Oh Frank, surely you jest!  LOL.  It’s been incredibly hard to find churches that even effectively allow their members to blog together (in an aggregated stream), much less tweet together.

A.  That would mean a loss of control over the church microphone, so to speak.  That microphone should be reserved strictly for a controlled set of announcements, music, prayers & lecturing.

B.  It would distort our definition of ‘church’… as our buildings & stadiums where we gather on Sundays (only).  What you’re suggesting might somehow give people a wrong idea that the Church is an aggregation of the children of God.

C.  Aggregating the important daily activities of all our members’ lives would create a tremendous quantity of ‘noise’ on the channel.  If we got invested in all their lives, it would distract from our available time for listening to the talking-heads on CNN, or our football games, weather reports, etc.  Think member-spam.  Lord know we already have enough distractions even in our own households, with wives & kids wanting our attention when there’s something more important on tv.

D.  And over time, wouldn’t all this volume of activity tend to downsize our churches?  After all, how could a person possibly keep up with all those voices?  We could never grow to be a stadium-sized church if we have to be attentive to each & every person.  Why the biggest we’d ever grow to be might only be the size of the team on the field.  Where would our spectators ‘worship’? 

And lastly…

E.  After all, that’s why we use a microphone in the first place—see item A above.

Frank,

Just read this post.  I am lead pastor at a church in Hot Springs, Arkansas and a student at Regent University School of Divinity.  Through one of my classes at Regent I began to get very curious about the possibility of leveraging Web 2.0 technologies to build community as well as evangelize.

One of the things we are doing is utilizing Twitter.  I have encouraged people in our congregation to Twitter the sermons and the results have been fantastic.  It is amazing what community can be built around 140 character micro-blogs! 

We are currently in the process of renovating our website around web 2.0 including a Twitter feed using hashtags, Flickr, and online community like myspace.  As the previous comment stated, this certainly does cause us to share the church microphone.  But our goal is interconnectedness.  We are rethinking church and I am excited about the possibilities.

Hi Ben! Thanks for commenting. I just started following you on Twitter so it will be good to make the connection on a more regular basis.

I’m curious as to how you’re using hashtags. Are you using them to, in fact, create a congregational twitter stream? If so, what has been the uptake in your congregation?

I’m working with a men’s conference on web strategy. Their members are fairly spread out geographically and it has been suggested that Twitter might be a good way to keep the members in touch with events in the lives of conference participants. I’m fairly new to Twitter and even newer to hashtags (just found out about them, oh maybe two minutes ago when I read your comment!), but I’m wondering how effective it’s been for you since it depends on members of the congregation remembering to use them.

Thanks again for the comment - very intriguing!

Frank

Thanks for you reply, Frank.  Don’t have a huge number of people to talk to about this.

We haven’t actually rolled out the hashtag yet.  As I stated in the post, we are in the process of renovating our website to utilize multiple web 2.0 technologies including blogging, online community (something like Unifyer), Flickr, and Twitter.

Our plan for Twitter is to create a hashtag like #rolchurch which we will have our Twitterers use when they twitter my sermons or just in general anything that is church related - testimonies, prayer requests, etc.  The hashtag can be captured via RSS through a widget on our website to help create a “buzz” and something of interest for people to come back and check out. 

Twitter has been a powerful community builder and I am seeing people of different ages getting into it.  I don’t think I will have any problem getting our folks to add the hashtag when we roll it out.  Hopefully the new site will be fully functional by sometime in December.  Be watching for me to mention it on Twitter.

Stay in touch!