Powerful Persuasion

Tex Sample has a new book called Powerful Persuasion. After his other great offerings, "Ministry in an Oral Culture", and "The Spectacle of Worship in a Wired World", I expect this to be good.

Section One focuses on Story,
Section Two on Rhetoric in Image, Sound, Beat, Light, Move and Dance
Section Three on the Prophetic Church and Prophetic Use of Figure - in Hebrew Poetry and in Electronic Culture

Here's what the back cover says:

When it comes to communicating the gospel through new media and technologies, churches are often faced with one of two bad options. Either they can reject these new vehicles for sharing the faith as “not the way we’ve always done it”; or they can uncritically embrace them, failing to see that when not understood properly these media can obscure the gospel message just as much as they can communicate it. If they are going to reach the generations formed by electronic culture, churches must engage in a new evangelism, one that makes use of new technologies and cultural expressions. Sample explains how the electronic generations receive and process the information communicated by new media, and how the ways in which our consumerist culture makes use of those media are not good models for how the church can employ them to spread the message of Jesus Christ.

Tex (what is that short for?) was Professor of Church and Society at Saint Paul School of Theology in Kansas City - now he's a freelance author and lecturer.