Thinking like Socrates,
talking like Will Rogers,
performing like Tina Turner

“Being called into the ministry is a lot like throwing up,” according to Tex Sample, coordinator of the Network for the Study of U.S. Lifestyles. “You can put it off for a while, but there comes a time when you have got to do it.”

Sample addressed the Council on Church and Media’s 21st annual conference in Pittsburgh May 12 and 13 on the theme “Bridging Communication Cultures.”

“My daddy once told me that there were three kinds of people in the world with clean hands:  people that don’t work for a living, thieves, and preachers. ‘And sometimes,’ he said, ‘you find all three in the same feller.’  Needless to say, I did not have a high view of the ministry,” Sample said.

Nevertheless, young Tex found himself at Millsaps College – a Methodist liberal arts school in Jackson, Mississippi – studying philosophy, but not from the kind of philosophers he admired.  

On his way to pick up the textbook for his philosophy course, “I was thrilled with the very idea that there was a book where someone had written down all the great lines of Will Rogers and Uncle Remus and Minnie Pearl,” Sample said in a story he also included in his 1994 book, Ministry in an Oral Culture: Living with Will Rogers, Uncle Remus, & Minnie Pearl (Westminster/John Knox Press).

“Daddy had told me growing up that Will Rogers was probably the greatest philosopher that ever lived,” said Tex, “and I believed him.”

“You cannot imagine my dismay when I later opened that book and started reading about some dumpy-looking little guy named ‘So-crat-is’….  At least I wasn’t like the boy from Louisiana who called him ‘So-crates.’”

“My dreams for that fall semester crashed on the universalities of Socrates, and I grieved for the down-to-earth particularities of Rogers, Remus, and Pearl.  It wasn’t that Socrates didn’t have any good lines.  He said, ‘The unexamined life is not worth living,’ and I liked that, but I just had the feeling that he could have been so much better had he studied with Will Rogers.”

Sample is a former academic dean at St. Paul School of Theology, where he was also a professor of church and society.  He works as a freelance lecturer, workshop leader and consultant with church, community, governmental and business organizations.  

Though Sample eventually learned to appreciate the writings of Socrates, Wittgenstein and other philosophers, he clearly has never lost touch with his roots in Brookhaven, Mississippi – tapping into them for humorous stories and one-line proverbs – effectively portraying communication as the art of engaging an audience through a medium that they connect with.

Sample addressed three distinct communication cultures – oral, literate, and electronic – and admonished attendees to “learn the practices” of their audiences’ communication cultures.

Sample described oral culture as “a common village culture, where wisdom is crystallized in proverbs.”  For example, “a stitch in time saves nine” or “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”  Storytelling is also a key component for people of oral culture who think relationally, Sample said.  “You need to put a face on it.”  

“Forty to fifty percent of people in mainline churches are of oral culture,” Sample said, “as are an overwhelming majority of the poor in the United States and in the world population.”

However, most mainline pastors are trained in a literate culture, made up of “theories and abstract ideas,” or conceptualization.  Sample said it relies on “discourse, the language of specialization.”  He was quick to point out that he is not opposed to these and other practices of literate culture.  “I read thirty to forty hours a week,” he said.  But Sample says pastors often introduce literate practices such as introspection into their traditionally oral congregations without understanding their need for concrete ideas that relate to their hard-living realities.

Add to this mix the influence of electronic media and cyberspace and another, more complex culture emerges.  

“The most bonding and persuasive communicators will have to learn a whole new range of practices,” Sample said.

People of electronic culture think in images and sound.  Sample said, “It is the increasing importance of the visual, but not just in a shift from aural to visual, because the visual imitates sound.”

Sample identified the most powerful practices in electronic culture as “image, sound, beat, light, movement and dance by an actively performing crowd.”

Sample talked about “soul music,” which he identified as “the music with which one is encoded.”  

“What is your soul music?” he asked.

He played music clips, starting with the Glenn Miller Orchestra, Wilson Pickett and Elvis Presley, as well as Don Moio and a host of other Latino musicians, plus rap, fusion, and more.  He noted the change in emphasis from down beat (emphasis on beats one and three), to back beat (emphasis on two and four), to more syncopated and complex rhythms.

Sample also talked about the visual elements of electronic culture – practices in front of a screen.

In a presentation on “Critical Immersion:  Prophetic Critique in a Media World,” Sample began with two film and video clips of concert footage – the first from Janis Joplin, circa 1968; the other a recent performance by Tina Turner.  He highlighted the contrast between a more passive, static environment in the Joplin footage with the much more active audience and pervasive lighting and visual beat displayed in the Tina Turner video.

“How can one use lighting to serve the liturgy?”  Sample asked. “These are the indigenous practices of the electronic culture.”

Sample further identified the challenge of engaging electronic culture. In print there was critical distance.  One could read and critically apply context and view the big picture.

But through electronic media, “critical distance has been abolished,” Sample said, “so much so that we cannot get the big picture.  We cannot understand the whole and are not able to locate ourselves within the new.” 

In critical distance, meaning comes through words.  Critical immersion gives meaning through experience.

Sample identified four strategies for communicating the Gospel in an era of critical immersion in electronic culture:
1)    Out narrate the world.  
2)    Ecology of Fit.  Fit remarks, stories, and issues in a context enormously larger.
3)    Objects of Comparison.  Use juxtaposition to expose contradictions.
4)    Put events in the context of God’s story.  “Don’t put God’s story in electronic culture, put electronic culture in God’s story.”

Sample’s three CCM presentations included a multi-media worship service that he described as “not designed for teens and twenty-somethings,” but “patterned on a classic structure of the liturgy.”  Media elements included projected photos and children’s drawings of Bible stories, plus recorded music.

“Worship as performance is not entertainment.  And it’s not just participation, it’s performance.”

He told the story of a group of merchants increasingly concerned with the number of youth loitering in and around their establishments.  The stores soon began playing easy listening music in an effort to drive the teenagers away.  It worked.

“Are we playing ‘easy-listening’ music in the church?” Sample asked.

But he also refused to define worship as the accommodation of consumer culture that resembles much of contemporary praise and worship.  “If you just do six praise songs and call it worship,” Sample said, “Hell becomes a washboard road… bump, bump, bump.”

“Production of worship should not be done by a ‘lone ranger’ pastor, but by the congregation,” Sample warned.  “You need to design worship with people, not for them.”

Denominational offices, he said, should provide tools and assist with music licensing arrangements for congregations to produce their own worship elements, utilizing the creativity of youth in the process.  

“Trained communicators should facilitate creation, rather than do the creation,” Sample said.  As one creative worship leader told him, “When it’s ours, it ain’t slick, but ours beats slick all over the place.”