The PowerPoint and the Glory: An Ethnography of Pulpit Media and Its Organizational Impacts

Abstract

Scholars of religious communication are vitally interested in the impacts of media on religion. At the same time, scholars of organizational communication have intensely studied the impacts of media on organizations. Since much religious communication occurs in organizational settings, the literature on the organization-media interface offers productive frameworks for analyzing the religion-media interface. This article draws from the author's ethnographic fieldwork to narrate four cases of evangelical churches whose radically different uses of PowerPoint for worship and leadership communication are driven by their respective organizational identities and impact congregational dynamics in divergent ways. PowerPoint, though a simple technology, inhabits the churches' sacred space and amplifies their central discourse. The cases are analyzed via frameworks from organization studies to elicit how the churches' PowerPoint usage transforms organizational hierarchies and processes, dynamically interacts with organizational structuration, and indicates degrees to which adoption of a media technology reflects and shapes Habermasian technical reasoning.