Did your Heart twitter Last Week?

3 ways a Pastor needs to connect.

It seemed like every radio station I tuned into this past week had “social” experts bantering with the radio jockeys, imparting their wisdom on how to better connect with your spouse or your “significant other”. Valentine’s Day seems to highlight the fact we do a poor job interacting regularly with each.

As a person in ministry, how do YOU do? Our lives are so busy and we often reduce our interaction to “how’s it going?” or even a simple (and conversation-stopping) “Hey!”. Christ intended us to be better interconnected and to “bear one another’s burdens”.

I think we drop the ball. The church is full of lonely people.

The internet is also abuzz about the need for social networking. I think the epidemic of loneliness is not just in the church. It’s so widespread that the Church can be a HAVEN to the lonely by producing solutions for the heavy-hearted.

We have the answer! Or do you?

In your busy life, how do you possibly keep up with your congregation?! And how do you expect your congregation to be engaged with each other?

Enter twitter.com. First there was AOL and Friendster, Facebook, and MySpace – but they take a lot of time to keep up with. Twitter is the next generation for busy people. That would be you!

Twitter (a free service sometime referred to as micro-blogging) allows you to update little snippets of your life when it’s happening, in 140 characters or less. You choose to “follow” other people’s tweets (a lot of famous people and news sources do this) and you can reply to any tweet (yes, that’s what it’s called) that you want to. You can use almost any mobile device or computer for twitter.

Twitter can do 3 things for the Pastor and Congregation:

1. Interaction. I hear all the time that Pastors don’t “fit” into the congregation. This is a great opportunity for you to share your “regular” day with the congregation (and vice versa). It’s also a great way to introduce members to other members who are doing similar things.
2. Prayer Requests. Talk about a prayer chain! Imagine that anyone can post a tweet about a prayer request and instantly, the whole congregation will get it.
3. Announcements. Snow day? Just tweet it. Reminders for events? How about a birth or death. Yes, all these can be instantly delivered to your congregation.

Now, I could go on and on about all the other things you can do with twitter, but start to think about it and you’ll be amazed. Now, all you need to do is get your congregation to sign up. But first, take the 20 minutes and do it first! Feel free to follow me on Twitter!