THE DIVINITY SCHOOL at WAKE FOREST UNIVERSITY
I am grateful to you for this invitation to visit your campus again and to speak with many of you in the student body and the faculty and the administration. Bill and I are so honored by the scholarship set up by Marilyn and James Dunn. Thank you, dear friends! The Dunns have been leaders and colleagues in the long battle for religious liberty and the preservation of soul freedom. And you here at Wake Forest are so blessed to have him continue his life's work here among you. And to have Marilyn making the gift of her music to this community.
I am thrilled with your new seminary! Praise be, God is still speaking! And God's people are not done yet. There are still exciting missions to fulfill and new challenges in every generation.
I grew up a Southern Baptist in Texas, so I always knew about this university. And then in the early eighties our daughter visited this campus as a high school student, met Dean Lu Leake and made it her very first choice for admission. And then I got to know it really well. Suzanne loved the traditions of this great old university and they rubbed off on me.
I have been a part of your football rallies and your outstanding basketball competition. I've just about never recovered from spending several nights in her dorm - was it Bostwick or the New Dorm? - during parents' weekend. At one time I could even sing your fight song and I knew the traditions like the back of my hand.
But that was 20 years ago and this campus has changed - even some of its traditions.
I love tradition! I count on it - in my family and my country and my church - the way I cook, the way I sing and pray, the expectation I have for my country.
Tradition is that set of customs and usages viewed as a coherent link between the past and the present.
Growing up Baptist was a tradition in my family. You know, in Texas, there are more Baptists than people.
I was baptized at age ten and I grew up in the soul freedom tradition that nothing may come between the soul and God. This is the same soul freedom that James Dunn has so brilliantly defended for his entire life's ministry. Mind you, my era was pre-Jerry Falwell. My Baptist family were guardians of the old principles that no priest, no church, and no state could supplant the individual as a free and spiritual person created in God's image, competent to deal directly with God.
But we also placed great value on community. My church shaped my religious, my political, and my professional identity. The formation of my intellectual core grew from the teaching and preaching in my small-town Texas Baptist church.
My family and my church set my moral compass and my sense of justice. I learned in my church about the democratic process, human rights, and the importance of the First Amendment. (We learned Roberts' Rules of Order in Baptist Training Union.) My parents and my Sunday school teachers taught me that Jesus saw me - a female - as equal to any other. I became a feminist in my 5th Grade Sunday school class taught by Miss Lucille Matthews.
As an adult, the fellowship of my congregations in Virginia and New York held me up in times of crisis. The pastoral care I received saved me from the despairs of life more than once.
My great-grandparents founded a frontier church and my grandfather, uncles, and cousins were Baptist ministers. My mother and aunts were teachers and organizers and home missionaries. Bill and I lived in a seminary community for four years and I attended as many evening classes as I could manage after my full-time job. On weekends we ministered to small rural churches and I would not trade that experience for anything.
Nor would I trade the four years Bill and I spent living in the Southwestern Seminary community in Ft. Worth. A very important part of that experience was our seminary friends. Some of those very special friends are here today: Jim and Beverly Hamblen.
So, I expect that you and I have a great deal in common. We could spend a lot of time counting the ways. But for this occasion, let's look at just one.
A primary similarity among most of us here in this hall today is that we are charged with the need - the mission, if you will - of communicating with our fellow human beings. That is central to the vocations we have chosen.
We are living in the information age. We spend an enormous part of every day "communicating".
This Divinity School's mission statement includes the intention to equip students to be "agents of justice, reconciliation, and compassion in Christian churches and other ministries".
You as students and faculty are challenged to "live out Christianity in the real world." Now. Wow!
Indeed, all of us are challenged to find a way to engage with the people with whom we live and work. And to engage we must communicate. We must connect.
Some communicate from the pulpit, others in the classroom, the sickroom or the courtroom. And in every field of endeavor that I know about, Americans are seeking new and better ways to connect.
My venue is television. Television is so strange. Unlike those who produce for the theater or movies or great concert halls, we are never sure who is watching. We may work for several years on a complicated documentary series and it tends to disappear into the ether after it is broadcast: here today, gone tomorrow. For years Bill and I have been dedicated to meeting this challenge by giving our television "legs". We try to broaden the scope beyond the broadcast through educational materials, viewer guides, national coalitions of interest groups and - in the past few years or so - websites.
Fifteen years ago, Dr. George Gerbner at the University of Pennsylvania noted that television is the only campfire around which all Americans sit. And, at that time, it was true and quite sad actually. Americans in those days gathered around the water cooler or the dinner table or in schoolrooms to discuss what they had all seen on television the night before.
That era has passed. Today, network television's audience has dropped off and Americans have hundreds of channels from which to choose. And then there's the Internet and all that we label "the new media".
People can customize and self-select the way they receive information. Television is not enough! Producing good television is not enough.
So, one of our challenges is to build an audience and to help that audience go on beyond our television program to find out more for themselves and to consider what action they might want to take. We have learned to use websites too as a great tool for inquiry and as an exciting channel of communication.
For now, at long last, we in television can listen to our audience as that audience responds to us through the internet. Listening is the other half of communicating.
Everywhere Americans are seeking new methods of connecting. And - it seems to me - that seminarians must also be engaged in that search. How do you share the old stories, the new interpretations, the thrilling questions and the rattling discoveries of today with your audience? How do you hear what they are thinking?
Who is your audience? Do you know?
In the world of television, the big networks and their commercial sponsors do a great deal of market research into who is out there, tuned in and watching. In our world of Public Broadcasting we cannot do much of that expensive market research but, occasionally when we can raise the money, we do it. A few years ago when we did our series about the end of life - about death and dying - we asked a research team to help us come up with a title.
We thought our audience would all be senior citizens. But the research showed that 35 - 55-year-olds were potentially a big market.
That marketing information also told us that the American public would not tune in to a 5-hour series if it mentioned "death" or "dying" in its title. So we called it "On Our Own Terms". The baby boomers became a large segment of our very large audience because the implication in the title was that they might be able to exert some control over the conditions of terminal illness. And you know how the baby boomers love to control things.
We did not alter the program content to fit market forces. We simply changed what we called it.
You seminarians would not change your message, but you might want to alter the way you deliver it - or how you label it.
It matters what you name something.
How do you label what you are trying to communicate?
Who is listening to you or reading what you write?
What is their attention span? It's true that Americans' attention span grows shorter and shorter.
We learned some years ago that we had approximately seven seconds to "hook" an audience, seven seconds before the remote control zapped us and moved on to FOX or "Fear Factor." It was essential that we learn to engage our viewers with the first few words and visual images of any program. And this revolutionized our traditional approach to serious television. Old dogs can learn new tricks!
It required even more attention to building an audience prior to the time of the broadcast. This we accomplished through networking with well-established institutions such as the public libraries, professional organizations like the AMA and The National Hospice Association, special interest groups such as United Methodist Women, Hadassah, and labor unions.
To avoid re-inventing the wheel, we formed coalitions with existing organizations with whom we had a common goal - not sharing all our goals, perhaps, but finding some common ground from which to act. Here's just one example.
For our series about addiction which was titled "Close to Home" we formed coalitions with the American Bar Association, the Association of State Legislators, and the National County Executive's organization. Not all our allies agreed on every issue. For example, there was a big difference of opinion on the issue of clean needle exchange.
But we did have this one focus to share: addiction is a disease, it can be treated, the "War on Drugs" must be reconsidered and reformed.
We have long been dedicated to doing public affairs programming, exploring issues important to the survival of our democracy. But we had to learn that our audience could cope with only so much information and so many signs and symptoms of the threats to our democracy. We had to recognize our viewers' question "What does this have to do with me?" And to hear the toughest of all questions: "So what?"
Before every program was finished we had to deal with the plaintive doubt, "What on earth could I ever do about this? Are there any solutions to the problems of our democracy?
Or "What could I ever change about addiction or campaign finance reform or immigration or hurricanes?"
What I am trying to say to you is that even as seasoned television producers we must always continue to discover new ways of communicating with our audience and we must search for ways of enlarging our audience beyond the "choir" of dedicated public television viewers.
We must become innovators. Just as your new Divinity School is challenging you in its mission statement. How will you engage with your community: this seminary, this university, this city, and the world at large? Only by finding ways to communicate, new ways. How blessed you are to be a young seminary! You are already in a prime position to find new avenues of teaching and learning.
After many years of experience some critics judged that Bill and I had "perfected" the art of television documentaries. Emmys and DuPonts and Peabodys and Christophers graced our offices. But the old and "perfected" way we had done it was no longer good enough - not sufficient for the world in which we were operating.
It's a little bit like a long and successful marriage: you cannot rest on your laurels. You must constantly be re-inventing it.
We had to develop new strategies of production to enhance the quality television that we had produced in the past, albeit "prize-winning".
And we are not yet done with television. So that means we must keep experimenting and innovating until we drop.
This is, I think, a challenge which we share with you who will teach and preach and pastor and counsel and lead. How do all of us communicate with 21st century Americans?
We have scores of new tools. And new models have been suggested and tested. We can move from the old linear model which is largely a one-way street where the sender encodes a message and sends it through a channel to the receiver who decodes it.
Or we can try the interactive model where both senders and receivers encode and decode the messages and have the opportunity for feedback.
Or we can learn the effective model of communication that is transactional. That is, it makes the communicators both the senders and receivers at the same time. It recognizes the effect communication has on its speakers. And that messages have two dimensions: content and relationship. The content is what is actually said while the relationship dimension explains how the content of the message changes those who are communicating.
It's a fascinating subject which challenges us to learn something new. No matter in what field we work, we must learn new vocabularies and practice fresh models of communing with others.
How do we learn to do "active listening"? And can we do it globally? I trust that you are exploring these issues - here in this new seminary.
Perhaps all of us could be informed in our quest by the American Heritage Dictionary's third definition of the word "communicate": it is "to receive Communion". In my religious tradition that means it is an act of sharing.
And now I want to salute you who work and study in this institution, preparing yourselves and others for a crucial task. You inspire me with hope for the future.
I know you may become my pastor, my counselor, the person who, in the end, sits next to my bed and holds my hand. You may be my grandchildren's teacher or their leader in the halls of government. You will teach them to pray, to praise, to seek the truth and to require justice - to act from the depths of their souls' freedom. I'm counting on you.
Thank you for your commitment to this mission.
