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 Telling the Christmas Story in 140 Characters or Less
Belchertown UCC Uses Twitter to Get the Word Out
by Marlene Gasdia-Cochrane, Editor
"ADVENT STORY PT 1. JOE: Gotta go pay taxes. C'mon Mary, let's pack the donkey and head to Bethlehem. Lousy timing. Bumpy ride 4 mom2be."
How can you tell the Christmas story in 140 characters or less? Rev. Todd Farnsworth, Pastor of Belchertown United Church of Christ, found a creative way to do just that.
Farnsworth has taken advantage of one of the latest social networking tools, Twitter, to get out the story of Advent. Twitter is a social networking and microblogging service that allows you to answer the question, "What are you doing?" by sending short text messages 140 characters in length, called "tweets," to your friends, or "followers."
During this Advent season, Farnsworth has been tweeting his followers every day. Since tweets are limited to 140 characters, the messages have to be simple, but creative. Farnsworth created several tweeters, including Joseph ('JOE'), MARY, and MAGI 1, 2, and 3 and then gave a modern twist to the classic story by tweeting in modern 'techno' language. For example, I'm sure you can guess that the 'mom2be' in the tweet above is Mary.
"I got the idea when I bought an Advent calendar for Sunday School," said Farnsworth. "The calendar tells just a small bit of the story each day. With Twitter, at some point during each day of Advent a new chunk of the Christmas story comes flying into people's phones and computers. With a modern twist and short messages, people are getting the basics so they think about the story as it unfolds."
Farnsworth got the word out about his tweets by promoting it in the church newsletters, bulletins, and on the church Facebook page. Currently he has about 15 followers, but believes his tweets are being retweeted (forwarded to others). One family, who recently started coming to the church, told Farnsworth that they receive his tweets and enjoy reading them. The mom, who receives the tweets via her phone, shares the messages with her two boys. And they can't wait to see what happens next. "It's just another way to communicate," Farnsworth said. He hopes that followers will become hooked and stay on for other church-related items like prayer concerns.
"The angels in the Bible are like Twitter," said Farnsworth. "They went about sending out one simple message at a time."
Rev. Todd Farnsworth can be reached at belchertownUCC@yahoo.com or at the church office at 413-323-7442. Follow him on twitter at http://twitter.com/BUCCBUZZ or on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/belchertown.ucc
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"Source: Massachusetts Conference, United Church of Christ, www.macucc.org/spotlight" |
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