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Title: The Spectacle of Worship in a Wired World: Electronic Culture and the Gathered People of God by Tex Sample ISBN: 0687083737 Publisher: Abingdon Press Pub. Date: 1998 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $18.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.83
Rating: 2
Summary: A New Age of Worship
Comment: Tex Sample is a student of modern culture and media. His grasp of the history, scope, and influence of our electronic culture provide a great resource for understanding our day and age. Coupled with Sample's heart for worship among the gathered people of God, he sets forth a challenge for the church to connect with today's culture.
For the church to connect with modern culture Sample asserts that it must become involved with and participate in the indigenous practices of its people (19). Samples spends much time expounding modern electronic culture trends in terms of engaging the world through images, sound as beat, and visualization.
While much of his analysis of electronic culture was insightful, I found much of it to be unhelpful rhetoric. Sample's sample worship service closing his book, instead of convincing me of the validity of his suggestions throughout the book, were more absurd than useful - Singing Frank Sinatra's My Way as lead into confession? Come on.
The most challenging section of the book dealt with the church being and incarnational presence among the people. As Christ became flesh and pitched tent among us, so too should we enter into the world and culture around us and dwell among the people. What better way to understand the needs and cultural nuances of the society and age in which we live. Furthermore, Sample's reminder that incarnation is more than just God becoming a part of our world, in reality it is a "disclosure that the world is part of God's story" (106). The church is still a distinctive culture with a distinctive message that needs to be communicated through modern means in an electronic culture.
Rating: 4
Summary: Understanding Cultural Worship
Comment: Tex Sample, in his book "The Spectacle of Worship in a Wired World," addresses the cultural divisions between the postmodern generation and the moderns (those born before 1945), and how that division plays out in the worship of the church. The basic elements of the electronic culture (postmodern) are images, sound as beat, and visualization. Sample blends scholasticism and humorous anecdotes to demonstrate how much of the postmodern cultural elements (images, sound as beat, and visualization) are already present in worship. Rather than fight against these elements, Sample argues for their understanding and intentional use in worship.
Sample continues to argue against the use of the word "relevant," but chooses the word "Incarnational." When churches are "out of touch with the people who live around them, the problem is not that they are irrelevant, but that they (are) not Incarnational" (1998:105). The book concludes with an illustrated worship service designed with the electronic culture in mind (a worship service using images, sound as beat, and visualization).
Rating: 4
Summary: Syncretism to the Wired World
Comment: Tex Sample in The Spectacle of Worship in a Wired World, wanted to provoke the Church to "get with it" by pitching its tent where masses of unbelievers are congregating. Sample deliberately engaged the electronic culture to demonstrate that it was not to be discounted or feared, but could be utilized, embraced and directed for God's purpose. Music, movies, and dance can provide major source materials for evoking the presence of God.
Wired World is explosive. It is rich in the use of contemporary imagery, personal experience, commentary, and creative illustrations. Wired World recognized that the electronic revolution is a fact of twentieth (twentieth-first) century being and that it exerts an unprecedented influence on our predominantly secular consumer society. In the cacophonous intensity of deafening electronic sound the appearance of reality becomes its own reality. Art and reality obscure each other. One possible implication of this aspect to reality is that meaning in being has become lost. The Church, Sample argued, offers hope to this wired world. The Church needs to drop its "holier than thou" posturing and infiltrate.
Sample, a grandfather, and an astute observer of our times, expressed worry at the Church's inability to convey its values to his and our children and grandchildren. Sample deliberately set on a course of self-education and invited the reader to journey with him. The church in its apparent irrelevance to the North American electronic culture, Sample argues, may have a metaphoric 'window of vulnerability' to counteract this illusion. Engagement, not dismissal, is essential if the church is going to be at all relevant to this wired world.
Sample quoted Emile Durkheim, the French sociologist, two times! This is a sure sign to pay attention. Sample wrote: "[Durkheim] observed that when you get people in close physical proximity to one another, focus their attention on a common object, and engage them in exercises that arouse emotion, bonding occurs" (57, 84). The type of bonding that occurs in massive electronic musical rally experiences is not the specific type of bonding the Church advocates. The question is: "How can the Church use Durkheim's observation, the fact of an electronic culture, and its own desire to fulfill the Great Commission?" The answer seems to fall under the adage: "If you cannot beat them, join them." In this case, "join" does not mean become as "they are." Join means to be with "them" in their environment, learn their language, use their imaging, and interpret the message of Christ using their own ways and means to "speak" to their condition.
Sample's conclusion is precise: "The call here is for a church that will 'imitate' Christ to pitch tent, to embody itself, to take form in the indigenous practices of our time, not for the purpose of accommodation to the world but rather to be God's people. It is a twofold effort: To join the practices of an electronic culture, on the one hand, and to keep faith with the story of Christ on the other. In worship this will mean taking up the practices of spectacle and faithfulness to the biblical narrative and to the integrity of Christian liturgy" (122).
The Cross of Christ may represent the intersection of the Eternal Christ with the Principalities and Powers of the World. In the case of the wired world Christ and culture meet anew to discover old truths. Christ is accessible to culture. Christ is able to meet culture. Christ is both in and above culture available to all cultures. Sample opened the thought that Christ and the wired world need to engage for mutual enrichment. The Christian Church simply needs to apply the principles of syncretism to the culture of the wired world as it has to other cultures in other times.
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Title: The Wired Church: Making Media Ministry by Len Wilson, Leonard Sweet ISBN: 0687069157 Publisher: Abingdon Press Pub. Date: 1999 List Price(USD): $22.00 |
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Title: Out on the Edge: A Wake-Up Call for Church Leaders on the Edge of the Media Reformation by Michael Slaughter, Ginghamsburg Worship Design Team ISBN: 0687054532 Publisher: Abingdon Press Pub. Date: 1998 List Price(USD): $22.00 |
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Title: eMinistry: Connecting with the Net Generation by Andrew Careaga, Leonard Sweet ISBN: 0825423708 Publisher: Kregel Publications Pub. Date: 2001 List Price(USD): $12.99 |
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Title: Digital Storytellers: The Art of Communicating the Gospel in Worship by Len Wilson, Jason Moore ISBN: 0687052130 Publisher: Abingdon Press Pub. Date: 2002 List Price(USD): $25.00 |
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Title: Video, Kids, and Christian Education by Russell W. Dalton ISBN: 080666410X Publisher: Augsburg Fortress Publishers Pub. Date: 2001 List Price(USD): $15.99 |
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