Rev. Naomi King

There are so many marvelous inexpensive or free social media tools that take us out of our religious institutions and grant us the chance of interacting with people in the far wider sphere of the internet. That openness marks a dramatic change in how some religious leaders think of who their congregation is – taking that sense way past an official membership list connected to a building. That openness gives people seeking to understand a faith or seeking to reconnect to a faith or needing the flexibility of connecting with their faith from home or on the road many new ways to grow in faith. Living faith so openly can feel risky for some, but there are many more folk who are yearning for that chance to live faith openly and nurture community digitally.

One free tool that is ideal for faith formation on line is TweetChat. TweetChat connects to Twitter and allows people to focus their attention on a particular theme, denoted by a # before the theme name (called a hashtag), e.g. #uu2020 for a Unitarian Universalist Faith Formation 2020 conversation or program. TweetChats can be engaged on the spur of the moment, which makes them ideal for small groups responding to a particular issue in their community or around a specific faith crisis. But the power of TweetChat is maximized for faith formation when a specific topic, expert, and time are announced along with the specific hashtag. For example, Thursday, June 16th, 8 pm Eastern (U.S.), I’ll be connecting to a TweetChat with the Rev. Phillip Lund (@psdlund on Twitter), the Director of Faith Development and Congregational Growth for the Prairie Star District of my Unitarian Universalist Association. We’re going to talk about #uu2020 and are inviting anyone else who’s interested in that topic to join the conversation. We could have chosen an inexpensive but more restricted technology, like an on-line classroom environment or a conference call. But TweetChat is free, encourages folks to utilize Twitter, and engages a public conversation on our approach to faith formation where anyone can participate.

TweetChat has several tools that allow individuals to make the conversation more accessible for themselves. Folks can alter the refresh rate of the chat, slowing down or speeding up to within five seconds of real time the discourse streaming across their screens. Folks can toggle the font size, making it larger or smaller – and on many computer screens, enhance how they utilize sizing text now to read easily. Folks can block retweets – the Twitter equivalent of a user shouting “Yes! This!” to the world, a very good thing, but a repeated piece of the conversation that frustrates some. There are some other tools, but they’re all intuitive and designed to help TweetChatters focus their attention on a particular Twitter conversation.

To use Tweetchat, you first need to be on Twitter. Twitter is filled with chatter, and once you have are following more than a few people or organizations, you’ll understand why tools like TweetChat became necessary to help focus attention. Set up your Twitter profile. (Please, put up some picture in your profile, even if it is a faith symbol, because many long-time Twitter users will not interact with or block the empty egg picture serving as the default). Then, log into TweetChat and allow that application access to your Twitter profile (folks who’ve never added an application, this will make more sense when you follow the steps online). Enter the hashtag you want to engage and you’ll find a window opening on the conversation that is, has, or will be unfolding.

If you’re considering a scheduled faith formation program, it is useful to have a host with the presenter. The host can track questions if there are is a large number of users and prioritize them for the presenter. The same format works great with a Twitter-based interview of an expert or a reporter from a restricted access locale, such as someone tweeting from a disaster zone, or a conference, or an emerging social justice event. Folks could drop into scheduled TweetChats to ask questions of religious leaders, to discuss grassroots organizing issues around justice and service delivery, to engage particular texts, or to speak to particular emotional, spiritual, or social issues. If you tweet links to images on an organizational website or through another great tool, SlideShare, then you bring the same capacity for slide projection and video usage one would have in many face-to-face meetings.

I’m hoping all kinds of people of faith will be utilizing TweetChat to live and explore their faith more publicly. I’m especially hopeful for my own denomination’s religious leadership to start using this tool to engage people directly, for the conversations we’re having about change and growth, for faith formation, for social justice witness and organizing, and for devotionals and spiritual practice. Using a few free and inexpensive tools, people of faith have the power to deepen their faith and grow faithfully via digital media. Using a few free and inexpensive tools, people of faith also have a chance to live so openly that others who are seeking can actually find them.