Twittering in Church, with the Pastor’s O.K.

John Voelz isn’t trying to brag, but it’s fair to say he was down with Twitter before most people knew it was a proper noun. Last year the 41-year-old pastor was tweeting at a conference outside Nashville about ways to make the church experience more creative–ways, as Voelz put it, to “make it not suck”–when suddenly he hit on the solution: Twitter.

He and David McDonald, the other senior pastor at Westwinds Community Church in Jackson, Mich., spent two weeks teaching their congregation how to use the microblogging site, which challenges users to be profound in 140 characters or less. They upped the bandwidth in the auditorium and urged everyone to bring his or her laptop, iPhone or BlackBerry to the training sessions.

As expected, there was plenty of blather flashing across the video screens, Ã la “Nice shirt JVo.” But there was heartfelt stuff too. “I have a hard time recognizing God in the middle of everything.” “The more I press in to Him, the more He presses me out to be useful.” “Sometimes healing is painful.”

There’s a time and place for technology, and most houses of worship say it’s not at morning Mass. However, a small but growing number of churches around the country are following Voelz’s lead and encouraging worshippers to integrate text-messaging into their relationship with God.

In Seattle, Mars Hill churchgoers regularly tweet throughout the service. In New York City, Trinity Wall Street Church marked Good Friday by tweeting the Passion play, detailing the stages of Jesus’ crucifixion in short bursts. At Next Level Church, outside Charlotte, N.C., pastor Todd Hahn prefaced his Easter Sunday sermon by saying, “I hope many of you are tweeting this morning about your experience with God.” Why tempt people with short attention spans with such distractions? Because Twitter is hot and because it can help keep wandering minds thinking about spirituality. “It’s a huge responsibility of a church to leverage whatever’s going on in the broader culture to connect people to God and to each other,” Hahn says.

The trend has its critics, including some young parishioners. At first, Katrina Cordova, 22, a Westwinds member who is studying to be a teacher, thought Twittering in church seemed “kind of dumb,” and she still finds it distracting, if not impossible, to text and pray simultaneously. But Twitter’s haiku-like banter has led her to meet lots of people in the 900-member congregation. “Feeling like I really belong to a church helps me in my relationship with God,” she says.

If worship is about creating community, Twitter is an undeniably useful tool. At Westwinds, people can ask questions about the sermon that the pastors will answer later or that another congregant may offer insights about in real time. Some use Twitter to take notes, rather than scribbling on programs that are easily misplaced. Often tweets are pastor-directed, with McDonald preaching while Voelz taps out, “In what way do you feel the spirit of God moving within you?” Discuss.

Since last June, there have been at least a dozen “Twitter Sundays” at Westwinds, but its 150 or so Twitterers are free to tweet at any time, at any service, whenever the spirit moves them.

The same rules apply at Next Level, where pastor Hahn headed straight to his office to log on as soon as the first Twitterfest ended in April. Punching in “nextlevel” in Twitter’s search function, he scrolled through such comments as “nothing u do 4 the lord is in vain” and “I think my thumbs are going to be sore.”

Next Level has no plans to make Twitter a formal part of each week’s service, but Hahn has told parishioners that “if God leads you to continue this as a form of worship, by all means do it.” Robbie McLaughlin took him up on it. The 23-year-old graphic designer Twittered the Sunday after Easter and intends to do it again. He says it helps him to see other people’s spiritual experiences during the service.

Though Twittering congregations are still a quirky minority, Voelz says he gets at least five e-mails a week from strangers inquiring how to launch Twitter in their churches. How did you rig the screen resolution so people could read the tweets? How did members react? And, not surprisingly: Got any tips to persuade church leadership this is way cool?