Twitter and Church

This topic is not really all that new, but it is still gaining steam and is just now coming into the radar for many churches and churchgoers. I’ve seen several responses to this topic, both positive and negative, and figured I would give my take on all this and what I am seeing other people say about it.

On the negative side, one of the biggest comments that I hear is that Twitter is a distraction between you and God, or between the people around you and God. These people would say that church is a place and time where you connect with God, and so there should be nothing the interferes with that time. The problem is that this is not necessarily all of what church is about. Yes, we gather together to worship our Lord. Yes, we do connect with God through worship, prayer, and preaching. But church is also very much about the gathering of community and the corporate worship that we share in. And during the week, we have our own personal time of intimate worship, prayer, and connection with God. Another part of our weekly gathering of community is the time of teaching. This is where the tweeting would generally take place. I have yet to see someone with one hand in the air worshipping while tweeting on their phone in the other hand. So you can pretty much take the worship in song portion of the service out of the debate. And so this pretty much leaves us with the debate of whether one should tweet during the sermon or not.

So lets look at some of the positives of tweeting during the sermon, message, talk, or whatever your church calls it. People have always taken notes during a sermon. This has pretty much always been accepted and generally encouraged. With the advancement of technology, note-taking has moved from pen and paper to using a phone or other device to take notes. Personally, I use the Evernote app on my iPhone to take notes. It automatically syncs my notes from my phone to my Evernote profile on the web, as well as the Evernote app on my desktop. So wherever I go, I can access my notes. Its a lot easier to keep track of than a piece of paper that is stuck somewhere in my Bible. So now you take note-taking during sermons and you introduce the world of Twitter. Now you can not only take notes, but you can share them with a multitude of others in real time, and you can see what others are saying and thinking as well.

But lets take it a step further than that. Most people who use Twitter also use Facebook, and most of them have these two social networks integrated. So whatever they say on Twitter shows up on Facebook. Many of these people are part of a large network of people, Christ-followers and not. And so now all of these people who either follow them on Twitter or are friends with them on Facebook are seeing these thoughts and comments being posted about what they are learning, thinking out, and enjoying from the service. And chances are that there are many people who do not attend church but have friends who do and they are now seeing a running dialogue take place about their friends’ experience at church. Add to this power of a RT (re-tweet), in which someone else re-posts what someone else on Twitter has already said. And so you have their followers on Twitter seeing their posts, their friends on Facebook seeing their posts, and now the followers and friends of the person who re-tweeted the original post as well. And if your head is not spinning yet, you can throw in the advantage of using hashtags (#) along with your Twitter post. This basically creates a real time running dialogue that can be directed under a specific topic or identity. For example #MHC is used to direct tweets to the Mars Hill Church discussions. You can then view every comment that is directed with that specific hashtag. And so now you have the capability of multitudes of people sharing notes and experiences, and at the same time, having another multitude of people who do not go to church seeing this running dialogue take place and how much these people are learning and enjoying at their churches that they might not know of outside of Twitter and Facebook.

In the end, it seems that the primary argument that stands is that of distraction. I can understand how someone going to town on a cell phone can be a distraction to others around them. I encourage anyone who wants to tweet during a service to do so discreetly so that they are not a distraction to those around them. You could even give the people next to you a heads up and ask them if it will be a problem, and if so then move to a seat where it will not be. Another problem would be the likelihood of you doing other things with your phone, i.e. checking email, texting, browsing the web, or just reading tweet feeds that have nothing to do with the service.

When weighed out, I can see Twitter as something positive for churches, but I also understand why churches could be hesitant to move in this direction with their services. What do you think?