Tuesday 15 June 2010

The generosity of tweeting and does this change the way I see the people of God?

So for the next few days I shall be tweeting here
http://twitter.com/Reformedcomunio.
Since the cecassembly in Lyon last year I seem to have got into tweeting as a conference event, it's quite a fun way to leave some trace of what is going on at business and discussion meetings and make it more immediate.
As a general rule to know what I am up to, you should follow the problems of travelling with one of my husband's socks by becoming my friend on facebook (I can quite understand why you might want to avoid doing this!) If you're interested in what is going on in my professional life then you can try to read between the lines at http://twitter.com/Oikoumene
As a result of all of this my own personal twitter feed has become very neglected but I suppose I sense that it is just lying there in wait for me to take it up again at some point and it does get fed by an RSS feed from my blog here.
Setting up the twitter feed for the new Reformed Communion today I thought about what an extraoridnarily generous medium twitter is. People follow you and so you follow them. Trawling through potential people to follow I realised that one of the things about social networking like this is that you don't just want to follow "people like yourself". Of course any organisation such as the WCRC has a very diverse identity anyway so it's important to be generous with your friendship and followers, it pushes against the "holy huddle" idea of what church and being a follower of Jesus is all about.
Spending some time in the diversity of the Reformed family as opposed to the wider ecumenical family makes me realise how fuzzy the boundaries and limits between our supposed denominations and tradtions often are. More evangelical and Pentecostal ways of celebrating worship are influencing liberal and traditional churches, we are learning to live together, to be one in ways I would not have believed possible even of myself 25 years ago. Perhaps to "be one" generosity towards the other is a key virtue to practise. Generosity changes the giver and the receiver, it's a gift of the spirit. Now I suppose I'd better go and tweet that - but on which channel?

2 Comments:

janetlees said...

S Twitter the new discipleship metaphor - discuss? Or perhaps just Tweet.

Jane said...

I know it's a great discipline actually ...