The Theology

of Twitter

Three Challenges for the Church

Engaging Social Media

Presented by Steve Knight

Saturday, September 12CE 2.0 Conference

Pfeiffer University

What is Social Media?

•Blogs (e.g., Blogger, WordPress)

•Micro-Blogs (e.g., Twitter)

•Social Networks (e.g., Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Ning)

•Wikis (e.g., Wikipedia)

•Other (e.g., FriendFeed, Delicious, Flickr, YouTube, Second Life, Google Reader)

“Social media is storytelling.”

—Sean Percival, Director of Content for Tsavo.com

Duc in altum!

The Internet is ...

or ... ?

3 Theological Challenges

for the Church

Challenge #1:Be “reverse

incarnational”

Proclamation

Reverse Incarnation

Counting Conversations

Why do people visit

the pastor’s bio page

more often than any other single

page?

Newmedia

Gamechanger

Maintain the physical

in the sacramental

Challenge #2:

Virtual Sacraments?

Liturgy » Magic?

Physical » Sacramental?

Promote counter-cultural

spiritual practices

Challenge #3:

Tweeting in church?

Who’s On Twitter?

•@JohnPiper

•@RickWarren

•@BrianMcLaren

•@LenSweet

•@StevenFurtick

•@UMCommunication, @GBOD, @UMCYoungClergy

The church thattweets together,stays together.

@Twitturgies

Benefits of Twitter Prayer

1.Empowers to pray frequent, short prayers

2.Brings incredible focus to prayers

3.Raises consciousness of one’s prayers and longings

Unplug

5 Ideas for EthicalSocial Networking1.Take a Sabbath from yourself

2.Begin your status updates with “If God wills it ...” or some variant thereof

3.Don’t slam with status

4.Say nice things about people you don’t like

5.Pray your Friend List

3 Challenges for the Church

1.Be reverse incarnational

2.Maintain the physical in the sacramental

3.Promote spiritual practices, such as fasting from media and devices

“The Internet causes billions of images to appear on millions of computer monitors around the planet. From this galaxy of sight and sound will the face of Christ emerge and the voice of Christ be heard? For it is only when his face is seen and his voice heard that the world will know the glad tidings of our redemption.

“This is the purpose of evangelization. And this is what will make the Internet a genuinely human space, for if there is no room for Christ, there is no room for man. Therefore ... I dare to summon the whole Church bravely to cross this new threshold, to put out into the deep of the Net, so that now as in the past the great engagement of the Gospel and culture may show to the world ‘the glory of God on the face of Christ’ (2 Corinthians 4:6). May the Lord bless all those who work for this aim.”

—Pope John Paul II, "Internet: A New Forum for Proclaiming the Gospel," for the 36th World Communications Day, Sunday, May 12, 2002

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