Blogging in Christ — Issue 21

The Same Word, Many Tables

A writer who has said a true thing once faces a question that sounds like thrift and often turns out to be appetite. Shall the same piece be used again, in another form, in another place, before another set of eyes? The counsel of the age answers at once: repurpose everything. Cut the long piece into short ones. Turn the essay into a thread, the thread into a picture, the picture into a clip. Let one effort feed every channel, and let every channel feed the name. The reasoning is plain, and on its own terms it works. One labor, many harvests.

The question is whether the harvest is the point. When the aim is reach, every new form is a new net, and the word itself becomes bait sized to each net. The same word, passed through enough forms, comes out a different word, and no one notices because each form still carries the writer's name. That is not stewardship. It is dilution with a system behind it.

The Scriptures show another pattern, and it begins not with channels but with a house. "These words, which I command you today, shall be on your heart; and you shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise up." (Deuteronomy 6:6-7) Mark the movement. The words do not change as the setting changes. The same words are on the heart, on the tongue at the table, on the road, at the lying down and the rising up. Then the command widens still further: "You shall write them on the door posts of your house and on your gates." (Deuteronomy 6:9) Spoken in the house, written on the gate. The form follows the place where a man actually stands. The word does not follow the fashion of the place. It stands written where passersby can read it, and spoken where children can hear it, and it is the same word in both.

That is the first joint of the matter. Repurposing is lawful when the form serves the hearer, and corrupt when the hearer is made to serve the form. The test is not whether the piece travels well. The test is whether the piece, in its new form, still says what it said. A letter is not a lesser sermon, and a spoken word is not a rough draft of the written one. Paul holds the two together without ranking them: "So then, brothers, stand firm and hold the traditions which you were taught by us, whether by word or by letter." (2 Thessalonians 2:15) By word or by letter: the tradition is one, and its carriers are two. The hearer who heard it preached and the reader who read it in a letter held the same thing. The form carried the tradition; it did not revise it.

Paul's own practice shows the same freedom with the same guard. He did not shrink from declaring what was profitable, "teaching you publicly and from house to house" (Acts 20:20). Publicly and from house to house: the assembly and the kitchen table, the open address and the close conversation. The setting changed the manner, because a public address and a household conversation are not the same act. It did not change the declaration, because the declaration was not his to edit for the room. Likewise his becoming: "To the weak I became as weak, that I might gain the weak. I have become all things to all men, that I may by all means save some." (1 Corinthians 9:22) He became all things, and he names the end at once: "Now I do this for the sake of the Good News, that I may be a joint partaker of it." (1 Corinthians 9:23) The adaptation serves the Good News. It never becomes a second gospel fitted to the hearer, because there is no second gospel to fit. "But even though we, or an angel from heaven, should preach to you any 'good news' other than that which we preached to you, let him be cursed." (Galatians 1:8) That curse is the wall around every table. Set the word at as many tables as you will, but set the same word, or do not set it at all.

The Lord himself varies the form and keeps the substance. "I have spoken these things to you in figures of speech. But the time is coming when I will no more speak to you in figures of speech, but will tell you plainly about the Father." (John 16:25) Figures first, plain speech after. The figure did not hide a different doctrine, and the plain speech did not introduce a new one. So the writer may speak in a figure where the hearer needs a figure, and plainly where the hearer can bear plain speech. He may shorten where the table is small and lengthen where the table is long. What he may not do is shorten by cutting the joint out of the text, or lengthen by padding it with his own cleverness, and then call the result the same piece.

Nehemiah's readers show the rule in one verse: "They read in the book, in the law of God, distinctly; and they gave the sense, so that they understood the reading." (Nehemiah 8:8) The form exists so that the reading may be understood. When a new form makes the reading harder to understand, or easier to admire, it has failed its office, whatever its reach.

Here the sower gives the image that settles the matter. "The farmer sows the word." (Mark 4:14) One seed, many soils. The farmer does not breed a new seed for each field. He carries the same seed to each field, and the field answers as the field will. The writer's tables are like those fields. The post, the leaflet, the letter, the spoken word at a kitchen table: these are fields, not seeds. The writer's work is to sow the same seed truly in each place, and then to stop. "I planted. Apollos watered. But God gave the increase." (1 Corinthians 3:6) Therefore, "neither he who plants is anything, nor he who waters, but God who gives the increase." (1 Corinthians 3:7) The increase is not the writer's to manufacture by multiplying forms. A hundred tables with the same seed, sown faithfully, are stewardship. A hundred tables with a seed bred for each table are a business.

So the practical rule is plain. Before a piece is set in a new form, ask two questions, in this order. First, does the new form still say the thing, whole and unbent, with its joints intact? If the answer is no, the form is refused, however promising its reach. Second, does the new form serve a hearer who could not otherwise sit at the table: a reader who reads on paper rather than on a screen, a hearer who hears better than he reads, a neighbor who will take a leaflet and never open a letter? If the answer is yes, the labor is justified as service, not as strategy. The piece is not being multiplied. The table is being set again, for another guest, with the same bread.

And the word, once set down truly, does not depend on the writer's distribution of it. "So is my word that goes out of my mouth: it will not return to me void, but it will accomplish that which I please, and it will prosper in the thing I sent it to do." (Isaiah 55:11) The word prospers in the thing it was sent to do, not in the thing the writer hoped it would do for his name. That frees the writer from the arithmetic of forms. He need only see that each table received the same word, and leave the prospering to the One who sent it.

Write the piece once, and write it truly. Then carry it, unchanged in substance, to every table where a hearer sits who could not come to the first. Speak it in the house and write it on the gate. Preach it publicly and teach it from house to house. Let the form bend to the hearer, and never let the word bend to the form. The tables may multiply. The word does not.