That last post was what I would have tweeted if I had a Twitter account, but I don’t and so it’s not. But in this issue of Time magazine there is an article about churches that encourage their members to tweet during the service (p. 51-52). It may also be available on-line, but with my dial-up service I’m not about to find out.
The lead church in the article is in Jackson, Michigan, a town which markets itself as the birthplace of the Republican Party. Isn’t that a bit like putting signs at the city limits that read, “Waupekeneta: we invented cancer,” “Lilac Falls: our Besse was the first mad cow,” or “Tianjin: the proud home of Chinese drywall”?
The pastor said that he hit on the idea of Twittering as a way to make the church experience “not suck.” While Twittering may foster community within the congregation, I have serious reservations about allowing—and especially encouraging—it during corporate worship.
1. Any pastor who asks his people to Twitter while he is preaching does not respect himself or his message. Or his people, who he is treating like children with ADD.
2. Multi-tasking during worship may be a form of spiritual adultery, and with an extremely dumb idol. You can’t even give God an hour a week of your undivided attention? One church member confessed in the article that it is “distracting, if not impossible, to text and pray simultaneously.”
3. Multi-tasking shortens already scattered attention spans. People who multi-task during worship or class (you students know who you are) lose the ability to think deeply or follow a sustained chain of reasoning (and when they perform poorly on tests, they say it’s the professor’s fault, even though he told them exactly what was on the exam). Shallow people make shallow Christians, so I don’t know how you can build a mature church on the back of Twitter.
Other than that, I’m all for it. Let’s go Cavs!
Mike Wittmer 
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