L.I.A.R.

Consider:

• I currently subscribe to (ie scan daily!) around 60 Blogs - and that's the tiniest fraction of sites out there.
• A search on Google for "evangelism" yields 7.2 million results (in, apparently, ".23 seconds")!
• ...even focusing that search to "evangelism amongst teenagers", gives 26,000 pages.
• At any moment in any 24 hours I can access live pictures from round world, news events as they happen and online journals from people in every part of the world and from all sorts of walks of life.
• I can search, online, millions of printed books; libraries of quotations; stored videos and audio files etc etc.

"Information overload" doesn't even come close!

What do we actually do with all we read, see hear (and I haven't even mentioned the print and TV/radio media above)?

Neil Postman, in his hugely important book of a few years' ago: Amusing Ourselves to Death, coined the phrase -

Low Information: Action Ratio

...in other words, he spotted that getting our hands (or our heads?) on more and more information doesn't necessarily mean we actually do any more about it. In fact, the overload can mean we do less than before because of the overload and indecision it can cause.

For example, the well attested phenomenon of compassion fatigue that relief organisations have to battle against is precisely because the public have seen so many problems in the world and know that there is so much poverty etc they feel powerless to do anything - and wouldn't know where to start if they did.

He, and others who have followed, say that we are building up our defences against all the demands on our action and decision-making to the extent that it affects our reactions to everything - a built in inertia to change and action, so that we don't feel over-extended.

Do you think that has an impact on our reaction to sermons?

Are we so immune to exhortation, challenge and direction that preaching is effectively hitting a brick wall?

I suspect it's not quite as bad as that, but I also know that I have to work hard to deliver on the "Why bother?" question and the "Why do this when there are so many demands on my time and thinking and decision making (like which of the 50 different brands of butter I should purchase!?".

Any solutions, thoughts..?