As a ministry leader, you have so many demands on your time, sometimes close to 24/7. Honestly, sometimes a distraction here or there can be welcome and the internet alone is often distraction enough. A specific distraction on the internet is Twitter. Twitter is a social networking site that allows you to say whatever you want to say in 140 characters or less. You can even have a conversation with someone or you can blast your message out to just anyone or maybe to a specific group. There are many different ways to tweet and most of these different ways do very little to add value to your life.
One thing I have learned, both from a ministry perspective and from an online perspective, is to ask myself the question
It's kind of an open ended question but that is intentional and it goes both ways. Is it adding value to me and is it adding value to my audience? Your audience could be readers of your blog, readers of your tweets, other ministry leaders, church members etc. Twitter is something that can seriously add value, both to you and to others but that takes a lot of work. It is much easier to waste your time tweeting meaningless tweets and reading meaningless tweets.
If you are easily distracted, like so many of us are, I would be very careful about entering into this arena. At the same time, I would challenge you to give it a try and ease into it slowly.
Hello, My name is @jimwalton and I am a twitterer. For the record, I was an early adopter and I started Twittering way back in 2007. In that 2 1/2 year period, I have logged over 15,000 tweets, which I find hard to believe. Sadly, many of those probably fall into the pointless babble category, but I think lately, I try to resist the urge to tweet just to tweet. I know for a fact that buried within those 15,000+ tweets are many meaningful conversations, with true friends, some of whom I only know on Twitter. A few of the best friendships I have ever known have developed as a result of Twitter and these are friends in real life (IRL) now. There are also so many fellow leaders in ministry that I have been able to connect with and learn from here on Twitter. For me, Twitter is extremely valuable but I still need to be aware of the time I spend trying to keep up with it and I need to always ask myself if I am adding value.
Twitter can add tremendous value to your life and your ministry but it can easily simply be a distraction and a time-waster if you are not careful.
Consider yourself forewarned!
Jim Walton with ChurchTechMatters and JimWalton.org and of course @JimWalton
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