Those are some responses you’ll likely get if you start polling your average mainstream worshiper about using twitter during a worship service.  For many, the very idea of people communicating electronically while worshiping is absurd.  Don’t our church bulletins tell us to turn off our phones when we come to worship?  Don’t we get annoyed when Heart of Glass starts blaring from some lady’s purse during the prayer of the people?  Don’t we tell our young people to pay attention in worship and stop messing around on your phone?

Most traditional congregations equate technology with distraction.  New social media tools such as twitter are kept separate from our experience of God in worship.  However, I get the sense that this is starting to change.  A few weeks ago I read a article in Time magazine online about the possibility of twittering in church.  I was initially interested because nextlevel, a church in Matthews, NC right down the street from my house is mentioned in the article.  Apparently the pastor there encourages his congregation to twitter during worship.  I must admit that my initial reaction was negative.  Mobile phone = distraction.  Bad for worship.  End of story.

But then I caught myself.  After reading the tweets of worshipers at various churches I realized something.  They were listening.  They were engaged. They were sharing their worship experience with others.  What I would give to have a congregation full of worshipers interested in share their worship experience with the world!  I think there’s a word for that.  Evangelism?  Is that it?

So, I have recently come to appreciate the gift that social media offers the church.  Granted, it can be abused.  I doubt twittering about the Jonas Brothers during the sermon is really worship.  But the truth is that I’ve seen many commonly accepted behaviors in the pews from week to week that can be abused.  Heck, they are abused.  They are a distraction in worship.  How about the woman who works on her needlepoint?  Or the one who knits a blanket with a peristent click click click click click?  Yet no one objects.  We pastors often laud the person who studiously takes notes throughout the sermon, scratching long penciled sentenced on the back of her bulletin.  Why then would we object to someone doing the same thing electronically?  And in addition sharing worship with the world?  I say tweet away!

Just tweet responsibly, worshipfully, and discreetly.  The Jonas Brothers can wait.

Seminar: “Emerging Worship Environments”

Adam Walker Cleaveland, who taught this seminar, has an excellent collection of their resources on his pomomusings blog.  Check it out.

Seminar: “Moving a Traditional Church into the 21st Century”

Recommended Books:

The Present Future, by Reggie McNeal

Direct Hit, by Paul Borden

Winning on Purpose, by John Kaiser

Jan Edmiston, who taught the class, keeps an excellent collection of her thoughts on her blog, found here.

Seminar: “Conversation with the Moderator”

Bruce Reyes-Chow, our esteemed Moderator, keeps his thoughts here.

Seminar: “Real Ministry in a Virtual World”

Internet Resources for Churches:

doodle.com (meeting setup website)

sunago.org (online church management)

tatango.com (text messaging management)

docs.google.com (collaborative document editing)

memberhub.com (group communications)

wufoo.com (form builder, useful for event sign-ups, etc.)

Worship Resources

Brian Wyatt has posted a number of the worship resources used at Alt7 here.  Thanks, Brian!

Incidentally, I have plans to use the prayer of confession from the Monday night worship service.  I’ve discovered that My City of Ruin by Bruce Springsteen also works well for the musical accompaniment.   So if the Black Eyed Peas doesn’t fit your worship venue, I’d recommend that instead.  It’s the perfect length for the confessional.  Just make sure you have someone to hit the space bar on the “amen.” screen just as he sings “rise up”.  It fits perfectly.

If you have other thoughts or resources you’d like to share, please do!

When I went into ministry, I essentially learned the language of the church as I knew it.  The language I learned was traditional.  It’s the language that our worship services have been speaking for centuries.  Call to Worship.  Call to Confession.  Scripture Readings.  Sermon.  Prayer of the People.  Offertory.  Benediction.  All of these “pieces” of a worship service occurred at a certain time, and each had a certain “sound” or “feel” to them.  They sounded like people expected them to sound.  They felt like people expected them to feel.  They were traditional, comfortable, and non-threatening.  No surprises.  The language of the church has no word for “surprise”!

But what happens when the languages of church and culture begin to diverge?  What is the church to do when the culture around it and within it begins to speak a new language?  Particularly in our digital, information-driven age the divergence can become very large, very quickly.  I’m reminded of the popular video found on youtube entitled Did You Know?:

I think most church leaders today would admit that the church generally chooses to remain static instead of adapting to a changing culture.  The oft repeated adage is that any organization must choose between deep painful change or slow painful death.  I wonder…  which has the church chosen?  My fear is that we have, in our adherence to tradition, chosen slow painful death as the culture around us changes.  Furthermore, I fear that our dying is occurring so slowly that we mistake it for living.

The reality is this: there exists in our culture an entire generation of young people for whom the primary mode of communication is electronic.  They communicate with their friends and colleagues through text messages, instant messages, myspace, twitter, and facebook.  These are languages that the church has largely ignored.  Granted, there are exceptions, but generally speaking, most mainline churches are failing to utilize all of the technology at their disposal when it comes to sharing the message and experience of Jesus.  Should the church continue this failure, it will be left speaking a language that very few people speak.

I’ve become completely convinced that a new church needs to emerge.  While I’ve never before considered myself a member of the emerging church movement, it’s now clear to me that the way we do communication, ministry, and especially worship in our mainline churches must shift.  This isn’t to say that we throw everything traditional out the window.  Tradition is of great value to the church as long as it exists as a conversation between where we have been and where we are.  There is room in our religious traditions for new elements, new understandings of how God is at work in the church and world.  The shift that must occur is not a radical overhaul of religious tradition, but rather a recasting of it that incorporates new language.

This is to say that the church must address the changing needs of our culture by becoming bilingual.  Learning a new language can be very difficult, and it takes a large amount of time.  However, speaking the language of an electronic culture now changing at increasing speed might just be the very best way we can share the message of Jesus with a world in need.  After all, at Pentecost (Acts 2) God did give birth to the church in an explosive, all-out fit of new language.

And if God did it once, maybe God can do it again.