Twitter of Faith

Religion Dispatches has an interesting piece entitled "Twitter of Faith: Microblogging the Divine." The piece considers how some religious groups are utilizing twitter, especially to post prayer requests. Here is an excerpt from the piece:

To this point, one pastor has blogged about how he had prayed about a prayer request that he had received on Twitter, and in turn retweeted the message to everyone who followed him on Twitter. The use of Twitter is highly intertwined with the use of other social media. Microblogging and blogging might well evolve into large-scale support networks for mobilizing churches and building relationships. Emerging research points to this pattern of weaving online and offline religious "bonding social capital" among networked believers. Microblogging may have positive and negative implications for religious organizations as it can lead to the strengthening or weakening of existing relational links.

It will be interesting to see how Twitter and other new technologies develop, and hopefully churches will keep up with the changes in order to improve ministry efforts.