Book Review - Viral by Leonard Sweet

I was initially very excited about reading Viral by Leonard Sweet. As a youth pastor, I am very interested in ways to utilize and leverage social media for ministry purposes. Sweet uses his book to discuss Twitter, Google, iPhones, and Facebook in the text. He approaches each of these items from a Christian perspective, offering insight in ways that he believes they should be used in an attempt to bring about revival.

Dr. Sweet has a tendency to be a bit too postmodern for my liking. While I consider myself fully in what he calls the Googlers, I have difficulty with some of the things that Sweet discusses as the direction that Christianity needs to go.

Having said that, I did appreciate the metaphor that Sweet used in his section on iPhones. In this particular section, he describes the way that an apple is eaten whole and an orange is broken into pieces. This is a way that many individuals treat their Christianity and their lives. They break it into sections, keeping one part from another.

Overall, I believe there are individuals who will like the book, but it was not necessarily what I had anticipated. I was hoping for a more practical guide for utilizing social media. While this book touches on social media and Sweet's apparent love for it, this book fell short of what I was looking for.

I was provided a review copy of Viral by Waterbrook Multnomah as a part of their Blogging for Books program. I was not required to give it a positive review.