 |
 |
|
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
|
||
|
|
|
 |
|
|
||
| The Twittering Preacher The culture is all a-twitter — and has been for some time — with Twitter.com and twittering. Actually tweeting. When you pose a question on Twitter you are posting a tweet. You are not twitting, nor are you a twit; you are tweeting. Preachers are not twits; nor are they tweets. They are Twitterers. Oh my. Let me continue. A British university is offering a master’s degree in Facebook, MySpace and Twitter, but it will cost students more than $6,200. “For $6,275 Birmingham City University in the U.K. will teach students how to blog, set up podcasts and make the most of the social media Web sites for marketing.” Can’t most seventh-graders do all that by themselves? Just to review, Twitter is a service for friends, family and co-workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: “What are you doing?” Another source describes Twitter as a social networking and micro-blogging service that allows you to answer the question “What are you doing?” by sending short text messages 140 characters in length, called “tweets,” to your friends, or “followers.” The short format of the tweet is a defining characteristic of the service, allowing informal collaboration and quick information sharing that provides relief from rising e-mail and IM fatigue. Twittering is also a less gated method of communication: You can share information with people that you wouldn’t normally exchange e-mail or IM messages with, opening up your circle of contacts to an ever-growing community of like-minded people. And if you don’t have time to do this tweeting yourself, you can jump in on the new trend of “ghost Twittering.” The New York Times carried an article about it last spring. You pay other people to update your Twitter account on your behalf. This “ghostwriter” of tweets thus becomes a “ghost Twitterer.” I will get to the notion of how a preacher might become a Twittering preacher, but for a moment, let’s review the enormous task that faces the preacher Sunday after Sunday. Right off the bat, you have a situation in which the preacher is asked to participate in a hermeneutical event that involves interpreting an ancient text (almost 2,000 years old) for a postmodern audience. If you don’t understand how formidable this is, a) you’ve never actually preached a sermon, or b) you might think about how you would, for example, deliver a homily that interpreted the meaning of Shakespeare’s Corialanus, or Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy, or Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics to an audience that can’t wait to power up their iPhones after church and SM or IM their friends and family. This is a huge challenge for every preacher. Second, the preacher these days is preaching to an audience mired in tough economic times. In what is now acknowledged as a deep recession, people have been laid off, lost their pensions, watched their earning power decline, tapped into their savings. They come to church with high expectations: They expect the preacher will have some words of hope and comfort. Third, the preacher is preaching in a culture that is experiencing a crisis of faith. Cynicism abounds. The culture is openly hostile to Christianity. In Britain, people disillusioned with what they describe as institutional religion are signing certificates of “de-baptism,” renouncing the sacred rite by which they had once self-identified as followers of Jesus. Fourth, the preacher is asked to deliver whatever message of hope, consolation and biblical interpretation he or she can by using a delivery method that is older than dirt. Where else would we expect a postmodern, 21st-century audience to sit on their hands and listen to a univocal message delivered by a speaker from a podium, chair or platform. Oral proclamation is not the preferred delivery method for dissemination of news, good, bad or otherwise these days. Although we are described as “people of the Word,” today the words are disappearing. The printed page is disappearing. Newspapers all over America are disappearing. Amazon’s hottest new product is Kindle, a device that allows one to read words on an electronic device. Listening to a sermon is not necessarily the best way to proclaim the good news. Granted, this kind of communication can still be found in large university lecture halls, but even these are disappearing, and moreover, students (or parents) are paying the professors to provide this education, attendance is usually compulsory, it is for a limited time (four-year programs) and once you’re in graduate school, the course work is usually done in group seminars, not lecture halls. Fifth, the preacher is facing an audience with the attention span of a 3-year-old. The decline of our attention span has been the topic of studies for the past 40 years now. Finally, there are Aristotle’s famous tripartite categories for rhetorical greatness: logos, pathos and ethos. The preacher is required to offer a message that a) is logically coherent, a discourse that makes a compelling case, b) moves a person to action through an appeal to the emotions, and c) is presented by someone who can be trusted, someone whose life legitimizes the message, i.e, the preacher must himself (or herself) be considered a trustworthy source. Given the clergy scandals of the last 25 years, this is an increasingly difficult card to play. While clergy used to be universally respected, one poll not long ago had clergy respect right below politicians and — fortunately — above prostitutes. John Stott, in his book Between Two Worlds: The Challenge of Preaching Today acknowledges some of these problems. To minimize them, he says, the preacher must listen to the audience, listen to the people and be in conversation with them about the difficult questions of life. The preacher must position himself to know what is going on in their heads and hearts, so that in the preaching event itself, a real-life connection can be forged. Which brings us back to the Twitter phenomenon, just one more platform in the huge growth of social media. We may not like it, but although we’re preaching on Sunday, we better be tweeting on Monday. I mean this as a metaphor, sort of. Get on Facebook. Get a Twitter account. Learn how to text. In other words, be in a conversational mode with the congregation throughout the week. Let them know that when you ask them for 20 minutes of their time on Sunday morning as you speak to them, this is a request you make only because throughout the week you have been speaking with them. I get text messages all the time from my pastor. And e-mails. Phone calls. And he has a Facebook profile. I know the guy. And when he preaches on Sunday, well — the “sermon” as a delivery method may be horribly antiquated, a medieval relic that creaks and groans — I am more than willing to give him my attention. I know the man. And he knows me.
|
|
|
|
© 2010 COMMUNICATION RESOURCES, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED PowerPoint® is a registered trademark of Microsoft Corporation. |