Thursday, August 25, 2011

Fellowship Gathering Hecklers

This week, the Fellowship of Presbyterians are holding their August conference. Many evangelical Presbyterians are trying to follow the meeting by using Twitter. A hashtag was created for the meeting to make it very easy to follow the conversation: #MN2011.

There are some at the conference who are giving a fairly good play by play of the proposals. Very informative, and very exciting proposals.

However, there are a few tweeters who are obviously not happy about the conference. In fact, they're downright offended!! How dare those evangelicals talk about The Word, standards, tenets and 'like mindedness' !!!

So they've made it their mission this week to disrupt the twitter feed from Minneapolis with snarky comments, disparaging speakers, and outright insults. All because the Fellowship insists on following 2,000 years of biblical teachings, and not conforming to the world of today.

Words like ugliness, hate, oppression and schism are bandied about. Heck, they don't even like the way we tweet. There's one person who thinks that we need to be trained to use twitter, this person tweeted through another hashtag: "Quick! I need a guide to Twitter etiquette! A church conference has brought a new crew to Twitter, but they don't how to interact." Another comment was "I pray that pastors and elders behave better with their congregants and colleagues in person than they do with strangers on Twitter." and "It's full of trolls! Trolls!" I wonder if they know where that term came from, probably has no idea what USENET is.

Then there was the one that it seems was reTweeted all over the PCUSA hashtag: "Is anyone surprised that #mn2011 is scheduled during #pcusa ordination exams? Including the voices of future leaders must not be a priority." Of course, the answer to that was because the original conference was for a small group of currently called Pastors. Well, the circumstances changed, as did the size of the group.

Well, many (including yours truly) really don't use Twitter on a daily or even monthly basis. Heck, if you think you can say something really important in 140 characters, then you really don't have much to say.

Most of us on there are trying to follow what's going on, many of us could not attend the conference, but are interested in the proposals that are being brought forth. Yet we are subjected to the intolerance, bigotry and hatred of those who claim that we are the ones who are intolerant, haters and bigotted.

And so it goes ...

3 comments:

  1. I thought it was just good ol' Luddite me. Don't understand twitter and there is just no substance to the the twits who are ambushing the feed and the the few tweets that try to say something meaningful in 140 characters. I'll wait for the bloggers.

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  2. Well said. I started to respond to a couple of tweets and then figured they're not interested in listening anyway. Why cast my pearls before swine.

    Peace brother
    Alan
    Portland

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  3. One of my colleagues had an insightful comment. He noted that many of the most strident of progressives came out of a fundamentalist upbringing. When they left home the gravitated to the most permissive form of Christianity, but they took their fundamentalist ecclesiology with them. When they run across dissent from their positions, they react with hammer and tongs, the same way their fathers would have done.
    We are all broken people redeemed by Jesus and transformed by the Holy Spirit- there is no room for such ad hominem attacks.

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I'm not one to moderate comments, as I try to moderate my own at other blogs. That said, I will remove offensive, defaming and otherwise inappropriate comments when needed.