The Creative Metaphor
Wednesday, May 30th, 2007Since we are the conjoined worship and communications department at NorthWood, we are tasked with designing the metaphor/series titles and anchor graphics for our series in conjunction with input from our lead pastor on thesis, themes, texts, etc. Since yours truly also preaches abou 40% of the time, I am knee deep in metaphor design.
Why metaphor? People think in pictures not text. If I say think of a red elephant you certainly think of a picture of a red elephant, not the letters e-l-e-p-h-a-n-t in red font. Giving people a metaphor connects a teaching concept to an image.
How do you come up with a metaphor that communicates? Key to the process is finding a metaphor which connects with people. I want a cognitive and emotive response to each metaphor and its anchor graphic. You can see some of our metaphorical anchor graphics here. Sometimes we formally brainstorm and other times it comes in the moment as one of us is working on something else. (coming soon…a post on brainstorming the IDEO way).
What do you do with the concept of the anchor image? We use it to set the mental picture, feel and direction for the series. For example, in the revolucion series our image prompted us to make our back curtain out of homemade street protest banners on sheets.
Much of our music for this series had a latin feel to it to correlate to the tone we wanted to set. The anchor image then goes up on our screens to promote the new series and on our webpage. That image or a sister image becomes the background for a song texts. Cristian often puts together a pre-sermon video bump to help set-up the metaphor. Here is the revolucion bump:
How does using metaphor assist in concrete teaching retention? People begin to attach the teaching concept to the metaphorical picture concept we have etched in their brain and thus, tend to remember the overarching concepts longer. Like it or not, no one is remembering your individual sermon teaching points (don’t believe me, quiz them the very next week on your main points). They probably remember the overall series thesis, illustrative material, and some nugget that intersected their life at the needed time.




