Sam Mills to illustrate. Mills graduated from Andover Seminary, which is right up the road in Newton in 1813, and after that he made a missionary tour of the Ohio and Mississippi River Valleys. He was very dismayed to find very few people had Bibles there. The good news was that they were happy to receive them, but the bad news was that he just didn't have enough to give out. What was needed was a national Bible society to print and supply the good book from mass distribution. Now unfortunately, 1813 was not a good year for new business ventures. Americans were embroiled in the War of 1812. There was fighting on the northern and western frontiers, and as you all could appreciate, New England was ready to secede. Two years later, things looked very different. A handful of men representing several denominations met in New York City, and they founded the American Bible Society, the ABS. Their goal was universal circulation of their product, not for commercial gain, but to save souls. These men wanted to place a Bible in the hands of every American. They believed the second coming was imminent, and saving souls would help hasten that day. What they needed was a technological capacity and the funds to pioneer the first national printing and distribution venture. To make this possible, the ABS sought out the newest inventions, steam powered presses, stereotype printing, and machine made paper. Each of these represented a significant step in moving printing from a small handcrafted concern to a major industry. The ABS far outstripped for-profit publishers in taking advantage of these innovations. In 1833, Harper and Brothers, the largest commercial press in the nation bought its first steam powered press. Let me repeat that. In 1833, Harper and Brothers, the largest commercial publisher in the nation bought its first steam powered press. Four years earlier, in 1829, the ABS was using 16 steam powered presses. That's how far ahead they were of the secular competition. That same year, 1829, the ABS Board announced it had the capacity to put a Bible in every American home. In a country of three million households, about 12 million people, they estimated their goal would be met in about five years. Now the initial supply went well, but by year three, the distribution network began to break down. It was difficult to reach households in remote areas, and the ABS did not have the money to pay agents to canvas and distribute the books. It was especially hard, not surprisingly, to reach poor families in the West. Nevertheless, one million Bibles had been given away. Now were Sam Mills and his contemporaries pleased by this outcome? Well, most Christians were in fact disappointed. The ABS had gone deeply into debt, and Bibles were not in the hands of every American. But from our vantage point, these results are amazing. In three years, the ABS printed one million Bibles. Its founders had discovered in the words of media historian David Nord that the capacity of a modern, highly-capitalized printing plant was astonishing. The mass production of the printed word in America was possible. This way anticipates the spread of secular mass communications. My final exemplar is a daughter of the 20th century, Amy Semple McPherson. And as some of you may know, PBS has followed my example as they just broadcast a documentary on Amy this past week. Sister Amy, as she was called, began her career as a pentecostal evangelist, itinerant evangelist in the 1910s. She held revivals wherever she could. In the years before and during World War I, she traveled in her gospel car, often sleeping and writing sermons in the back seat. She easily developed a following among the faithful. Then as now, there weren't a lot of women evangelists, and she tended to attracted very big crowds. In 1923, Amy settled in Los Angeles, and she built a huge building, Angelus Temple, which at the time was one of the biggest, it sat 5,000 people, and she packed every service. She filled every seat because she adopted elements of popular entertainment to attract the unfaithful, as well as the faithful. Her illustrated sermons were stage productions, enacted with music, costumes, scenery, choruses, and lots and lots of melodrama. One of my favorite Amy stories is that she wrote a motorcycle from the back of the sanctuary right up into the stage. Other evangelists had dramatic aspects in their sermons and altercalls, but Amy really took it to a whole new level. Like other religious leaders, Sister Amy had her own newspaper and her own magazine, but she jumped to the next step. She was a broadcast pioneer. In the early 1920s, when radio was in its infancy, she became the first woman to broadcast a sermon on radio. In 1924, she became the first woman to own a broadcast license. On Sundays in L.A., you could hear her voice from one side of the city to the other side of the city, as she was one of the few people who were on radio in those days, but she also was a very compelling speaker, and her national reputation was solidified through her radio work. McPherson died in 1944, but she had already purchased land to build a television station. She planned to extend her ministry with this next innovation. This was, as you all know, a good decade before television had penetrated most American households, but Sister Amy already saw what the future looked like, and she was going to get a jump on it. There's widespread perception among many secular Americans that's aided and abetted by our news media that evangelicals are unsophisticated. Nothing could be further from the truth. From a media standpoint, evangelicals have been pioneers from George Whitfield's skillful manipulation of the burgeoning national press to the ABS's mass distribution of Bibles to Sister Amy's use of the broadcast media. Evangelicals have harnessed the power of communication to spread God's word, and I haven't even mentioned their early and ongoing use of film and television, video cassettes, DVDs, video games, and podcasts. It would be a mistake, albeit understandable, to think commercial interests have been the sole driver of media use in America, but the desire to spread God's word has been an even greater motivator. Thank you. I am, as I was listening to Diane speak, I'm probably the rabid right-winger, I think, would be the app description for me, so let me quickly get my PowerPoint ready here. I thank you, really, for having me out here. It is an honor to wait for my PowerPoint to open up. Now, let me say, as it opens up, I was a little bit, as someone who works to focus on the family, I was a little bit nervous about coming out here to MIT, and I say that because focus on the family has a little bit of a reputation as perhaps being very conservative. MIT has a reputation of perhaps not being very conservative. So my greatest worry, and please don't think me vain for saying this, my greatest worry really was what to wear when I came to MIT. So I consulted with my wife, who is the fashion maven of the family, and as you can see, we settled on the cream pie and rotten tomato retardant blue pinstripe. So I am prepared for anything you might throw at me, figuratively or literally. It's a little no fact, actually, that I've got some liberal street cred myself. I don't talk about it often, but I feel I can share that with you. And it comes from the very subject that we're here to discuss tonight, and that is evangelicals in the media. One of my jobs that focus on the family is to oversee a daily email and website news service called CitizenLink, and I'll talk in more detail about that in a few minutes, but for those of you in the audience who consider yourself liberals, please don't think I believe everyone who goes to MIT or teaches at MIT is liberal. But if you self-identify with that side of the ideological map, let me say to you so we can start on common ground that you can understand that folks like me bear some of the same scars that folks like you bear. I did a story a few years back on someone you may recognize. Her name is Ann Coulter. I interviewed Ann about her book, How to Talk to a Liberal if you must. And in the course of that Q and A conversation, we have the following exchange, which I'll read to you from the screen here. Me, I mean, are you a Christian? Her response, are you a moron? Yes, of course. Where'd you think I got that zesty stuff about abortion and traditional marriage? The Nation magazine or the Quran? So Ann doesn't like me anymore than some of you in this room. So we've got that solidarity. This is an interesting time for me to be here to discuss this subject because it was just last week that Focus on the Family celebrated its 30th anniversary. And the date that commemorates the founding of the ministry in 1977 is March 26th. And that was the day that Dr. James Dobson, my boss, aired his first Focus on the Family radio broadcast. And he aired it from a one room office in Southern California. And it was probably heard at that time, I don't know what the arbitrant number show, it was probably heard at that time by fewer people in this room right now and certainly by fewer people that are gonna hear this when it gets on the internet. I won't go into a lot of detail about how that first broadcast came to be because there are other places, frankly, where that detail is available. It's been quite well documented. In fact, in a book, Dr. Dobson's authorized biography called Family Man, which describes not only how the broadcast came to be and how the ministry came to be, but how those both have grown through the years. But I will say in broad brush strokes just this, when Dr. Dobson did his first broadcast, he was a child psychologist. He is not, contrary to popular opinion, a reverend. He is not an evangelist. He is a child psychologist by trade. And he was working at the USC School of Pediatrics, you know, doing research there on that subject. He'd also written a book called Dare to Discipline, which one reviewer described like this when it came out. It is quote, a blend of biblical principles, Christian psychology, common sense, a nostalgia for the 1950s, and a conservative reaction towards some of the more liberal social developments over the prior couple of decades. I'll add that whenever Dr. Dobson talks about this book in public with a certain generation of folks, the ones who grew up being spanked are the ones whose parents had bought Dare to Discipline. So there's a bond there of some sort. At the time of the book though, Dr. Dobson also began traveling around the country, talking about the issues that he raised in the book. And one of the things that he discovered as he talked to people who came out to hear him speak, one of the things he heard from them was how they felt as if the family was in crisis. They felt as if society wasn't coming alongside the family, wasn't helping the family, but was in fact at cross purposes with the family. And he felt led, as we evangelicals would say, he felt called of the Lord to do something about that problem. And what he felt, and what he did was create something called focus on the family. 30 years ago, as I mentioned, the ministry was housed in that one-room office that I talked about earlier. Dr. Dobson had one half-time employee. Today, our campus is a little bit bigger in Colorado Springs, Colorado. We have about 1,200 employees. And the radio program that started it all is now nationally syndicated to 3,000 radio facilities in North America. It is heard on about 4,200 additional radio facilities around the globe that is in 160 other countries in 27 different languages. The story of how all this happens is what I wanna kinda drill down to today. One, how focus is use of media and specifically how Dr. Dobson's skills as a communicator helped grow both the broadcast and the ministry. Secondly, I wanna talk about how the credibility and integrity that Dr. Dobson developed through coming alongside families, through helping people manage the day-to-day struggles, not only of being a family, but of raising a family, how those things helped focus on the family and Dr. Dobson step into the realm for which you probably know us more than anything else, not as the public policy realm. And there's just an example of Dr. Dobson in his public policy realm. As to point one, let me say this, conservatives like me often talk about media bias. When we do, we don't tend to be talking about radio. We tend to be talking about television. We tend to be talking about newspapers. I have a perspective on that having worked in what Diane referred to, what we have referred to as the secular media for many years, and so we can argue, I mean, I'm happy to argue about media bias. I love doing that anyway. So we can talk about that all we want after we're done. But we tend not to apply to radio. Today, radio still remains largely a conservative bastion. You have Rush Limbaugh, you have Sean Hannity, you have Dr. Laura, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. But it's important to note, not only was Amy Semple McPherson, but before any of them came along, these folks like Rush and Sean and Dr. Laura, that Dr. Dobson was on the air and he was on the air dispensing biblically based advice about how to raise your children, how to keep your marriage not only intact, but how to make your marriage thrive, and how to share your faith in a world that wasn't always interested in hearing about your faith. He was a pioneer in the field of not only Christian radio, but in conservative radio. How did that happen? We believe it happened because Dr. Dobson didn't just kind of lecture from the Bible. There's a place for that. He didn't just kind of tell people what they should think. He brought people on the show who had stories to tell and he himself told stories. And they told stories about things they'd struggled with in their lives and things that they'd overcome. And often people cried during those broadcasts and there was an emotional connection. Dr. Dobson throughout the history of the Focus on the Family Radio program has not just connected with people theologically. He's not just connected with people ideologically. He's connected with people emotionally. And that has inspired people. That then led people to go, wow, we want more of what this guy and this organization have to offer. So in the best biblical King James tradition, a lot of baguettine started to occur. The Daily Radio show baguette shorter form radio commentaries. Now heard by more than 220 million people every day, including the translation of the program that's carried on state-owned radio stations in the Republic of China. The logo on the left, still our logo. You can tell we are indeed 30 years old. The logo on the right is the Chinese adaptation of that. The audience's desire for other content formats, baguette, not only more books from Dr. Dobson, he has written about 40 to date, but a series of other publications, many of them targeted to specific age groups and people groups and interest groups, whether that be preteen girls or parents looking to help their kids make wise entertainment choices. And that's just part of the baguetteing. Still got some baguetteing going on. Then came special radio and television programming for children like The Adventures in Odyssey show and even full-scale, old-time radio drama theater like your grandparents used to listen to around the hearth. Again, very dramatic ways to connect people with the core message of what we're trying to bring to them. Technology, as we've already talked about here, has driven much of the baguetteing that we've been through through the years. We're on the internet now. Our website doesn't look that good either, but we had it done more than a week ago, but it's still a work in progress. You can even get Dr. Dobson now on your iPod if you'd like. And even as I speak, we are looking for ways to expand our content offerings in on-demand areas like cable and satellite television on-demand, cell phone usage. One of the things I read about, something about the MIT communications area here is that the idea is to train people for jobs that don't yet exist. Whenever that happens, we want to be, we find a place to put our media in those channels wherever that happens. So that's, we're constantly looking for ways to put the information that people crave from us into new formats so people can absorb it. But the important thing to remember through all this is that no matter how much technology is available to us, no matter what the delivery mechanism has ever been, whether it's been book or iPod, the essential message has always been and will always remain this. And that's Dr. Dobson's passion for people. What he offers is truth, heart, and hope to families. That will always be at the center of what we do media-wise. That explains, I think, why we're still having an impact 30 years into it and why I think we'll continue to have an impact 30 years down the road. To give you an idea of the kind of impact that we've had, I want to read a letter that we got just a couple of weeks ago from a listener in China where they've updated our logo. Two things to keep in mind as I do this. One, it was translated from the Chinese into English, so some of the syntax and grammar's not gonna be good, so for all you editors out there, just take a deep breath, it's gonna be okay, we'll get through it fast, we'll get through it together. And also, for some reason, and I'm not even sure, Dr. Dobson in China is known as Dr. Do. So the references to Dr. Do in the letter are all about Dr. Dobson. But here's what the letter says. Modern life in a big city has always been crowded and noisy, people get tired and frustrated easily, lacking good taste for a decent life. Yet when I listened to Dr. Do's program, I realized there got to be a better way to live. The length of this program is very short, but every minute seems so precious. Dr. Do is like a live dictionary. He provides answers to almost all the questions in life. Each story he told can be easily identified with our daily life. The topics he talked about covered widely from interpersonal relationship, family financial management, love and conflicts between husbands and wives, teenagers' problems, and discipline for children. Through this program, I felt the love and warmth of a healthy family life. He used simple to understand words to convey profound values. Dr. Do provided his audience with a high place of heart to look at the world around us so we can see it from a different perspective and to find a better way to continue our daily routines. He made our life exciting and rewarding. That is a letter, folks, from a man whose life has been altered, changed, renewed, improved by the words he's heard, the encouragement he's gotten from James Dobson and Focus on the Family. And he is just one of millions of folks that we feel fortunate, blessed enough to have served over the course of the time that we've been in operation. But he and others like him, especially in the US, formed the basis for the second part of what I want to talk to you about. And that is the influence that Focus on the Family has in public policy related issues. That is, even though it accounts for about 6% of our budget, about 6% of our time and energy, it gets about 94% of the headlines. The things that Dr. Dobson and Focus on the Family do in the policy arena. Now, I want to give you a quick quiz and I want to give you this quiz only because I want to be able to go home to my friends in Colorado and say, I stumped somebody who goes to MIT. So somebody in this room's got to get the question wrong to entertain me. Here's the question. Who was the first president Dr. Dobson served as a member of a governmental commission on issues that affect the family? Who was the first president he served? Incorrect, thank you. I get to go home and tell all of my friends that I stumped an MIT student. You are a student at MIT, correct? Whoever got that wrong? Great. No, the first president he ever served, no one really knows this, is Ginny Carter. Carter's invitation to Dr. Dobson came in the late 1970s. But as someone said Reagan, Dr. Dobson is probably better known for his association with President Reagan throughout the mid-80s and that's really when focus on the family began to think seriously about getting into the areas of public policy. Dr. Dobson in particular was on a commission, the Attorney General's commission on pornography in the mid-80s and he learned there the devastating toll that pornography took on families and on individuals and society. And that's when focus on the family moved very noticeably into the public policy arena. And to do so we created media channels that allowed us to communicate our concerns, to communicate to our constituents issues that matter to them on that front. First came Citizen Magazine launched in 1987, currently out to about 50,000 subscribers nationwide. Then came Family News and Focus, a daily radio news program heard by more than two million people in the US every day. And then of course came CitizenLink, the daily email and website with a circulation of about 120,000, which from time to time publishes the work of someone that Ann Coulter thinks is moron. These vehicles have been along with Dr. Dobson's daily radio broadcast, the primary way that focus on the family, constituents can make their voices heard on public policy issues. Please listen to how I phrase that. I said these media channels are the primary way that our listeners, our viewers, and our readers can connect to lawmakers and opinion shapers on issues that matter to them. I did not say these are the primary ways that focus on the family as an organization or James Dobson as a person can exert its or his influence on the public policy or political process. And that is an enormously important distinction. We view our work in public policy. We call it defending the family. We view that work in the same way that we view our work on the other side of the equation, nurturing the family. That's our motto, nurturing and defending families worldwide. So our communications with our constituents are designed with them in mind to equip and to empower them. It's not about us, it's about them and their ability to be helped and to be heard. So yes, Dr. Dobson will go on the radio and Dr. Dobson will talk about a bill in Congress that would limit the religious expression rights of folks in America. And he'll say, you know what? You should call your congressman and your senators about that bill, because that's a bad bill. And hundreds of thousands of phone calls will rain down upon Washington DC and we've blown up the Capitol switchboard system on more than one occasion. CitizenLink will offer readers a way to express their outrage, their shock, their disgust at something like Janet Jackson's Super Bowl halftime show performance. And overnight, 100,000 emails will show up in the inboxes of the FCC commissioners. And that will lead over the course of time to a tightening of the agency's enforcement of laws already on the books against broadcast indecency. Understand when that happens, it's not a case of our muscles being flexed. It's a case of our constituents muscles being flexed. If you need a metaphor, consider us the Nautilus machine, the ab lounger, the bow flex. All we're doing, our role is to give constituents the tools they need to exercise those muscles. I'm gonna finish with a letter from a constituent and how grateful she is for that service that we do offer. This is the reason why we do what we do. This is the reason why I don't mind having quote, rabid what a right winger hung on me. This is the reason why we endure some of the things that we endure because there are people out there who are helped so much by the things that we do. Here's the letter. I am a stay-at-home mother of two boys, three years and eight months. My days are filled with wiping messy floors, walls, faces, hands, and of course, bottoms. Sometimes I feel like I am drowning in laundry. From the outside, some people look in and think my duties are meaningless. Quite the contrary, I have the privilege to shape my boys to be godly men. In addition to that, little do those people know that at night, after the kids are down, I check my daily email update from CitizenLink and write my Senators, CEOs, the FCC, et cetera, on important issues facing our nation. Before receiving your emails, I felt powerless as I watched the moral fabric of our society unravel. Now I don't have to sit and watch. I can do something about it. Your links to email key people are so convenient. So many of us Christians want to make a difference, but we are so busy raising families that we don't have time. You have taken so much of the time factor out of the way by doing the research for us and providing the contact information with the click of a button. Just imagine the impact if every Christian mother did the same with prayer, we could change the nation from inside our homes. God can do it. I agree with that. I say amen to that and I thank you for having me here. My name is John Walker and I, too, was trying to figure out what to wear here to MIT. Coming from Southern California, just putting shoes and socks on is, that's dressing up. And I went ahead and I went with, trying to be a little more dressy. I figured it's the East Coast and, anyway, I see I could have been more casual. Wanted to start off, I'm gonna bring the mic over here. I'm gonna stand over here. Just because, again, California, we like to be different. Gonna start off here. First of all, I just wanted to let y'all know, now these are my kids, I had to leave them, and I know you're thinking, why is he bringing his kids here? Now the oldest one in the back there, he just got a math award. And I'm thinking he may be a future MIT student. In fact, his grandfather, my father-in-law, has a PhD from MIT. He got back in the early 60s. Now the youngest here, he plays Superman all day. He's gonna be the actor or whatever. Plays Superman all day, but at the end of the day, he's just a little boy. I figure what, he's ripe for Harvard? You think so? Is that the way I would go? Now, okay, closer to the mic. Now, I was told, you know, I took math tests when I headed off to college. And my entrance exams, I passed about fifth grade math. That's when they said that you're qualified to be, you know, a journalist. So I became a journalist. And I was told that I wasn't allowed to mention my particular alma mater while I'm here. But so I'm not going to mention what it was, but anyway, I did get a good education there. I wanted to talk a lot about what churches are doing as far as using media. And I'm gonna move from local to somewhat global and then what we sometimes call global, which is the fact that now that we have the internet and so forth, whatever is done at the local level really goes global almost immediately. And so it's a, it's a global kind of thing. One of the things obviously that is utilized is PowerPoint things like this. And one of the reasons I'm wanting to show a couple of things like this is because it has an impact on us that we don't necessarily notice. You begin using PowerPoint presentations like that. It makes it easier for people to take notes. You're guiding what the notes are, but you walk into most churches nowadays and you won't see hymnals, okay? Because hymnals are put in the back storeroom because people are putting the words of the lyrics or up there and people are following them on PowerPoint. You won't see a lot of Pew Bibles anymore unless you're in a very older conservative church because the verses are put up on PowerPoint. You get a lot of things like this where you have stagecraft going on where people are using all kinds of illustrations. The impact on this is that people are coming and they're expecting to be more entertained. They're expecting to have analogies, stories and things like that to keep them going. I don't think there's anything wrong with entertaining people while you're teaching them theology. It just means that you're capturing their interest. If you read through the Bible, Jesus captured people's interest all the time. They say that the people were very interested in what he was saying. The crowds were astounded at what he was saying. So he was not a boring lecture kind of person. But what this also means is that to put together a talk like this, it may have required four or five people, a graphics team and so forth, half a week to put that together. That has different impacts on your staff, where you're putting staff time as opposed to say, counseling and things like that. Of course, Rick Warren, who's a guy I worked with for the past seven years. He was known, now it's popular to come out and preach like this, but Rick was preaching like this 20 years ago. That's him in the pulpit. You know you work for Rick Warren when I put a tie on a couple of years ago and my oldest son said, what is that? Now, what we have here is, this is Saddleback on a Sunday morning on a weekend service and you see we have the big Jumbotrons. And again, the reason I wanted to point this out as far as media, okay, so a local church is using this, but you know what we discovered is that when people were in there, even though Rick is right there in the pulpit in the center, when people were watching this, it didn't matter whether it was by video or live, they would look at the Jumbotron, okay? And so they began to be used to watching the screen more than the person there. Well, that opens up a lot of things as far as whether you're gonna use video and things like that. Now this is off a little bit, sorry, but so we created what are called venues, which means on the Saddleback campus, there are different venues, so here is where it all comes into play. The praise venue is, for instance, my wife's favorite one and that's a tent that we have set up and you go in there and it's, excuse me if this is politically incorrect, it's like a black gospel. It's African-American, a lot of African-Americans in there and we, it's just really a good time. My wife brings a tambourine and doing all that. Overdrive is rock and roll if you like the who or somebody like that, you come in there and there's a band that does that. The worship center is our traditional one. This one over here that is, you can't quite see it there but it's Ohana. That's an island when it's Polynesian and if you come in there the worship team is actually doing Polynesian dances and so forth. Okay, what you can see there is this is actually happening at the same time so at an 11 o'clock service, you can go to the main worship center and you would see something like this but you could also be at another part of the campus and what you would be seeing is something entirely different. Now, here's how it all plays in. We take that broadcast and we T-vo it. So if you're in the passion tent, you can have your own music and if you happen to have music that lasts two and a half minutes longer than the people who are here, then you can be in the passion tent but you can pick up right when Rick begins to preach and you can begin to see not only the incredible impact that the media has but you can also see there's the positive. You're able to niche in. There's the negative in that you're beginning to, you're beginning to create disconnects as far as how things are going. It also, for instance, this is San Clemente Saddleback Church. This is what we call a satellite church. We just started this last Easter and this is the San Clemente. Those of you who are old enough of, you know, B.B. Robozo, Richard Nixon, renowned. It's about 30 miles south of where Saddleback is and Saddleback is located about halfway between San Diego and Los Angeles. So we went down and we broadcast, again, Tivo, the Saddleback Services, but it's live music in San Clemente and last Easter. So a year ago this coming weekend, we started with like 3,000 people. I mean, you wanna talk about a church plant. Most church plants start with like 50 people and it takes years for them to get larger. We started with 3,000 people and we immediately had a church right there. This was our experiment. There are other churches across the country who are doing these kinds of things. Here is, this is Breakline Church, which is Ed Young, Jr. He started in Irving, Texas. But look at this, he's got one in Plano, got one in downtown, Texas. They're actually starting one in Miami. So you're seeing churches that are doing this. Part of the reasoning here is this. If I were to start a coffee house over here on the corner and I sold really great coffee, you might come, okay? But if I were to put the name Starbucks out in front of my coffee house, you would come. So it's capitalizing upon a name that is already known to bring people in. That doesn't mean that there can't be the John coffee houses out there. But it just means that as far as niching, you're able to attract certain kinds of people and so it's all about continuing to spread the message. Of course, we have now, all kinds of churches are using iPods. This is a church planted by a friend of mine in New York City. They're calling it iGod. But what you can do is download on your iPod sermons and things like that. This church has three different locations. It's cut off on the top there. This particular church, it started right at 9-11. When 9-11 occurred, they were about to launch it about two months later, but they went ahead and launched it during 9-11 in downtown New York City. In the first six months, what it primarily was was they would meet in movie theaters and they would watch movies. And then they would talk about the theological implications within the movie and that's how they began this particular church. This is not showing up well, but I'm sorry, I just cut and pasted some of these and I couldn't find a good slide on this, but this is actually a David Yonki show. Probably one of the largest churches in the world. It's in Korea. They probably have four or 500,000 members. All right, and they use webcast for it. They do not have a facility where you can bring all the members in. In fact, I was part of an interview with him a couple of years ago. He actually encourages young people not to come to the church building because they just don't have places for them. He encourages them to meet in homes and watch the webcast and they have built their entire church on small groups. And so that's another example of how media is used there and that's how you can have a church of three or 400,000 people. You have churches that are getting RSS fees and all kinds of things that can automatically go places. This is Saddleback. Saddleback, by the way, has a membership of somewhere around 22,000. So it's a pretty large church. This is our bulletin. It's an electronic bulletin. We no longer have a paper bulletin if you're used to going to churches again. We have all of that. We send it out electronically. If you don't have an email address, you don't get the bulletin. But that's how we connect in. We have, on our website, for instance, these are all small groups, support groups, so you can go in and you can immediately hook in and find small groups. This is something, a church called Granger, which is up in Indiana. Anyway, these are classified ads. You can actually go on and you can meet people or not meet people, but sell things to people and so forth. So here, this again is Saddleback, but so worship services are very, very different. I mean, here you've got the jumbotrons. You've got choirs that are in here. This is actually part of the praise service that I was talking about. You've got all kinds of orchestras, instruments and things like that that people are using. That leads into all kinds of media licenses and what are you gonna do when you put it on the website and so forth. I stuck this in here. I'd like to say what I did. My one thought was, you traditionally think of churches, the organ is how you drive things, at least those of us who are old enough to remember that. This is probably the instrument of choice now in the church. Actually, I stuck that in there too. My wife gave that to me for, I just had my 49th birthday, old guys in Iraq, so I just got that. Anyway, this is a church called Mars Hill Church, which is up in Michigan. Now, what they have done, Rob Bell is the pastor there, it's a Gen X church, but he uses so many little video things on the jumbotron that he has created this ministry. And this is another thing where I'm moving into kind of the global thing. You've got these churches that are doing things that are so innovative that they begin to influence all kinds of other churches. So he created this thing called Numa, which you can go on and you can actually download. They're like little shorts. It would be something about, why does evil happen in a good world? It's a 90 second video that he's done for his local congregation. But some other congregation, you can go in here and if you go through and putting your password on, you can download it for 99 cents or $5 or whatever and use it in your worship service. There's a whole cottage industry then that grows up. This is called IFX worship. A friend of mine started this. This is his Easter stuff. These are all PowerPoint backgrounds. So if you're a smaller church, you can download these PowerPoint backgrounds and then you can put your PowerPoint presentation to these things and you don't have to do it. But there's this whole resource thing that begins to fuel from here. One of the things that Rick Warren has done has kind of changed the way that we fund missions. Okay, I'm a Southern Baptist. The way that we have done it is a cooperative program where all the churches contribute money and then we send missionaries out. What some of this stuff does is by selling these resources, the church then funds missionaries that way as opposed to through more donations. This would be a global kind of thing. That's Kay Warren. That's Rick Warren's wife. She was very moved a couple of years ago by a Time Magazine piece talking about the orphans of HIV AIDS in Africa and the pandemic that is there. And she's taken it on as her cause. So we created this HIV AIDS website for her. But it's something that impacts the entire world as people come in and check on some of these things. One of the big things that Saddleback is working through now is peace, which the peace plan is... Oh, I might still walk away, I'm so sorry. The peace plan is what Rick is attempting to do is he's actually taking the social gospel and the evangelical aspects. The evangelical has tended to abandon the social gospel and been more witnessing. This is what you would believe. He's trying to marry them back in. And with the peace, it's a global plan, trying to get hundreds of thousands of churches. Doesn't matter what denomination to line up with each other. That's telling me that I'm running out of time here. It's former television producer and me. Even track of time. But what the peace plan does is it's looking at going out, how do you help a village? First of all, you gotta help with the economy. You gotta help with their medical problems and things like that. We have a thing, and I couldn't make a copy of it for you, so I put Wikipedia up here, but we have a thing called piece of media. And the idea behind that is that churches that are involved in the peace program can come in and just like a Wikipedia thing, they can say, here are things you need to know about this country if you're sending a missionary there. Here are phrases you need to avoid. Things like that, we can put them in. As far as media goes, if you look there where it says our purpose is right there in the center, this was a baseball diamond essentially. This is how Rick came up with describing the five purposes of the church based on the Great Commission and the Great Commandant. And so this little diagram is the use of media has gone all over the world. There is a purpose-driven church in every country in the world at this point. So here again, this is kind of a global thing. Saddleback Church started holding conferences to show people how to do this and then purpose-driven ministries started from that. So here is purpose-driven. We estimate there are probably 40,000 purpose-driven churches in America which would make it, we're not a denomination, it's just this loose affiliation would make it as large as the Southern Baptist Convention which is the largest evangelical or non-Catholic denomination in the country. And then it's all over the world. And so anyway, purpose-driven does this. And this is leading up to something so Rick had been training pastors. Here's one of the conferences that we do. You have purpose-driven churches all over the world. You can see there's the German website. There's the Chinese website. But here's my point in showing this so you begin to have this network of churches and this is how media is used also with both the websites and with email and things like that. With Katrina, we actually had people on the ground in New Orleans before several governments there. Of course that became a big criticism later but we actually had people on the ground helping with Katrina because of the network of churches and us being able to get information to the churches. When the tsunami hit in Southeast Asia we actually knew it was going to occur before it occurred because someone in a purpose-driven church emailed us and said this earthquake has happened. There's a tsunami headed here and we were able to mobilize people before the tsunami actually came. This is a positive use of media in various ways. Here they were going in for Katrina here. This is pastors.com. This was a website that I helped launch with Rick. Basically it was him mentoring pastors and we also let people buy his sermons on there. This is the Ministry Toolbox. Rick likes to call me the founding editor of it, whatever, I was just the guy who was putting this together but we began to send this out. It was one of the first Christian HTML newsletters that went out and we have about 150,000 pastors. So it was thought leaders or gatekeepers who were getting it. One of my favorite stories is a guy who ran into Rick. He was in Africa and he said I get your toolbox every week and he goes well how do you get that? You have a computer because he was in a village somewhere. They didn't have electricity and the guy says I walk seven miles into town and they had a little cyber cafe and he said I download it there. So that's just the Toolbox article. Now this all leads up to this. Of course Rick wrote The Purpose Driven Life. That says 20 million sold worldwide. It's about 27 million right now. It's the largest selling, let me get this straight, largest selling nonfiction, hardcover book in the history of publishing. Okay, a couple of years ago Bill O'Reilly had a book out and Hilary Clinton had a book out and Bill O'Reilly was making a big deal out of the fact that Hilary was saying she had a best seller and he had like three million in sales and she had a million in sales. Rick at the time had 20 million in sales. And in fact if you took the New York Times best sellers the top 10 list, this book sold more than all the top 10 together. The media bias that, I keep going on, my gosh. The media bias, I just get so excited about this stuff. The media bias is such, okay the way that like the New York Times best seller list is put together as they talk to boarders, they talk to the various standard bookstores and that's how they get it. What they're not recognizing is things that are sold in Christian bookstores, things that are sold to the internet, things that are sold at Walmart. So therefore a book that sells as much could actually end up not being on the best seller list although this eventually did make it. But here's the point too, it sold 27 million copies. We had a campaign called 40 Days of Purpose. This is 40 Days of Community which was a second campaign but 40 Days of Purpose, a church pastor could come in and buy this and take his church through it and if his church went through it, you have a church of 400 people then you're gonna buy 400 copies of Purpose during life, okay. Now you could call this a marketing scheme. I know Rick's heart was, he was just trying to share the gospel and disciple of these churches. Here's why I wanted to talk about the network. Nobody knew about Rick Warren except pastors for 10 years. He built a network, they trusted Rick, that's why they bought this stuff. And I think Rick proved to be trustworthy. He made a lot of money obviously if you sell 27 million copies or something. He gave virtually all of it away to various ministries putting into the peace plan, trying to fund missions and so forth. But what this meant, and here again is media use, you have small groups. So you have people coming in and they're watching DVDs as they're learning things. Positive thing is you're using master teachers at that point. The negative thing is you're gonna have a disconnect. It is, if you see down here this little circular thing, one of the principles of purpose driven is that instead of starting core to crowd, you start crowd to core. Which means see it's better to have 3,000 people show up in San Clemente and you have 3,000 people and you build a church from there creating a core from those 3,000 than to have a core of 20 people and try to build 3,000 from that. It's the same thing as this, all right? You're out looking for a party on Friday night and you show up and there's 100 people at the party and you're thinking this is a cool party or if you show up and there are three people at the party, you know, you wanna be at the larger party. A lot of what I've described, you know, Billy Graham has been doing a lot of this stuff. I'm gonna move through some of this quickly here but I think this stuff is important to see. This is purposedrivenlife.com, we created that. You know, we don't do things perfect. I personally think that this was one of our greatest failures. They have a book that sells 27 million copies. This should be the greatest Christian website on the web, discipling people but it really didn't amount too, too much. You know, we've got a few sales things at all. Got these daily devotions, that's what I do right now. Ashley Smith and this is something and this is where, you know, when you talk about marketing and things like that, Ashley Smith was the woman who, you know, the gunman in Atlanta killed people and then he took her captive and then she read chapter 33 and purposedrivenlife to this man and then he turned himself into police. And here's the thing, we couldn't have planned that and I was watching the website when this came out, you know, sales and everything and hits and all just bounced up high. So what I used to argue when we would get in some of the meetings of how do we do things, you can talk about marketing all you want. Now, I'm speaking as an evangelical. God does something like that. You know, you may think it was a random accident or something, but you can't plan that. And so what I'm saying is I think one of the dangers of when we get into evangelical marketing is we forget that the Holy Spirit of God can work in certain ways. You can create situations like this. These are the eHarmony. Now, the guy who started this is a Christian, although it's not a Christian website, but the idea here is that, you know, you can match people up and what their shapes are and things like that. This is of Oklahoma Baptist. This is another thing that you can go on for $100. They give you a web template. So any church, no matter how small it is, you have its own website. Friend of mine started this. This is just a testimony thing, mostimportantthing.org. You know, people wanna go on there and put their testimony on there. They can do that. My utmost, for his highest, one of the greatest selling, our greatest, most influential devotionals in the last 50 years. This is my devotional. I mean, this is what I read every morning. I get it off the internet. I'm gonna go ahead and jump on through some of these things. In fact, I'll shut this down. And I just wanna mention a couple of other things. And then I know my time is up, but I think it's important when you're looking at the strategies and things like that. How do I turn that off? Can you just close it? Just close it. Okay. You know, the marketing aspect that... Yeah, thank you. The marketing aspect of Christian media. There's a lot to be said for doing things. I think where the danger comes is you begin to move into the idea of products and resources. And you're doing consumer marketing. And there's one church, they even sent me an email. They were looking for a communications director. And in the letter, they said, remember that people are consumers before they are committed. And I mean, it just offended me to even look at that. And that's where you can get into the dangers of it because it becomes a usury approach. How are we going to get them to do it? I don't think there's anything wrong with pure marketing. And this is the problem. Marketing has gotten a bad name. The idea, for instance, of marketing, say target audiences, okay? One size does not fit all anymore. And so the church of 75 years ago, you know, where everybody would come to the same church, it just doesn't happen anymore. And so you do have to niche to the kind of people who you're trying to do. And that's a missional approach as opposed to a marketing approach. That's what missionaries do all the time. You go to a foreign country, you don't say, okay, you have to learn English and then come and learn what I want to teach you. You learn their language and you begin to learn how to do things in the way that they would want. So the targeting is not that bad, I don't think. The other thing I see, there are two other things I'll mention, it's interesting that, for instance, Scott Hefferman who started meetup.com, he came by saddleback after looking at what we'd done with purpose-driven life and things like that. And he said, I learned the value of small groups from watching you all. And that's where I got the idea for meetup.com. So there you have Christian media turning around and influencing in a different way. And the other thing, and this is something, I'm primarily a writer. The thing that really bothers me sometimes is I see that Christian media focuses in on the channel as opposed to the content. It's like this, they see it as a function. They say, I need a letter. So you hand them the letter. And they say, I have my letter. They are not concerned about whether the letter is written well, whether it communicates well or anything. They have their letter. And that's how a lot of the media ends up. Certainly somebody like Focus, they're doing it right or saddleback and all. But when you get into, it's kind of a free-for-all nowadays. I was a broadcasting major at the University of Florida. And you couldn't just go out and make films and get them up on the internet. Now people can do that. So you have people who are good at it and you have people who are not good at it. It's like when Max came out and everybody thought that they could be a publisher all of a sudden. You've got that going on. Anyway, I may have gone a little bit long, I apologize. But anyway, I am so thrilled to be here. Okay, once again, we have two microphones set up in the aisles here. And I hope that you have lots of questions for our presenters, lots of interesting ideas and information to reflect on together. So just go ahead and go to one of the microphones. We'll need you to speak into the microphone. Go ahead, sir. A question for Mr. Schneeberger. If you have a family, gentlemen, you worry about the world that they are going to inhabit. Particularly worrisome to me is the question of man-made global warming, which must be an area of concern to Mr. Dobson. What is he doing about that? Is this one of his causes? And if not, why not? Thank you. I was expecting a question like that. So I'm reasonably well-prepared to answer that. Dr. Dobson, focus on the family, have acknowledged that the Earth maybe has gotten a degree warmer in the last 100 years, something like that. And Dr. Dobson, our point on that subject is the science is not conclusive. The science is not conclusive. There are folks in a different setting who would make that same sound, sir, that you made if someone said the science was conclusive. Our view is, as evangelicals, as an organization, we should focus on those things that evangelicals agree on. And while, as Diane said, some of those things are, there aren't a whole lot of those things in many cases, we prefer to focus on things like sanctity of human life, defending marriage, those kinds of issues. So no, it's not an issue to focus on the family is taking a leading stance on. That said, we recognize that evangelicals have a whole variety of different views. And that within, I mean, the National Association of Evangelicals is a group that represents 30 million people who call themselves evangelicals. And we're not even saying that our position is the majority position in that case. We recognize people have different views. If people want to go pursue that as part of their agenda, that's great. But that's not what we feel called to do. Going up to one of the microphones. But I saw a hand in the middle. Yeah, just go ahead and take a mic. I'm probably not the right person to talk because I'm not very religiously involved. But I, listening to Mr. Schneeberger and Mr. Walker, there's one element that I feel is very lacking in your conversations. And it's just the word spirituality. And I don't see it. I don't feel it in any of the groups that you represent. And I guess I would compare the small chapel at MIT, which is architecturally a beautiful chapel created by Saren and I think. And I have visited that chapel several times. And I feel just the grandeur of it in a very quiet way. But I don't feel any spirituality in your two groups. And I wonder if you could just talk briefly about that. I mean, I'll say, in our groups in general or in the way that we describe them, if it's in the way that we describe them, I'll say that this forum is called evangelicals in the media, not evangelicals in spirituality. I mean, I'd be happy to talk about those things. Certainly, what I tried to hint at or suggest in my time that I had was that 94% of what Focus on the Family does has nothing to do with public policy or political type of things. 94% of what we do is very, in your words, I would say spiritual. We help, we counsel people biblically. We offer people hope where there is none. We are definitely the number one goal of our organization, the number one reason why we have media channels, the number one reason why we have phones is our mission is to lead people into a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. From our perspective as evangelicals, there's nothing, there's no higher calling than that, nor is there anything more spiritual than that. Yeah, I would echo what he's saying, which is based on the topic, I know I was very focused on just trying to show some media examples. The whole idea behind Purpose Driven and the Saddleback Model is we've taken the Great Commission and the Great Commandment and basically trying to do what you're talking about where you go to a chapel and you kind of have this feeling. And we all can do that as far as spirituality, but how do you drive people into deeper discipleship? So that's where the five purposes, the first one is worshiping God. So you begin to worship God, the second one is fellowship. You get to know other Christians and we grow as a community. In fact, individualized Christianity really doesn't work. That's not historical Christianity. We grow as a Christian community. Then you have discipleship learning, you have ministry or service, and then you have missions. And so the idea is that as people walk through those, it will drive them deeper into discipleship. The Holy Spirit will work within their lives. I'd be happy to come back and give a talk on that any time. Actually, I have two questions. The first I will address to you, John. The second to Diane. John, the number you gave for Purpose Driven churches, I think you said 40,000 churches in the US. Is that correct? Yeah, and that's a rough estimate and a very elusive. Right, and you mentioned that the closest comparable organization would be the Southern Baptists. That's correct. In any event, whatever exact number it might be, that's a phenomenal figure. And I wondered if you could, from your own perspective, try and explain to what would you attribute that phenomenal growth? That's my question for you, I'm gonna leave it at that. Diane, I want to ask you if you could place this latest growth or spurt, huge expansion of the church that we've seen, in this case here, Purpose Driven, and the use of digital media in a historical perspective and tell us whether, is this something new going on, or is this just a continuation of a longer pattern that you suggested goes all the way back to the Enlightenment period, the 18th century with George Woodfield. Are we seeing something different here or new, or is this just the same that we've seen before? Or you can outline how it's different. Yeah, well, I'll answer. As far as Purpose Driven goes, I think there are a number of factors that came into play. I will say, I've worked for Rick for seven years. I actually am a freelance writer now, but I'm still associated with Rick. I know Rick's clay feet. I'm saying this because this isn't a big Rick Warren thing. So I know his clay feet. Some days now I get mad at him. I wanna slap him upside the head, but he did come in and he figured out how to teach church leaders this model that would help them to be able to empirically see how their church was growing and how it was moving deeper into discipleship. He came along. He, I think, is a unique combination of. He had Southern Baptist roots, so he had very traditional theology, but he was from California, so anything goes there and by combining those, he came up with this. He began to train pastors. We stopped counting when we got to 350,000. He had trained 350,000 pastors worldwide. So in doing that, and that's where he had this tremendous influence, you also had denominations beginning to break down. People my age and younger, we weren't as interested in denominations and we never made any attempt to make people give up their denomination. You could be a Southern Baptist, use the purpose-driven model. You could be Lutheran or Episcopal, use the purpose-driven model. We didn't want you to become part of our denomination. I would say, and this is why I said Rick has clay feet. Some days I've watched what he does and I think in some ways it may be witnessing like a young John Wesley, or actually Rick's pretty old now, but what John Wesley might have been back 100 years ago where John Wesley just came up with methods for how you would do certain things and it created Methodism. Methodism was never meant to be a denomination. They were still trying to work within the Church of England and the Episcopal Church. So I think that that came along and it just really helped the denominations breaking down, the fact that they could get in with these things. And then being an evangelical, I have to say, I mean, God works in different ways. I think the answer to the question of is this the same or different as both and? I mean, it's the same insofar as my point is that evangelicals have always been pushing the boundaries of what media can do to reach greater and greater audiences. And insofar as that's the same, yes, it's the same. I mean, I was interested when you talked about some of the theatrics that Rick Warren or other people use because in the Salvation Army or Amy Semple McPherson did these things over 100 years ago, people were like, oh, how can you put these secular things into a religious service? It's so horrible. But I mean, that's always the point. You're always trying to think of what you can use or in the secular culture to reach people who wouldn't normally want to hear your message. So in that sense, in terms of experimenting a secular culture, forms a secular culture in terms of using media, pushing the boundaries, yes, it's the same. The question, though, is what impact does media have on the way we think about our religious lives or the way we organize? And that's more of a question I might throw back to Henry or some of you who are more expert in media studies than I am. I mean, I do think that the way society is mediated shapes the way we think about things, the way we experience things. And the fact that we are in a digital culture and we're doing so much online is going to shape the way we organize and take in material. And religious material is a good part of what we are taking in. So I think, obviously, there are some great changes ahead as we are entering this sort of new media revolution. I leave it to those more expert than I to perhaps suggest what they may be. About kind of a brand-name church in terms of that seems to be the opposite of where the arts tend to be going, where everything's evening out and there are more options, it's diversified. So my question is basically, where is there room for dissent? Can you maybe mention blogs, message boards, mailing lists where people have debates openly and have room for change within the churches? Because I'm just curious if that takes place. And what kind of debates are taking place? You know, I think as far as within the local church, again, I'm Southern Baptist, so I'll say, boy, we have all kinds of dissent, you know? I mean, we, you know, people can argue. And so the tradition that I come from, it's less formal. And so, you know, I mean, we have whatever you wanna call them, I'm trying to convert, you know, we'll have a congregational meeting. People can say whatever they want to say and so forth. I don't know in most churches that there might be like, you know, the official dissent of, okay, this is where the leadership of the church is and now this is where people are over here. That certainly happens. I mean, it's been happening, you know, for hundreds of years, you know, the Gossips or whoever else or people who have factions go off. I don't know of any churches that actually do that. There is a lot of dialogue within churches. Gen X churches in particular, they grapple a lot with the theology and what does this mean? And they wanna see how the experiential part of it is there. It's more important. They don't wanna see these rules. They wanna say, what does that really mean in my life? And grappling with these kinds of things, some of the hard decisions. We were talking about before we started here. Like my wife and I had a baby named Jeremy. He had Trisomy 18 and I happened to be pro-life, but you begin to get into the bioethical situations there of, you know, this baby has a minuscule chance of surviving, you know, it may impact my wife's ability to have children in the future. How do you begin to make decisions like that? And so there's a lot of discussions like that. Now externally, yeah, the blogs are all over the place. I mean, there are blogs that say that Rick Warren is the antichrist, you know, and there's all kinds of stuff. That's both the good and the bad of the internet. I think it's great to have the free thinking. Most evangelicals that I know, all we want is a place at the table within the marketplace to be able to talk. We don't have any problem with the plurality of society. Where we have a problem is when we're not allowed to come to the table and actually talk about things. And I think that the blogs can be very healthy. As a journalist, some of my concerns about the blogs is they're playing by a different set of rules. So if they state something that is not factual and you correct the fact, they will not correct it. And so then the myth continues to go on and on. I don't know that answered your question. I talked about Solas Frictora and Martin Luther's suggestion that every person has the right to interpret the Bible for him or herself. With that, the uniformity of the Catholic Church broke down and it's been ever since Protestants have been splintering and splintering and splintering and that trend has not changed today. There are thousands of Protestant denominations in this country and anytime anyone has a bone to pick with someone in their congregation, they're free to begin their own. So I think there's lots of room for discussion, for criticism and for change within denominations. As John suggested, one of the more interesting to me developments in evangelicalism today is the growth of the emergent church. And the emergence basically are in reaction to the megachurch phenomena. And these were basically young people who were being groomed for leadership in the megachurches. They were meeting regularly under the auspices of a group called Leadership Network and they all of a sudden realized, well, this is not where we're coming from. This does not represent our values and we believe in a different way of being evangelical. And so the emergent church movement is about, instead of megachurches, more tightly focused communities that live in areas where they can make a difference. They tend to be more progressive. They tend to be, in their words, more missional. And that's a really big change from the kind of prototype we've had for the last 20 years or so with the big megachurches. Lots of times we secular folks don't know about this stuff because we don't read the blogs, we don't read the media. A lot of this stuff isn't reported in the newspapers, but I think a lot of change and disagreement occurs. It's just sort of under the radar. If I could just follow, because I did, there was a church I'm recalling now and I'm not gonna say the name of the church or anything, but they actually had a situation. This would have been a couple of months ago where some people became aware that one of the staff members had been guilty of child molestation and he'd been guilty of it like 20 years ago, but they thought it was inappropriate for him to be on staff. And the leadership of the church did not respond in the way that they wanted to. So they started a blog and began to explain it to the congregation and the community in general and it forced the church leadership to respond, to do something about it. So, yeah. So before we go to the next question, I just wanna push back a little bit on this issue just to hear some more reactions from you. I agree with everything that you're explaining about, room for debate within specific worshiping communities and the use of blogs to get different opinions out. I think the popular perception of evangelical Christianity based on a lot of the products that are kind of out there, right, the radio show or the national broadcast or that sort of thing is that there's one view and focus on the family. I don't hear a lot of debates going on unless I've missed that. Dr. Dobbs, he knows what he thinks and puts it out there. So the perception is that, well, this is what Christians believe and maybe those debates are happening but they're not out there and presented as a model for how that part of the Christian life is having that debate, having that conversation. Well, that's a problem with the secular media. The media does not report on religion very well and as a result, people think that Dobbs and speaks for all the Christians, that's not true. I mean, I don't mean to, you know, I'm not insulting you, I hope. No offense taken. But I mean, the media has a narrative and the narrative now is that Christians are right-weighing nutjobs and that's really very far from representing the wide spectrum of belief held among Christians. That's why I said they're Christians who drink and smoke. They're Christians who are feminists. They're Christians who are environmentalists. I think that for whatever reason, the media tends to grab on to a narrative. It sticks with and it's really hard to change. What about the media that is being generated? I guess that's what I'm by the evangelicals themselves, is, you know, can you give me some examples of work that's being done in your organizations where there's three speakers with different issues and they're all Christians and they're wrestling with us together? Yeah, I would say that's probably not, I'll speak for focus on the family, that's not an enormous priority for us. We exist as an organization that dispenses what we believe to be a biblically based approach to certain issues and I mean, not to be crass about it, we own the microphone, therefore we're entitled to speak that which we wanna speak in the same way that someone like Jim Wallace who leads the group, or runs a sojourner's magazine, you're not gonna find probably a lot of debate within the pages of his magazine because he owns the press and he has the right to publish his perspective on issues of faith, on issues of policy, the way that he wants it. Where the debate comes is when you read what Jim Wallace has to say on an issue, you read what James Dobson has to say about an issue and you as the consumer of those things then decide who's right, who's wrong. I think it's an unfair standard to expect evangelicals to do what most folks don't do, most folks that are in the media business, George Clooney doesn't go on television and invite someone else who disagrees with him on Darfur to come along and say something when he's on the Today Show because he has a perspective, he wants to get that perspective out, but we're much the same way. We have a perspective, we think our perspective is a biblical perspective and we wanna disseminate that to as many people as possible. My question's very related to what we've been talking about and that's, any organization's gonna lose members if they lose touch with their members and the bigger you get, the bigger umbrella you have to have and then you're going to start disagreeing with each other and I'm wondering if as part of, since this is a media forum, like it's all, we've all talked about how the message gets out, are there ways for the message to come back up? It's sort of related to what we're talking about, but I'm not saying so much disagreement, so much as, is there a way for your members to communicate back, like how do you stay in touch with so many people so that you know that you're still serving them? One of the things you'll read, if you do like a nexus search or focus on the family and find all the stories written about us, invariably what you'll find is a line that says has its own zip code because focus on the family was assigned a separate zip code to deal with the mail that we get. We have a very large correspondence area, we have counseling phone numbers, we are constantly in touch with our constituents in terms of how they feel about what's been on the broadcast, how they feel about some resources they have, whatever. I know that 30 years into it, even though he's no longer the president, Dr. Dobson is the chairman of the board, so he doesn't run the day to day administrative aspects of the ministry. Every day he reads that report to hear what constituents are saying. I know that because things I'm responsible for have broken down, said some things that maybe we have done something wrong, they've turned up on that report and I've heard about it. So from our perspective, a huge aspect of what we do is maintain relationships with people and that drives down to things like you will never call, if you call our phone number, 1-800-A-FAMILY, not trying to plug in or anything, but that's the number. If you call that number, you won't get an automated anything. You will never get an automated response and focus on the family. You'll always talk to a live person because that personal touch that established when the ministry started in that one office continues to this day, so we can have that connection with our folks. You know, I'll bounce off of that. What they do is excellent and actually a lot of churches could learn from what you all do. There is a tendency to begin to use the technology. What you're trying to do is save staff time and everything but all of a sudden you've created this wall that is there. And we've actually, we're grappling over the last year at Saddleback of what to do. On the one hand, as you get bigger, you have to get smaller, so that's where you go to small groups and people are cared for in the small groups. But how do you get a dialogue going to where it's not all, we're speaking to you, but where people can come back and begin to do that and one of the things I had wanted to try to do and I never successfully got implemented was to get blogs going for various ministries so people could communicate better and do those kinds of things and communicate their frustrations and so forth. Yeah, it's a very good question. Sir. My name is Brian Minkus. I'm a graduate student here in chemical engineering and I appreciate each of your talks very much. I would also label myself using Diane's wordings as a neo-evangelical and I'm interested, especially Gary, regarding focus on the family. I'm interested in what your response to the criticism that Christians shouldn't be involved in politics, but instead they should be more concerned with spreading the gospel or evangelism and even taking Christ as an example who was much more concerned with reaching out to the people or helping the poor or spreading the word versus being involved in the government and so as an organization that is very involved in political action, focus on the family, I personally disagree with that statement, but I know many Christians, maybe especially in this area of the country who feel that way and just would be interested in your view. The first answer to that, and that's a great question because it allows me to be able to say again, it really is a small part of what we do. It's, for some reason, newspapers do not think leading people to Christ as a front page story. Newspapers do not think that helping parents keep their kids off drugs as a front page story. They do think what Dr. Dobson might think about a presidential candidate as a front page story. The, our involvement in public policy was not taken lightly. In fact, I have a, and Dr. Dobson, if you're listening to this later when I give you the link, I apologize. It was our 30th anniversary, so we've been going through the archives and looking some stuff up and I found this really great historical document. It's a letter that Dr. Dobson wrote to a friend of his on October 26, 1988 and it talks, it touches on what you just talked about about the involvement in politics and the way in which we did that. And here's what he wrote to his friend who suggested the same thing. Should we really, as evangelicals, be involved in this kind of area? Here's what Dr. Dobson wrote about 20 years ago. Our movement into the arena of public policy is unsettling to me. It is so easy to make a mistake in that dimension and if I had my way, we would stay out of it. On the other hand, I feel that God has put us in a position of leadership there and we would displease him if we refuse to accept the challenge. Thus, we proceed with fear and trembling. When we talk about defending and nurturing families, really the way that we look at our effort in public policy is we are defending the right for folks to continue to preach the gospel. We are defending the right for folks to continue to do that 94% of what we do at Focus on the Family and Nurture aspect of things. There are countries in the world where to speak from the pulpit, words from the Bible can get you thrown in jail. We're not naive enough to think that can happen here so when we engage that process, that's the purpose. It's not, I mean, I meant what I said, it's not so that we can be power brokers, it's not so we can get our names in the paper. Trust me, my job is to oversee Dr. Dobson's media and I like it when there's names not in the paper. But we fight those battles, we educate our constituents on those issues because, A, Christians have a right to be heard in the public square, else can be heard in the public square. Christians have a right to be heard. Someone needs to inform them and that's what I think he was referring to when he said God has led us into that area. Dr. Dobson had credibility. He wasn't someone who jumped into the political realm off the bat with zero credibility. He helped people raise their families for 10, 15 years so that when he speaks about issues like that they trust him and they listen to him. So I hope that gets close to nibbling around the edges of your question. Let me bounce off of that a second and just say, Diane had mentioned about evangelicals, they're not monolithic and it's very easy for people to think along those lines. Just like it's easy for conservatives to think that liberals are monolithic in the way they are. But some political Southern Baptist and Southern Baptist tend to be thought of as very conservative and so forth. Bill Clinton, Al Gore, Jimmy Carter. Those are three Southern Baptist, Newt Gingrich. So that's kind of the political spectrum that you can see. Also, Christians being involved in politics is not always a negative thing as it is framed out. If I were to tell you that there was a powerful pastor who spoke to a congressman near here and basically this congressman was trying to get some legislation passed by Congress and this pastor said he would not support it. He would take his congregation and make sure that they didn't support it unless this guy made certain changes. You might be horrified to hear that. But if I tell you that the pastor's name was John Leland and the congressman or the representative he was talking to was James Madison. And what Leland was saying to Madison is the Constitution is good but it's missing something. And they hammered out something that we call the Bill of Rights. Because what this pastor wanted was to make sure that there was freedom of religion and freedom of speech within this country, okay? And he was bringing his Christian ideals into the Constitution. A two-part question. My name is Candice. I'm also a graduate student and it's kind of related to this last question. And the first part of it is when you're thinking about media and using new kinds of media how much do you think about serving your constituents? I think that's what Gary Schneeberger said. And how much of it do you think about as a missional kind of purpose? So what Diane was describing all of these historical characters they were thinking about spreading the gospel which is different than serving your constituents, right? And so my second part of that question is then where does concern about socioeconomic factors come in? Particularly in both of your presentations focus on the family, the wonderful letter that you ended with what I heard was here's a woman who is wealthy enough to stay home with her children and has a home computer that she can log on to after. And when I was looking at what Saddleback Church does they put out their bulletin via email. So that means you need to be able to go home or have a blackberry or something like that to be able to log on and look at that. So where do those considerations come into how you use media? Okay, this is a very brave woman here. I mean, you humiliated her earlier saying that you had stumped an MIT person. And yet she was brave enough to get up here and ask a question again. I think that you ask a very valid question. First of all, I will say in rushing through everything I did not do justice to some of what Saddleback is doing in certain things. I touched on HIV, what we're doing with the peace plan. We're sending hundreds of people and dumping lots of money, I shouldn't say dumping, but putting lots of money into Rwanda trying to rebuild that country. So it's not just about being white middle class or in Orange County. I don't even know if there's a middle class, upper class, whatever it is. In doing that, so there is a lot where people where we're trying to reach out along those lines. Go ahead and have me. I would say on the issue of disseminating the gospel versus serving our constituents. Part of the, I mean, we're an organization that primarily interacts with folks who are already Christians. Therefore, I mean, they've already heard the gospel, they've given their life to Christ. So what we're trying to do is equip them to live the Christian life in a better fashion. But still, preeminent, number one mission statement of focus on the family is to disseminate the gospel of Jesus Christ in cooperation with the Holy Spirit, specifically through serving families. So that is still the number one thing that we do. Some of the magazines and the things that I threw up there, I didn't have time to go into the content of those things. But when I talk about a Brio magazine which deals with young girls, the content in there is designed either to drive young girls who are not yet Christians to a saving knowledge of Christ, or it's designed to take young girls who have made that decision already and help them grow in that area. As to focus on the family and how we deal with socioeconomic issues, a good deal of our resources given away free to folks who ask for them. We have also in the past, again, not reported in the media, but we have donated money to tsunami relief and those kinds of causes. But it's somehow, in some way, I don't know, kind of untoward to stand up and say, we gave a bunch of money to a tsunami relief. It's kind of a double edged sword. For us to stand up and say that, it looks like we're trying to leverage that as an opportunity to say, aren't we great? To not say that leads to the impression, I guess, in the minds of some folks that we're sort of don't care about those things. You really ask a very pertinent question. And I think it's something, personally, I struggled with as I've walked through some of these things over the last few years and been in a lot of conversations with them. The number one thing should be, what is the missional approach? How is this going to reach someone to help transform their lives, to allow God to work within their lives? There is a tendency even to do things like, somebody read Purpose Driven Life and so that changed their lives. Or excuse me for using this example, but James Dobson changed my life and that's not what we're about. It's that God places his spirit within us and it's Jesus Christ in the spirit of God working within us that transforms the lives. That should be the number one thing that we do. But there is a tendency, and this is where you get into the new gadgets and the new media and all of the things to just kind of rush in and do it. And sometimes it's like you're sitting there and you say, we can do this, but it's like, well, why? Now, me personally, and there may be some effective uses of this, but we were putting out, you could get portions of Purpose Driven Life text message to you, okay? So what is that, a sentence? Now I personally, and some of you may be like this, I didn't come to Christ through a track, I came to Christ through grappling and talking about it and so forth. Reading a sentence on a text message, I just don't see the missional aspect of it. So even though it can be done, why do it? When you could put the resources somewhere else. And people grapple with that a lot and sometimes I think they make the wrong decisions. We have just, it just kind of popped into my head, we have just changed our model for how we do, I mean, Focus on the Family has a lot of resources. We have a resource center, as I said, we give some of that away to folks who ask for it, who can't afford it, but we've just created something that we call the Truth Project, which is a DVD series designed to present a Christian worldview in a real sort of grounded fashion. For the first time in our history, you can't buy that just to take it home and stick it in your DVD player. And the purpose of that is because we want people to go to sessions where they learn how to process it and then pass it along. So the idea there is very missional in the sense that it's not, I'm gonna sell this DVD to you and then you may or may not do whatever you wanna do with it, it is, I'm gonna put you through a series of seminars where you can learn then to have this information spread to people in your influence. So we are being very intentional about that because we'd also recognize, just quote, unquote, moving product doesn't necessarily mean that people's lives are being enriched. Okay, we have two more people with questions out here and I have a question as well. And we have just a few minutes. So maybe could both of you ask your questions one after the other and I'll ask mine and we'll just see what we can get out of our panel. And we'll talk shortly. That's right, we'll snap it up, go ahead. My question is I'm wondering to what extent can these ministries outlast the personality that's driving the media. I know both of you come from organizations where there's a really big personality sort of at the center of it with whom people feel a tremendous personal connection. And so I'm wondering in the event that that person moves on from that ministry or steps down or whatever, is there a plan for after that happens or Professor Winston if you could speak to some of historically these people who have pioneered media in these ministries, what has happened after that person has gone elsewhere? I will jump in and answer that question by saying, yes, there is a plan in place. So it's pretty amazing that one kind of segment of the religious spectrum would so clearly and profoundly dominate the advancements in media. And I was wondering if Professor Winston could address maybe what is it about evangelical Christianity in particular that lends itself to this kind of innovation as opposed to other religious faiths. My question goes back to Henry Jenkins introduction actually, Henry mentioned the fact that our culture these days and our political system is very divided, very divisive and a lot of people having a tough time just being in conversation with one another across the spectrum, Congress having a hard time, just Republicans and Democrats talking to each other and there are those who would say that evangelical use of the media may have contributed somewhat to that divisiveness in our culture. And I'm just wondering if you could comment on whether what you would say about that and whether your organizations are doing things to try to address that, to try to bring people together in conversation. So take a shot at whatever one of those questions you want. Um, it's interesting that it's true, one side of the religious, one portion of the religious world has really made use of media in a way that other religious groups haven't. And I think that really is because of the great commission and this desire to get the story out that's been a real motivator for evangelicals for the last 250 years. And what we call the mainline church, mainline Protestantism has been a lot more reticent about using media because one, they were dubious about technology. Two, they thought maybe it was, they didn't kind of want to get their hands dirty with, you know, speaking to audiences that they really didn't know who they were. And three, they just kind of felt like, you know, there wasn't the same sort of pressing need to get this message out. There's a new book coming out by a colleague of mine that specifically looks at how the mainline really had television to itself in the early days of television and yet really did not take advantage of this, whereas the evangelical just kind of stepped in and used the media. So I just think it's sort of a bias that's propelled by one's religious conviction. I also think that, and here you all may take issue with me, but as someone who's thought about this and written about it, I think that there have been political elements that have buried their way into the evangelical world that have politicized a lot of the message. And I think that the majority of evangelicals in this country are not represented by a lot of the strong political claims made by some evangelical leaders. And I think if you were to go talk to eight out of 10 or seven out of 10 evangelicals, they would not feel like they are being properly served by the divisive political dialogue that goes under their names. And I think it has a lot to do, as I said, with secular political concerns worming their way into religious structures. On the issue of divisiveness, I mean, I guess as evangelicals, we are to take as our example Jesus. There wasn't a lot, in my reading of the Bible, I'm no theologian, but he didn't spend a lot of time worrying about whether what he said was divisive. He spoke into the culture that which he believed to be truth. That really is how we look at what we do. Yes, there's debate and there's divisiveness. Jesus said we could expect that. They hated me. They will hate you. Rejoice when you suffer persecutions, those kinds of things. Strictly from the perspective of do we at Focus on the Family, do I as a conservative evangelical Christian wake up in the morning and say, what am I gonna do today to stamp out divisiveness? I'm really not worried about that. I want, certainly I'm not afraid of debate. Certainly I'm not afraid of, hopefully I can discuss issues passionately. I can discuss them respectfully. But in the end, the Bible teaches me to stand and believe in certain things. And those are things on which I will not compromise simply because I want to avoid there being any kind of dissension. It's interesting how both in talking about that, I think you're right that there has been some political elements that have moved into evangelicals. You've talked about the fact that we have to state certain things. And there is a device in this. Let me just say this one as an evangelical. I believe based on the Bible that there is one way to get to heaven. That is believing in Jesus Christ and no one gets to the Father except through Jesus. That's a divisive statement in some areas. That's what I believe. You can believe what you want to believe but that's what I believe the Bible teaches. But I don't think that kind of divisiveness is necessarily can be unhealthy. There can be discussions around that. What is crept in is kind of a fear. In this country we've moved. I know one of the things that we're trying to work on even at Saddleback is the idea of civility that you can not agree with someone but you can speak to them civilly about it. But there is so much fear in this country and so much fear that if you don't line up with like-minded people that you're gonna lose something. Like lose an election by 100,000 votes or something like that. And so there's therefore this fear that is going on. And for instance I probably agree with a lot of what Gary believes in as far as focus but then there are other areas where I don't. I find it rather interesting when I speak within conservative circles how they define things by that. I was for instance and still am against the war in Iraq. There were just, it didn't follow biblical just war principles. There was no reason to do it based on biblical principles in my opinion. But boy you bring that up in conservative circles at least at the time that they were going in. And I mean people were branding me this liberal. You haven't met a liberal if you think I'm a liberal. You know? And so but see people are afraid to say they disagree there because then Gary and I are no longer looking like we're aligned and then someone's gonna use that politically in a gotcha media oriented society where here we are on the internet or whatever and you're gonna take one statement that is made by somebody and all of a sudden it's blown up all across the globe and it doesn't represent really the full dialogue of what went on. So then people are afraid and we really gotta get away from that kind of thing. And I don't know that's something where we each have to individually agree to do that kind of thing. If there's one thing that the media loves to report about people to faith about evangelical Christians it's when we disagree about stuff. Right. That's what the media stock and trade is. Right. It's not just you, it's anyone disagreeing. But they will report, I would suggest they report other things about other groups and tend to just report about us the things that we disagree about in a greater percentage. I think one of the things the media does is what they wanna do is they wanna aim personalities against each other. And what we really need is we need the media to begin to have strong discussions about ideas. But see that doesn't sell newspapers. That's not sexy. People aren't gonna tune on to see that. What they wanna know is what Jerry Falwell said about this particular person, you know. Well that's not even the issue and that just goes into this whole cult of personality that we're into. What we need to talk about are what these ideas are and how that we do it. Even as far as how we solve things it's often not a question of heart. Like how do we help the poor? Now you know, I mean the whole peace plan that Rick is rolling out is trying to help the poor. Now Rick is very conservative politically. But that doesn't mean that we can't line up with people over on the liberal side to help the poor. It's not a hard issue, it's a methodology of how it's gonna be done, you know. We are right now, as focus on the family, we are right now in other conservative groups working with, drum roll please, the ACLU to deal with some pretty bad legislation that's making its way up through the house. So those kind of alliances can be formed around things that we agree with. All right, we have to end. Please join me. Thank you.