With all due respect and awe, I'm not sure I'm feeling you here, MED. Since you're the one with all the fancy initials after your name, I assume this is a "me problem". So lay some knowledge on me (or have your lackey/goon Leeman do it for you).

What's the connection between wanting to see God (but not being able to as a result of the Fall) and video in church? If God made us to be visual people and to long for a visual experience, wouldn't we want to leverage that for the gospel? I'm not saying you're wrong; I'm saying that I'm not following you.

I personally wouldn't use video in my service for a few reasons:

1. I've never seen it really work. Usually videos boil down to:

a) "Look, we're relevant! We watch the same mind-numbing garbage you do!"

b) "Look, the culture around us is more spiritual than you think! The lady on Desperate Housewives has spiritual questions!" Don Carson skewers this kind of naive embrace of cultural deism in his "Christ and Culture Revisited". It makes foolish Christians feel less intimidated by making the secular culture seem less secular, but it can also serve to confuse them by conflating mindless pablum with Christian truth.

c) "Look, this is taking up time and space in the service! Words are mentioned here that will also be used at another point in the service or sermon. Please do not notice that little to no actual light is being shed on the subject." Of course many of the guys on the Reformed conference circuit do something like this with their humorous digressions ("mental smoke breaks" they used to call them before cigarettes were a top-tier sin).

2. Like you said Mark, it works against the kind of church culture we're trying to build. It takes some practice and discipline to listen to the Word. It's a muscle well worth building. When we import video, I think we take away some of the sense that what we're doing when we gather as a church isn't exactly like the other 6.75 days of the week.

3. I'm just a little crusty about it. It's just not the kind of thing that I like. There's a little bit of "If Bill Hybels is fer it, I'm agin'it" in me. I can admit that.

Bring the funk, Leeman.