The following is from A Is for Abductive (152-155) and should help in beginning the process of understanding EPIC.

It needs to be said again and again: The church has an image problem. In an image-is-everything culture where images ha supplanted words as the cultural vernacular,(6) the church is heavily “logocentric” (i.e., word-based), nervous around images, an, alienated from its own image-rich pedigree. This contrasts with the fact that even children today are extraordinarily learned within a visual tradition.

Of course, words still and should thud and punch. But what principles and points were to moderns, metaphors and images are to people in the emerging culture. Images are now the narrative, words the declarative (”Look at this!” “See how this works!”). Words now support images; they don’t create images themselves. Visual ideas rather than scripts set today’s story lines.

Metaphors are the masters of postmodern culture, and leaders must offer people master metaphors that offer life rather than death. Virginia Woolf said of Yeats, “Wherever one cut him, with a little question, he poured, spurted fountains of ideas.”(7) Cut postmoderns anywhere, and they gush, spurting fountains of images. Focus groups are now not being asked questions so much as being given images (e.g., 400 laid out on a table) and asked to pick them up, respond to each, and relate how they make one feel.

We live by metaphors. Metaphor is the ordinary language of the mind. Far from being the preserve of poets and artists, metaphor is how the mind thinks and is what distinguishes our thinking from the animal kingdom’s speech and speculation. One of the foremost linguists of our time, George Lakoff, even argues that image is that from which reason emerges:

On the traditional view, reason is abstract and disembodied. On the new view, reason has a bodily basis. The traditional view sees reason as literal, as primarily about propositions that can be objectively true or false. The new view takes imaginative aspects of reason-metaphor, metonymy, and disembodied. On the new view, reason has a bodily basis. The traditional view sees reason as literal, as primarily about propositions that can be objectively true or false. The new view takes imaginative aspects of reason-metaphor, metonymy, and mental imagery-as central to reason rather than as a peripheral and inconsequential adjunct to the literal (8)

Metaphors are the real thing. Metaphors are mental magic the wand that transforms the brain when waved over attention.(9) “A talent for speaking differently, rather than for arguing well, is the chief instrument of change,” argues philosopher Ric Rorty.(10)

“He is the image [ikon] of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation.”
—Colossians 1:15

The greatest communicators in history have used the wizardry of metaphor magic. Jesus, the greatest of all time, did speak in public without the use of “parables”–an image-based form of narrative. Dante created physical pictures of hell, purgatory, and heaven that have pestered us ever since. The phenomenal growth of Southern gospel music in late mode’ culture is partly due to its Christocentric focus, the genius, Bill and Gloria Gaither, and Southern gospel’s tribal integrity (”O Brother, Where Art Thou”) and ingenious, close-to-the people use of images and metaphors to convey biblical truth. Similarly, the success of modern masters of “seven points” a “eleven principles” like Steven Covey can be attributed in part their use of vivid metaphors (e.g., “sharpening the saw,” “the fire within,” etc.). How has Los Angeles pastor Erwin McManus be! so successful in building a multicultural, multigenerational missional church? He masterfully employs vivid images, not just words, to embody Mosaic Church’s mission and values. For example: Most churches are “spiritual bomb shelters”; “you can’t wash the feet of a dirty world if you refuse to touch it.”(11)

While most modern Protestant churches either left their walls unadorned, or adorned them only with words on Scripture plaques, University Baptist Church in Waco, Texas, fills its worship space with artistic touches-from icons to crucifixes to brightly-colored walls-all bespeaking a sensitivity to image. Modern preachers structure their sermons via analytical outlines with points and sub points, angled with alliteration and pointed with parallelism. It’s all about words, words, words. Meanwhile postmodern preachers pace back and forth, musing and dreaming, seeking to discover and craft vivid, unforgettable, and profound images-like bursting fishing nets and fruited grapevines, swooping crows and resting sparrows, naive kings and spunky widows.

Footnotes
7. Virginia Woolf, describing Yeats, as quoted in Hermione Lee, Virginia Woolf (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997), 567.
8. George Lakoff, Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Re about the Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), xi.
9. Marcel Danesi uses the phrase “word magic’ to describe metaphor in his Of arettes, High Heels, and Other Interesting Things: An Introduction to Semiotics (N York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999), 93.
10. Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (New York:
11. For more McManusisms, see his bookAn Unstoppable Force: Daring to Become the Church God Had in Mind (Loveland, CO: Group Publishing, 2001).