Customer Reviews

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

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As a young professor at Goshen College in the 1960s I bumped into a professional challenge. I had come upon Marshall McLuhan's books which introduced an entirely new way of thinking about the media. (Later we used the term paradigm shift.) McLuhan found his way into my course syllabuses and coffee conversations. A friend once told me that I was totally McLuhan-washed.

Problem was, the profession didn't have a very good word for McLuhan. Stylists scoffed at his style; communicologists asked for his research methodology; and the qualitative analysts couldn't find coherence in McLuhan's broad shot. Was something wrong with me that I so revered the Toronto seer?

Forty years later a former student called me. "Check out Shane Hipps' book."

I am pleased to recommend a McLuhan inspired The Hidden Power of
Electronic Culture. I look through a rear-view mirror and wonder how much better my own classes might have been had I, in the 1960s and 1970s, come upon this kind of interpretation and application of McLuhan's seminal work.

Hipps is a deeply spiritual pastor; his book, subtitled "How Media Shapes(sic) Faith, The Gospel, and Church" offers him an opportunity to explore the "cultural engagement" of people of faith. McLuhan never struck me as particularly religious, but I am sure he would approve of how Hipps has appropriated his thought.

Central to McLuhan's understanding was that media (Why did Zondervan make the noun singular on the cover?) are "dynamic forces with power to shape us, regardless of content." Hipps smartly pulls together the widest range of McLuhan's writing to suggest more precisely the nature of the dynamic forces. He identifies McLuhan's "four laws" of media. The media
extend..., the media make obsolete..., the media reverse into ..., and the media retrieve... . A useful exercise, then, is to explore what does a medium extend? what does a medium make obsolete? What does a medium reverse into? And what does a medium retrieve?

Like McLuhan, Hipps uses the print media as the contrasting backdrop to a study of electronic media. Beginning with chapter 4, the book lends itself to provocative churchly discussions, although I am of the opinion that the typical lay leader who fails to make a careful study of McLuhan could stray from the principles that guide Hipps' discussions and simply opt for the latest church experiment.

Be sure to wrestle with Hipps contrast of the Apostle Paul's method of discourse and that of Jesus. If you grasp this contrast, you will be well on your way to understanding Hipps' perspectives on metaphor, sign and symbol, story, emotional involvement and community.

"I contend the medium of print shaped the modern church in ways we are only beginning to recognize in the wake of postmodernism. Only when we study these changes can we begin to perceive the impact for the other forms of media on our understanding of community, leadership, and worship." Shane Hipps.

Like the proverbial frog in the pot of water, I have grown up in a culture saturated with electronic media. I remember going to Sunday School as a young boy, and talking with my classmates about what we had watched on TV the night before. Little did I know that the media we shared was creating the community that we were becoming. Shane Hipps in his book The Hidden Power of Electronic Culture, deftly explores how the things we do influence who we are. Things that we don't think about have enormous impact on what and how we think.

I have read theology and sociology treatises on the modern / postmodern rift in our society. For the first time, thanks to Shane, I see causal relationships between historical technological events, and the worldviews that emerged in their wake. To ignore this insight is to run the risk of what I call the hardening of the categories. Understanding the post-modern experience is a cross cultural journey and this book can serve as a tour guide to the trip.

In Chapter Six the treatise on conflict and how to deal with it is worth the price of the book many times over. If you are a thinking Christian--not an oxymoron--you will find Shane's work ranking up with the likes of Dallas Willard, and Marva Dawn. It is scholarly, pleasingly readable, and insightful to the point of comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable.

David Wheat, Merrimack NH

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.

The Hidden Power of Electronic Culture is undeniably one of the most significant books that I've read this year. Shane Hipps has taken the discussion of changing forms in church - whether worship, or preaching, or leadership, or church governance - and raised a new, often ignored set of questions. He states this in his introduction:

"A host of books and articles have been written on what has changed and how the church ought to respond to those changes. However, few writers have made a serious effort to understand why these changes have occurred...I propose that the answers to the question of why these changes have come about can be found in part by exploring the nature and effects of media and technology on culture." (p. 16-17)

And this is exactly what this book does. Hipps proposes a model in which these questions can be considered and then uses that model to tackle some of the pressing form-related questions that the western church faces at the beginning of the twenty-first century. To be sure, much of the book is an application of Marshall McLuhan's writings from the mid- to late-twentieth century. But, for those (like myself) who have never read McLuhan, he distills the essence of McLuhan's thought and connects it with current discussion and debate. For those who have already read McLuhan, I suspect that the book may offer just as much for exactly those reasons. In short, this is a wonderful, readable book that will aid the church in her often tumultuous dialogue with a media-savvy culture.

Length:: 5:34 Mins

Shane Hipps' desire with this book is essentially two-fold. First, he wants to take a serious look at the effects of media technology in the lives of believers. Secondly, he works to take that analysis and apply it to the life of the church.

Using the powerfully prescient McLuhan as his touchstone, Hipps proceeds to remind us of the truth that the "medium is the message" and the subsequent analysis provided by McLuhan to help us understand the impact of any technology. Hipps moves fluidly from oral to written culture to projected sermons in video venue church services. As such, I think Hipps does a good job of reminding us of some very important reflection - the kind of reflection we so rarely do as evangelicals. At times Hipps is insightful, at times he is appropriately biting in his critique, but most of all the first half of the book provides analysis that needs to be heard. We live in a technologically saturated culture, and hence we tend to lose our ability to "step out" for a moment and think through whether it is any good for us or the message of the Gospel.

Where the book begins to lose its impact is the second half - the application to church culture. Several problems become fairly obvious as the book progresses. I was personally disappointed to discover that Hipps is squarely in the emergent theological fold. I know his book is endorsed by leaders in the emergent movement, but that didn't necessitate the theological problems with Hipps' analysis. As is becoming almost stereotypical of emergent writing, Hipps' history, philosophy and theology are rife with straw men, hyperbole, and unkind generalizations.

For example, Hipps simply assumes that epistemological foundationalism is dead. It isn't. The result from Hipps' point of view is that church life needs to look more at a "web of belief" way of presenting the Gospel, but that is not free from its own serious problems. If the foundation of your argument is a broad generalization, your conclusion is bound to suffer.

Hipps argues against the cultural captivity of seeker sensitive style churches and the prevalence of modernism in too many evangelical circles. Though this is true in some places, the emergent point of view has painted with a very broad brush and pigeonholed every church that doesn't look at things the way they do. Ironically, at this point Hipps falls into the same trap as so many emergent authors - while accusing the modern church of cultural captivity they have willingly become captives to a postmodern culture.

And then there are the ad hominem attacks. Hipps is not above mocking the "30 minute lecture" style of preaching or stating that top-down leadership models "inevitably" lead to corruption and abuse. I'm growing tired of hearing these kinds of obviously false and unkind generalizations from emergent authors.

Hipps' personal narrative is compelling and his work in McLuhan's theory is a great reminder for us, but the book would have been a lot more persuasive with better application to church life.

THE HIDDEN POWER OF ELECTRONIC CULTURE: HOW MEDIA SHAPES FAITH, THE GOSPEL AND CHURCH is essential reading for any believer who wants to understand how gospel is presented through media filters. From questions of the neutrality issue in media analysis to cultural opportunities the church has missed and how the church can take advantage of cultural trends, THE HIDDEN POWER OF ELECTRONIC CULTURE addresses the needs, concerns and future of a dynamic church structure.

If you liked "The Long Tail", "Tipping Point", and "Freakonomics," you'll find practical, lucid, and intelligent perspectives within the pages of The Hidden Power of Electronic Culture: How Media Shapes Faith, the Gospel, and Church.

If you have anything to do with media or technology at your church, you need to read this.

Shane Hipps skillfully identifies and describes basic media inventions that have had enormous impacts upon Western civilization. So all consuming are the resulting cultural shifts that we often no longer recognize their birth was caused, in part, by technology we now take for granted. That is the hidden power behind the electronic culture that Shane wants to unveil for us.

Once we begin to grasp the concept that the medium is the message, we begin to understand that we should not reduce the use of media and technology as just a tool "useful for dispensing the gospel (pg. 38)... As we will see, these media forms have a profound effect on our faith - an effect that goes far beyond their content (pg. 39)."

This is a good book. The last 1/3 of the book is more practical for a church leader or layperson, but I found I was more interested in the philosophical material that comes before.

As a result, I've been thinking a lot about what is the gospel message and how does the Church (i.e. me) embody it in in a disembodied world of cell phones, internet, television, written word, etc. Also, I'm paying attention to how electronic media have shaped me and our culture and the gospel. Interesting stuff. For me the biggest "Aha Moment" has been observing what my life has been like without my cell phone. It's like I'm in a separate room at a party. On one hand, there's this feeling of missing out on all the action, and on the other hand there's this sense of stillness that is quite calming. The question I find myself asking is, in which room would Jesus prefer I be?

Before this book, I didn't even pay attention to this stuff nor have a way to evaluate it.