Real Church in a Social Network World, by Leonard Sweet

If you picked up Leonard Sweet's Real Church in a Social Network World thinking you'd get some great insights on church life and cyber connectedness, you quickly find you were mistaken.  This book has some good ideas.  But it doesn't work well as a book, and doesn't fulfill the expectations created by the title.  Basically what Leonard Sweet (or, more likely, his publisher) has done is repackage excerpts from some of his other books, and include a "bonus chapter" from his newest book, Viral: How Social Networking is Poised to Ignite Revival.

Leonard Sweet has had his finger on the pulse of American Christianity for a long time, and I respect his insights, if not completely his theology and perspectives.  For example, Sweet bemoans the intellectualization of Christianity, which detracts from relationship with God and others.  "One of the problems of the church is its forceful insistence on intellectual adherence to certain beliefs, in the relative absence of a holy passion for the incarnational practice of those same beliefs."  Are conservative Christians more concerned with defending the Bible than with obeying it?  The defense of orthodoxy detracts from relationship to our peril.  "We are disconnected from our Source so that we have become sterile.  We may be doctrinally correct, but we have become spiritual cadavers."  Challenging words, indeed, but they leave me wondering if Sweet does have lines beyond which he will not wander theologically.

The excerpt from Viral is most relevant to the title of this book.  He describes the "TGIF culture" (Twitter, Google, iPhone, Facebook), and contrasts the Googlers (who embrace TGIF culture) and the Gutenbergers (for whom the written word is normative).  Sweet's take is a bit mixed.  A self-described native Gutenberger, he embraces the TGIF culture, yet sees its shortfalls.  "Much of human contact has been reduced to acronyms, misspelled words, emoticons, missing punctuation, and mindless replies to meaningless revelations. . . .  These things pass for conversation, a thing that used to thread the fabric of society."

So my recommendation, if you want to hear more from Sweet, is to skip this e-book and peruse some of his other titles.

Thanks to Waterbrook Multnomah for the complimentary electronic review copy.