If you liked “Podcasting Church,” wait until you read “Tweeting Church”

Today is day three of writing on my new book “Tweeting Church.” It’s so much easier to write a book when you know you can write one. Here’s the rough draft (not even corrected for grammar or punctuation) of the introduction:

Tweeting Church—Introduction

There’s a universal history in our world, one in which large players make aggressive moves on the world stage. There’s also a much smaller history. It makes up the lives of each an every person. Until recently, our best measure of personal history was personal writings in letters and journals. With the advent of the internet, that’s changed. Now I can determine where I was years ago and what I did.
It was March 25th, 2007. I was working in downtown Lexington, tearing down the audio/video equipment that the company I worked for had loaned to the hotel that housed our offices. It required little brain power to unplug cables, so I was doing what I tend to do in such situations; I was listening to a podcast. I remember being excited to hear an interview with the founder of Odeo, a service that specialized in aggregating podcasts.
Leo Laporte and Amber MacArthur were asking him questions and the subject of his latest project came up—Twitter. I’d never heard of such a thing, but I was intrigued. They talked about a simple service that allowed people to exchange messages about what they were doing. It could be done through text, but also online. The limit was 140 characters.
I don’t know why, but I signed up immediately. I was the 2,147,401st user (by comparison, an account I created last month was the 331,120,652nd account). I found it oddly compelling to share what was going on in my life. Nearly a month later I released an episode of my podcast “Tech, No Babel” where I talked about it. I told my listeners about it and encouraged them to join, but I didn’t get why I liked it until much later.
There were two situations that marked why I liked the system. The first was a slow realization, the second came much more quickly. I began to notice that my behavior was changing. I wasn’t searching the internet for links and stories that interested me, they were just coming my way automatically. I just had to see and click. I was learning more and more, but I didn’t have to seek out the knowledge; it came to me.
I’d gotten links and had interactions for years, but June 25, 2009 I started to see another piece of the value of value of Twitter. I was working for a whole-house audio/video company doing tech support. To balance the boredom of saying the same thing day after day, I had a twitter client loaded in the lower right hand corner of my screen. I started to see discussions of Michael Jackson amongst the 200+ people I followed. Soon it became clear that the reason was that he’d died.
Jackson wasn’t an old man when he died and wasn’t known of a partying lifestyle. He was known to be odd, but odd isn’t often deadly, so I was surprised. As the story developed, it looked to be more and more true. Michael Jackson was dead and I’d learned about it from twitter.
A lot of tools become valuable not because of their ability to do everything, but because of their limitations. To me, a good tweet is like poetry. The gifted tweep (twitter user) can convey a lot of information in those 140 characters. Often, tweets that exceed the limit are pointless, rambling things which interest only the writer. Like a sonnet, which is limited to 14 lines and a certain rhyme-scheme, or a haiku which contains precisely three lines of 5, 7, and 5 syllables each, a good tweep breaks the 140 character rule rarely and only when absolutely necessary.
Some find this limitation constricting, but I find it liberating. I need not create 150 page book for it to be shared on twitter. A simple tweet like “I’ve just written the introduction to ‘Tweeting Church.’” Can speak volumes about what’s going on in a life. I can only read part of a book or two each day. I can read a few blogs or several entries in an online forum, but I can read hundreds if not thousands of tweets each day. I can follow celebrities, people famous in niches, individuals I’ll never meet, and my best friends. It’s like people-watching.
As someone who prays often, I can used twitter as a way to pray for a young singer who is a little too famous for someone who’s not legally allowed to purchase alcohol yet. I can pray for a pastor struggling with opposition to the message of hope he’s trying to spread, half a world away. I can pray for a husband in South Carolina who loves his wife, but isn’t sure how long he can stay married when she won’t let him make love to her. I can pray for my friend John whose baby daughter is having trouble keeping food down. I can know and participate in the lives of others in ways that only God could just a few years ago. I see it as an opportunity to help like my daughters help me when I do things. I could do it faster myself, but my “help” builds my relationship with Jesus just as their help builds the father-daughter relationship.
Twitter is nothing more than a tool. It can just as easily spread random spam links to porn as it can call someone to selfless actions which will eventually save lives. How we use it illuminates what we consider most important and shows what makes our hearts beat in excitement.