The Twurch of England's reformation

Overnight the Twurch of England Web site briefly became a promotional for British Conservative Party Parliamentary Candidate for Harlow, Robert Halfon. DNS redirect strangeness, we are told. And fixed.

Earlier, however, It is as The Church Mouse (creator of the site) explained, it was a service which "allows you to follow the conversation in real time" of CofE "Archbishops, Bishops and Clergy on twitter." Using twitter's list capabilities, as you see at right. (No laity, and that's something of an issue, as you will see below.)

The Mouse offers monthly rankings of the Top 20 twittering bishops and clergy in the CofE from the Twurch of England. The site offers a convenient widget. There is other useful information there. All very nice indeed.

Yes, the Twurch of England has apparently been quite well-received, save with one widely-adopted quibble from David Walker:

The Twurch of England is the Church of England on Twitter. The bishops, the clergy, and the… hang on… it’s only the bishops and the clergy! The laity (ordinary people) are nowhere to be found. This is an unjust state of affairs which sends out the message that the ordinary people are not as important as the bishops and clergy. Being mildly deeply upset about this I started a ‘Reform the Twurch’ campaign yesterday – you can read all of the tweets on the subject via the hashtag #reformthetwurch. It was great fun and a most creative protest. Proceedings were conducted calmly and peacefully, and from time to time nuns came out and brought us tea.

. . .

My challenges to Twurch administrators (The Church Moose and Peter O) are as follows:

1) First of all I think you really need to include CofE laity if you are to go on calling it the Twurch of England. It’s OK, there aren’t many of us and we’re declining in number all the time.

2) Secondly, I understand that you may want to restrict membership of the Twurch of England to members of the Church of England. However, if you don’t find a way to include the wider groups of people (Anglicans, UK Christians) in some way I suspect someone else will. There is an opportunity for a creative individual to form the Anglican Twitter community or the Christian Twitter community, and sooner or later someone will do so.

Commenter Ann Fontaine at The Lead at Episcopal Cafe summed up with:

Love Tweeting clergy - twergy-- from the comments. Are there also twishops? but what kind of church has no laity? oh right a dead one.

Which helps explain why there is plenty of twitter traffic tagged #reformthetwurch.
Will Mouse call a Council of the Twurch?

And see to restoration of the former site? We do hope so.

TweetTheExodus

Follow the Exodus from Egypt one tweet at a time. "The story comes to life" March 16-29, at @TweetTheExodus. This corresponds to Rosh Chodesh Nisan. It culminates with the crossing of the Red Sea. Passover begins at sundown on March 29.

Rabbi Oren Hayon explains via Facebook that, "collaborating with Jewish professionals around the country, all of whom will play the part of one of the Exodus’s major characters, we will create an experience that allows our followers to reenact this inspiring story in totally new ways."

Xmas wasn't late or last

Other Mashable Christmas graphs.

Discovered State Baptist Convention twitter hash tags

Baptist Hashtags:

• Alabama Baptist State Convention twitter hash tag: #absc09
• Florida Baptist State Convention twitter hash tag: #fbc09
• Kentucky Baptist State Convention annual meeting twitter hash tag: #kbc09.
• Baptist State Convention of North Carolina twitter hash tag: #bscnc09.
• Baptist General Convention of Oklahoma twitter hash tag: #bgco09
• Tennessee Baptist Convention twitter hash tag #tbc2009
• Louisiana Baptist Convention Pastors Conference twitter hash tag: #LBC
• Georgia Baptist Convention twitter hash tag: #GBC
• For general comment on things Baptist, the most commonly used hash tag is #baptist.
• For Southern Baptist Convention issues the most reliable hash tag is #SBC.
• For Southern Baptist Convention Great Commission Resurgence issues the most frequently used hash tag is #GCR.

Do you see others?

Let us know.

No twitter- or site-links for the twitter-Bible?

Christian Post tells us “And God Decided to Chill,” is a "twitter Bible" without linking to the German-language www.evangelisch.de [German][English translation] where it originated.

And without linking to any of the still-available-online tweets [German][English translation] from which the on-paper book was created.

Had Michelle A. Vu's story been published exclusively on paper, there would have been less with which to quarrel:

Formally named "And God Decided to Chill," the German language book is the compilation of tweets by more than 3,000 German Christians who participated in the church project earlier this year.
In honor of the Pentecost holiday, German Christians used the micro-blogging service Twitter to summarize 3,906 Bible sections into 140 character messages, according to Berlin-based newspaper “The Local.” Though the project was scheduled for May 20-30, it was completed 37 hours ahead of schedule and achieved a world record.

Going to an April story at Vu's also unlinked-to source, Ecumenical News International, we learn how the date of the effort was chosen and that it was a complex, carefully planned undertaking:

The project aims to publish the Bible in a shortened, micro-blog form on 24 May, the final day of the once-every-two years German Protestant Convention known as the Kirchentag, which attracts tens of thousands of participants as well as political leaders from Germany and beyond.
...
Theologians are busy dividing the Bible into 3000 sections that will need to be summarised as tweets. Volunteers will then distribute flyers to the expected tens of thousands of Kirchentag visitors listing the Bible verses to be tweeted.

About that world record - what world record? One is claimed but never explained in the stories we unearthed.

Well, hope this helps.

Got the twitter religion?

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Tweetly telling the Vatican what not to give up for Lent

London Times Religion Correspondent Ruth Gledhill tells us, "The Roman Catholic Church in Italy wants us to give up texting, Tweeting and other tecchie messaging services for Lent," and she says, er, no.

Exactly the wrong move.

Had the Vatican been online reading blogs, using Twitter and the like, there would have been no historic row over Bishop Williamson's past because "Italian blogs had been writing about it, The Catholic Herald in England had covered it and I had blogged and reported it extensively for The Times."

No, it, she says, " is not texting they should be giving up, but Luddism."

Amen?

Baptist Press kicks the hornets' nest

The Southern Baptist Convention's (SBC) Baptist Press (BP) news service stepped on the heels of an enthusiastically received Feb. 6 appearance in North Carolina by Mark Driscoll. They published a critical piece on Feb. 11, while the bloom of that appearance was still on the rose.

The story was "assembled" from a Jan. 9 New York Times Magazine article about the dynamic Seattle pastor, other previously published reactions and some original quotes.

Mark Driscoll

Presented to an audience rich in recently inspired Driscoll enthusiasts under the headline Driscoll's vulgarity draws media attention, it was the equivalent of kicking a hornets' nest.

Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary (SEBTS), which hosted the Feb. 6/7 conference where Discoll spoke, blogged disappointment with the "inaccurate content and harsh tone" of the article.

Ed Stetzer of the SBC's Lifeway Research stepped forward to obliquely defend "my friend Mark Driscoll" from unfortunate coverage in general (BP was mentioned only in comments by others).

Jonathan Merritt was less gentle in his North Carolina Biblical Recorder op-ed piece Unfair, Unbalanced, and Unacceptable. He blistered BP, and also recalled how release of the Southern Baptist Environment and Climate Initiative (SBECI) in March, 2008, drew immediate reaction from BP:

“Less than 24 hours after the story appeared in national media, Baptist Press had a story distancing the denomination from the document,” the Christian Index reported. They went on to note that Baptist Press “generated an additional 13 stories over the next 8 publishing days. The majority of those took issue with the topic. . . .” During this time, I left multiple voice mails and sent several emails to BP Editor Will Hall to clarify journalistic inaccuracies an offer the other side of the story, but I received no reply.

"No reply," yet one of the most redeeming values of good American news journalism is communication with the subjects of stories and correction of errors and omissions.

Reply is a newsroom requirement, like the correction of errors.

"No reply" is not an option.

Everyone trained in the field knows that. And experience teaches that prompt reply, and appropriate corrective response when one errs, are both required to protect one's reputation for quality and win community loyalty.

BP appears to have neither replied nor made satisfactory corrections in the earlier case cited by Meritt, and made some changes but offered little response to the Driscoll matter.

Corrective passion flowed into blogs and environments like and including twitter, as it would have to some degree no matter how BP responded. Snowballing blog commentary is summarized by Timmy Brister's' annotated list of selected links.

Amid the fire and brimstone, we did find one comment in defense of BP.

From this old newspaperman's point of view, the story doesn't look malicious, as some seem to us to have implied by calling it a "hit job." Just incomplete and outdated by facts immediately available to both an important part of the audience and perhaps, with some effort, available to the author.

As a result, a vocal segment of the audience felt poorly served. In our opinion, it was, as usually happens with dated, incomplete stories.

In an environment rich in other sources of information, the audience's protest will be corrective. In part because, as they demonstrated, they're no longer simply the audience. They also publish.