» NY Times: Our Father, Lead Us to Tweet, and Forgive the Trespassers

"If total control is what you want, social media will frustrate you," he said, reprising his advice to the clergy. "But the trade-off is the ability to hear and learn, reach out in new directions." Many clerics, desperate to connect with young people, have been like radio dispatchers using the wrong bandwidth, he said. "The young don't do e-mail anymore," he said. "They do Facebook."

Evangelical Christian ministers were among the earliest Web networkers, and today, popular preachers like Rick Warren and Joel Osteen have thousands of followers on Twitter. At Christ Tabernacle Church in Queens, Pastor Adam Durso and his brother Chris, the youth director, keep in contact with their flock, sometimes hourly, on a half-dozen social media sites.

Leaders in other faiths are catching on, but moving slowly, said Monique Cuvelier, a Web consultant in Boston who attributes some of the resistance to the conservatism of any established institution, and some to a sense of privacy: Gossiping about the rabbi's wife may be common in temple parking lots, "but having it end up on the Internet -- that freaks some people out," she said.

There's some interesting tidbits in this story about how people of other faiths view the openness of social media like twitter. It definitely seems as if evangelical Christianity is more inclined to take a favorable view towards it. And (possibly) not just due to some notable individuals using twitter.

I'm on twitter, but I don't claim to be enamored with it. Something about limiting myself to 140 characters just seems so ... limiting. Besides, I prefer to think in paragraph form. In short, don't expect any grand twittering on my part. If I'm in a groove with the keyboard, the blog is always my preferred medium.

Twitter's use to me is the ability to keep dibs on a few hundred things at a time. And if the world blows up, chances are that I'll not go hours without knowing about it. Or, in the case of last night, seeing Duncan Dodds tweeting from Australia and being reminded by Joel's tweet-team to watch the service.

I'm not sure what to make of the more adventurous twitter usage by other churches. I remember when television shows started experimenting with a crawling feed of user comments from the internet in the late 90s. It wasn't pretty then and one of the examples in this Times story serves as a reminder of that. Time'll tell, I suppose, whether there's useful and productive fit for it in ministry use.

Sidenote: The Lakewood Church twitter experiment is still a work in progress it seems.