The Hidden Power of Electronic Culture: How Media Shapes Faith, the Gospel, and Church

The Hidden Power of Electronic Culture helps the church navigate its challenges and opportunities in the context of our electronic culture. Author Shane Hipps interprets and explains this culture, as well as the implications for our faith and the church. Providing both history and prophecy, The Hidden Power of Electronic Culture invites us to engage new cultural realities while staying connected to our spiritual heritage.

Customer Review: Well Presented Material on a Complicated Subject;Perhaps a Needed introduction to important issues

In reflection on the relationship between media and social organization, Shane Hipps explores the emerging church's engagement with electronic culture. For instance, Hipps outlines some basic associations with the individualism, objectivity, and abstraction of modernity and the print medium's encouragement of private reading, detached learning, and abandonment of mnemonic practices - respectively. Print culture can seem to give shape to a Christian privatized worship life and a systematic scripture reading of "extracting propositional truths."

On page 88 Hipps writes: "Because the medium is the message, our media revolutions - from the printing press to the Internet - have led to unintended changes in our message. Among them is a shift from a modern, individualistic, and highly rational concept of the gospel to a postmodern, communal, holistic, and experiential one." Hipps highlights the positive aspects of this:



"The emerging gospel of the electronic age is moving beyond cognitive propositions and linear formulas to embrace the power and truth of story. It revives the importance of following Jesus holistically rather than simply knowing Jesus cognitively. It has reintroduced us to a corporate understanding of faith that has powerful implications for this life, not just the next. It recovers the importance of ancient imagery, rites, and rituals in celebrating the mystery of the kingdom of God." (90)



Moreover, if the internet truly reflects a diffusion of information, and therefore of power, then this shift offers "a helpful corrective to the long history of centralized, top-down authority in the church. Electronic media allow us to retrieve the more participatory and egalitarian forms of worship where authority is dynamic and based on relationships rather than on fixed job descriptions." (130)



The author draws heavily on the thoughts on Marshall McLuhan, and offers valuable insights into the role of communication technology in culture. However, after reading this book one wonders if the author puts too much explanatory weight on media technology regarding social organization and related issues. It must be noted that there are other factors which can help explain our systems of thought and social organizing.

One book that helps to bring perspective on these issues is A Social History of Media: From Gutenberg to the Internet by Asa Briggs & Peter Burke.

Customer Review: A Must Read for the Church

Shane Hipps has a knack for being able to effectively read the pulse of our media drenched culture without falling into the polarized positions of most 'Christian' books. Most treatments of culture either wag their finger from afar (void of authentic engagement or understanding), or they immerse themselves so deeply in popular culture, losing their sense of perspective (void of the countercultural nature of the church). Shane avoids both by gleaning from the wisdom of cultural/media prophet Marshall McLuhan, who coined the phrase, 'the medium is the message' as well as the concept of a 'global village'. His application of McLuhan's thought has stunning pertinence to contemporary Christianity.



The fair, balanced, and thoughtful treatment results in some fantastic thoughts on how media shapes our faith, our gospel and our church. Though involved with the emerging church, Hipps doesn't use the book as a platform for mere emerging church promotion. He does offer a strong (but well informed) critique of the evangelical seeker church method, but he also offers some valid warnings for leaders in the emerging church as well.



This book is a powerful took in drawing the reader far enough away from the electronic media that has become commonplace in our lives and our faith, so that we are better able to focus and evaluate. His prescription is not the way of the Luddites or the Amish (although he is a Mennonite!). He instead challenges the reader to understand the power of electronic media, apply our faculty to think critically, and choose to use our media wisely and authentically.



Two thumbs up here. I consider this book a 'must read' for all church leaders.
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