What’s the difference between bird flu and swine flu? For bird flu you need “tweetment.” For “swine flu” you need “oinkment.”
Bad joke. But I want to talk about “tweetments.”
The technical term, though it hardly sounds technical, is “tweets.” I’m talking about the short messages from one of the fastest growing social media – “Twitter.”
Many of you need no introduction. A few may need some help, so here’s the brief explanation. Twitter allows a sender to communicate to the cell phones, Facebook pages, and other electronic media of an unlimited number of friends, enemies, and other acquaintances. The “tweet” works like a text message, which means no long diatribes, no pictures, etc. Just quick updates – 140 characters max.
Think of my tweets as “Bob’s Breaking News.”
I’ll use Twitter mostly for Corinth news – a new baby, a death, an timely reminder, a critical prayer request, maybe a construction update, and so forth. Sometimes it might be about the UCC or Faithful & Welcoming Churches. During this week when we remember the 20th anniversary of Hurricane Hugo, I’m thinking tweets might be very helpful in an emergency situation. I can also quickly announce weather-related cancellations.
Don’t expect much personal stuff in my tweets – though I might pass on really important things. Mostly I’ll tweet ministry news.
The Bible is full of illustrations and even imperatives about spreading news. It’s always been human nature to want to get the word out – especially when the word is good news or important news. I love the story in 2 Kings 9 (during the time of Elisha) when four lepers decided that surrendering to an invading army of Arameans was a better risk than certain starvation if they waited on food from besieged Jerusalem. But the angel of the Lord had frightened away the Arameans, and the lepers found unimaginable booty.
Their response? “This news is too good for just us. We’ve got to let people know.” Imagine if they’d have been able to send a tweet.
So…if you want the latest updates from Pastor Bob, go to www.twitter.com, sign up (if you haven’t already – it’s free), and say you want to follow “corinthpastor”. Then watch for my tweets.
News might be breaking any moment! If you were the first to know, wouldn’t that be tweet?