Holy Twitter! They're tweeting from the pews

Kicked out for tweeting
Not all churches are becoming Twitter-vangelists overnight, though.

Alexis Martin Neely, a 35-year-old entrepreneur from Hermosa Beach, Calif., says that she was recently kicked out of her church for tweeting.

“I was in the back of the sanctuary tweeting the sermon and an usher came over and told me I couldn’t do that there,” says Neely, who attends the Agape International Spiritual Church. “They thought I was violating the copyright, like I was recording it somehow. I got the feeling they didn’t understand what Twitter was.”

She’s since gotten the go-ahead to live-tweet all her pastor's sermons, but even with the blessing of clergy, some people feel church is where you connect with your maker, not your friends or followers.

“I’m on Twitter and Facebook and I embrace technology every day, but there are places where you need space and one of those places is your church or temple,” says Mina Sirkin, a 42-year-old estate planning lawyer from Woodland Hills, Calif.

“If you’re tweeting away on your cell phone, it not only takes away from your personal presence in that moment, where you’re connecting with your creator, it takes away something from the people sitting around you, too.”

Alan Byrd, a 39-year-old marketing and PR entrepreneur from Apopka, Fla., says his tweets during church have raised a few eyebrows, but he feels getting the word out during that moment of inspiration takes precedence over everything.

“My wife doesn’t approve of my tweeting in church and at a prayer breakfast, I’ve had people say ‘You’ve got to learn to put your phone away, Alan,’ ” he says. “But the way I look at it, if two people out of my 2,000 followers have a closer relationship with God because of it, isn’t that what we’re supposed to be doing?”

Concern over inappropriate tweets
While some people worry that Twitter is alienating certain members of the congregation and others praise the increased outreach capability, there’s a third aspect to Twitter that some find disconcerting: the medium’s lack of control.

Kevin Joyce says that while he’s not concerned about someone posting inappropriate comments during one of his church’s live Twitter streams, others have raised the issue.

“People will ask me ‘What if someone says something bad? What if they say the F-word and it’s right there on the screen for everyone to read?’” he says. “Potentially it could happen, but it doesn’t worry me. If they’re part of our church and they do that, we can help them through that. And if they’re not a part of the church and just coming to a Sunday service to yank my chain, I’m not going to worry about it.”

Unfortunately, chain yankers (or “griefers,” as social media expert Kim Gregson calls them) can sometimes throw a monkey wrench into a connected congregation.

“There are people who just get pleasure out of messing you up,” says Gregson, who’s studied various forms of social media, including the online virtual world of Second Life.

“We’ve seen that in Second Life where someone will show up at a Muslim service as a giant pig or something. If churches are having a live Twitter feed, there is a potential for them to be visited by griefers. Someone could get on and pose as Satan or tweet ‘This is God and I hate you.’ ”

While the potential for both griefers and global outreach are there, it’s probably best to remember programs such as Twitter, are, well, newly christened. Sorting out the benefits — and the bugs — is still, as the Rev. Schenck of New York says, a “work in progress for all of us.”

“I think that all clergy are trying to determine the right balance as well as the boundaries and limitations of social media,” he says. “But for me, the Christian faith is all about connectivity. There’s no reason to think that Jesus wouldn’t have Facebooked or twittered if he came into the world now. Can you imagine his killer status updates? ‘Jesus is walking on water and freaking out his disciples.’ ”

Diane Mapes is a Seattle freelance writer and author of "How to Date in a Post-Dating World." She can be reached via her Web site, dianemapes.net.

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