Tweeting in the Church

Jesus' famous words "Follow me" have taken on a whole new meaning in the past five years. This is the coin phrase for global social networkers. Twitter, a micro blogging site has become a social phenomenon receiving over a billion hits a week and each day roughly half a million new users are registering to follow tweeters. That's one huge discipleship!

Twitter took blogging off on a huge tangent. Whereas a typical blog is pretty much without limits. Twitter only allows between 20 and 30 words to be typed in a single tweet. For the follower this means that less time is spent devoted to reading an individual blog entry and they can follow more tweeters, and for the tweeter this means that as well as tweeting they have more time to follow more tweeter's and their micro blog updates. Followers can reply to tweets and also retweet the tweet of someone they follow to their own group of followers.

Many tweeters sign up for an account to give themselves direct access to people they might admire or engage with, but who previously they would never have been able to meet. And therein lies a great opportunity for the Church.

Many well known pastors from around the world have created Twitter accounts and have hundreds of thousands of followers. This allows the pastors to regularly share their latest theological musings, or provides links to a new blog or sermon in an instant. On the flipside, Twitter allows followers to keep abreast of and follow new wisdom from their pastors and other leading speakers.

Christians are using Twitter to debate en masse about issues of theology and culture, often with people they don't know, from all corners of the globe. This makes Twitter a very, very powerful engine for the Church as a place to share ideas and discussion about mission and theology on a global level.

Twitter is also serving to break down denominational and theological boundaries. There is much less evidence of denominations in the Tweetchurch than there is in the physical church. This is a great development. There is much talk about unity but very little physically done about it. Tweeting may indeed provoke a true unity one day.

Twitter also proves itself to be a great tool for evangelism. The imposed word limitation ensures that the evangelist doesn't preach a full sermon to the follower. From a follower's perspective, doses of evangelism are kept brief and unobtrusive. However, often in this case a short, sharp statement can have a much greater impact. And Twitter is a nest egg of millions of people who do not yet follow Christ but who are now fully versed in the act of following thanks to micro blogging.

Twitter ultimately removes barriers. It puts all those on the planet with internet access on a level playing field regardless of gender, faith or celebrity status. It offers the opportunity of a community which when it's working well is supportive, generous and listens. The Church would do well to embrace this new medium of communication as it offers so much promise for the future of mission, discourse and unity.

Can Twitter change the Church?

Yes, it could have an enormous global impact.