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The Transformation of Worship Spaces - W Dyrness
Open Our Eyes: A glimpse of the way churches are transforming worship spaces
by William A. Dyrness
We seem to be in the midst of a sea change in attitudes toward the visual, even in worship. For one thing, since the middle of the last century, a major change has been taking place in our visual environment. Whereas previously print culture predominated, with the rise of television and movies we have entered an era in which visual images are dominant and inescapable. In seventeenth-century Puritan America, a person probably would have heard more than 5,000 sermons in his or her lifetime; by contrast, American children have probably seen more than 10,000 TV programs and a couple thousand movies by the time they are eighteen. No doubt they can tell you more about these videos than about any of the few hundred sermons they may have heard!