Read about Pastor John Voelz of Jackson, Michigan here.
Last year, Voelz was tweeting at a conference outside Nashville about ways to make the church experience more creative — ways to “make it not suck” — when suddenly it hit him: Twitter!
There’s a time and place for technology, and most houses of worship still say it’s not at morning Mass. But instead of reminding worshippers to silence their cell phones, a small but growing number of churches across the country are following Voelz’s lead and encouraging people to integrate text-messaging into their relationship with God.
On Easter Sunday, pastor Todd Hahn prefaced his sermon by saying, “I hope many of you are tweeting this morning about your experience with God.”
“It’s a huge responsibility of a church to leverage whatever’s going on in the broader culture, to connect people to God and to each other,” says Hahn.
What do you think? Please email or tweet your response….
You post raises a whole set of interesting questions about what technology is doing to our lives. On the one hand tweeting in Church (sheul) sounds like a disaster. Why add to the already intesne distraction that we feel in our day to day lives. It seems to me that some days I can’t even type a five line e-mail without 5 distractions. Worship is our escape from this. When we go to shuel, sit down to meditate or to pray, we shut off the constant stream of information coming in from the outside and try to become aware of our own bodies and minds as they are in that moment. This is almost impossible to do amidst the constanst stream of external stimuli that is day to day life.
On the other hand there is something about tweeting that reminds me of a good pluralist peulah at summer camp. It lacks the depth of two individuals conversing, but there is something about seeing a question or an idea refreacted from so many different perspectives that can be really fruitful.
Take a look at this interaction
http://www.c4chaos.com/2010/01/so-what-did-the-buddha-awoke-to/
on a Buddhist blog about the nature of awakening. There is something interesting about seeing the interaction of minds in this format. It’s limited, but it does serve a purpose.
It also made me think of our conversation from a couple days a go. Just in case you wanted to follow up on the research I was talking about and the subsequent media firestorm, here is a really good blog post on the topic.
http://neurocritic.blogspot.com/2009/04/neural-correlates-of-admiration-and.html
Anyway, just my disjointed thoughts ( :