Press Releases

January 3, 2006

New Visual Communication Ministry Opens Its Doors
Narrow Gate Media Launched to Serve Front-line Church Staff

(Vancouver, Wash.) – Narrow Gate Media today opens its doors as a new visual communication ministry serving local churches with multimedia graphics and other preaching resources.

“We live in a visual world,” said Vince Williams, co-founder and vice president for marketing. “Pastors of all denominations across North America today face a major problem, competing for their congregation’s attention against quality, visually-compelling messages produced by the world’s most talented communication professionals. And unfortunately, most churches just don’t compete.”

Every week, 55 million people listen to 1 billion words in sermons given throughout the United States. According to Rick Warren, one of America’s most influential pastors today, Preaching makes or breaks a church. Yet research shows that the #1 complaint people have is that sermons are boring and don’t relate to their lives.¹

Today’s world is saturated with noise, as messages of all types bombard the public. The average adult listens to 3 hours of radio every day, watches 4.5 hours of television, and spends 3.5 hours using the Internet—totaling 46% of every day immersed in media.² And the pace of communication has escalated. In 1971 the average American dealt with 560 messages per day; today, the average American is exposed to over 3,000 messages every single day.³ Each of us sees more ads alone in one year than people of 50 years ago saw in an entire lifetime.⁴

Furthermore, most of this content is created and refined by world-class communication professionals, who frequently spend thousands of man-hours and millions of dollars carefully crafting a focused, compelling message. Movie makers spend tens of millions of dollars creating a powerful entertainment experience for theater goers. Especially among younger generations, there is a low attention span and high expectation for quality and relevance—both of which take focused thought and refinement.

Every week, hundreds of thousands of pastors step into this environment. Each has a message laid on his or her heart by God, a burden that must be communicated clearly and passionately each congregation. Yet pastors only have a few hours every week to prepare a sermon, resulting in a presentation that cannot possibly compete with the quality and force of modern media.

Still, many churches are trying. In response to this changing world, churches are moving rapidly to bring video technology into the sanctuary. A new study from Barna Group shows that 62% of churches today are using large-screen projection systems, up from 39% in 2000.⁵ Once the equipment is installed, the next question reveals itself quickly: what do we show on it? Most churches use it simply to project the words for hymns and worship songs. A few churches have tried using scenes from major motion pictures to illustrate key sermon points, yet bringing Hollywood into the sanctuary hardly seems appropriate to many churchgoers. In the vast majority of churches—even those with projection equipment—the sermon continues to be presented using the spoken word exclusively.

There are, however, proven ways to improve the communication power of a sermon. Using visual media in conjunction with a spoken sermon improves long-term retention by 30%.⁶ A printed sermon outline helps kinesthetic learners. Using consistent graphics to promote a sermon series increases anticipation before and during the series, also increasing the effectiveness of the message.

Church will never compete with secular media, in terms of quality and entertainment experience. Church is not—and should not be—an entertainment experience on par with TV, motion pictures and live theater. Yet the worship experience can be improved using contemporary communication tools—if only pastors and church volunteers had the time and resources to do this.

Narrow Gate Media was founded to fill that void.

“Our goal is to provide complete, easy-to-use graphics packages for pastors to use for promoting and presenting the weekly message,” said Larry Witzel, co-founder and vice president for product development. “Our team of gifted creative professionals produce these packages focused exclusively on the needs of the local church, honing each one to world-class communication standards.”

By spreading the cost of development among hundreds of churches, Narrow Gate will offer high quality, relevant sermon resource packages at a very reasonable cost to each local church.

Narrow Gate Media launches with a substantial customer base, thanks to its relationship with It Is Written Television. Narrow Gate recently signed a contract to continue developing and marketing Oxygen Preaching Graphics, a popular line of Scripture-inspired art pre-built into PowerPoint. Many Narrow Gate staff members were involved in the launch of Oxygen while working with It Is Written Digital Media Group, and through this agreement thousands of Oxygen customers will continue to be served without interruption at www.oxygen-multimedia.com.

Narrow Gate will also develop other new communication resources focused on preachers and the local church.

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Contact
Narrow Gate Media
Larry Witzel
(360) 567-3400

NOTES AND REFERENCES

¹Pastors.com Resource Catalog for 2005/2006

²The KNOW Network: http://www.knowledgebusiness.com/knowledgebusiness/projects/ Knowledge_Library_Read.asp?site=1&sitesect=3&cat=18&content_Id=1961

³David Shenk, Data Smog: Surviving the Information Glut (HarperEdge, 1997). Cited at http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=56750

⁴DMNews magazine, 12-22-97, cited at http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=56750

⁵Barna Group, http://www.barna.org/FlexPage.aspx?Page=BarnaUpdate&BarnaUpdateID=199. For confirmation research, see also “Multi-Media Worship Becoming Norm,” Leadership Journal, Winter 2003, p. 11.

⁶Barry Simon, Utilizing Visual Objects in Preaching to Adults in order to Increase Memory Retention of Sermon Content, a 1999 DMin Applied Research Project for Oral Roberts University, found at http://www.pastorbarry.com/doctoralproject.htm

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