Our Incredibly Shrinking Attention Spans

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Remember elevator speeches? 

A product of the 1990s, Elevator speeches were well-constructed monologues that you shared with a companion while being held captive in a moving elevator. Elevator speeches were a way to showcase your skills and goals to someone who might very well hire you for your next dream job. 

Oh, and there’s one more thing about elevator pitches. They were supposed to be brief...as in 30 to 60 seconds. 

Someone told me recently that this is the sweet spot for people’s attention spans today. You read that correctly. 30-60 seconds. If that’s the case, you may be one of the 20% of my readers who hasn’t yet given up on reading my Five-Day Forecast. I suppose I need to get to the point more quickly. 

Pssst. That’s an occupational hazard for preachers. I wouldn’t expect much brevity from us. However, if people’s attention spans are any indication, maybe we should double down on being concise. 

The smartphone app, TikTok, certainly has. Perhaps you’ve heard of it, or your teenager son or granddaughter uses it. TikTok is a video-only social media platform where users can swap short video clips. When it first launched, the videos had to be less than 15 seconds. 

15 seconds? How do you express a complete thought or idea in 15 seconds? (Hint: You don’t). 

Or maybe I’m just playing the part of the middle-aged curmudgeon. Perhaps I’m stuck in another century where lectures, heavy books, and extended sermons were the way people expressed themselves. It’s true. I do love and miss libraries and the smell of old, dusty volumes. 

If modernity has taught us anything, however, it is that we must adapt to the changing marketplace or die. Although that may sound stark, consider the changes that the sharing of the Gospel has undergone in the last 20 centuries. Jesus shared God’s love to us in person, literally incarnate, through his presence and his teachings. Word of mouth then spread this Good News to others. The Pax Romana, or peace of Rome, enabled letters to be written and shared over great distances. Codices and then later bound books became the way for people to share ideas. The invention of the printing press later helped to pave the road that the Reformers would walk. Greater mobility further enabled the missionary movements of the 18th and 19th centuries. Then, we 

arrive at the electronic communication revolution of the 20th century. And, well, here we are. 

The 21st century provides both advantages and drawbacks to our efforts of sharing the Good News. We may have at our disposal a veritable pandora’s box of possibilities in our modes of communication. But, if people won’t give themselves more than 30 or 60 seconds to view content before moving on, what is the Church to do? 

How do you share the Gospel in less than 60 seconds? 

How do you get people’s attention--and keep it--when everyone’s so distracted by so many other possibilities? 

As church consultant, Bill Wilson, has described it during these Days of Pandemic, the church has become ‘Church on Demand.’ Like Netflix, Prime Video, Apple TV +, and Hulu, Christians looking for content select from a drop-down menu for that which will slate their appetites (Be sure to look at how long the content is before clicking). Case in point, according to the advanced analytics feature on the Boxcast video streaming platform, the viewers who view our hour-long service online watch, on average, only 14 minutes and 46 seconds worth of our worship service. 

Call me old-fashioned, but I don’t see how an elevator speech can cover everything Jesus teaches us in scripture. Transformation into Christ’s likeness—aka sanctification—requires time, presence, commitment, patience, and long-suffering. 

But who has time, energy, or interest for that? 

It’s an open question: How can we best communicate the Good News of Jesus Christ and provide content to strengthen the faith of the faithful in times like this? 

As you ponder that, consider this: Even TikTok has recognized that they need more time. After expanding their video limitation to 60 seconds, they further extended it to 3 minutes in length just last month. 

It turns out, some ideas and stories need more time than we might want to give them.