So I got this research idea over lunch today: I have been considering ways to quantify how big the Presbyterian Church (USA) tent really is and I thought that maybe Twitter accounts might be one metric. I am not sure how well this actually does what I want but it was an interesting experiment and so I thought I would share it as a musing.
The idea started when I was thinking about the articles I write as previews for various general assemblies and including the official social media links in the article. There is usually an official Twitter account for the denomination, maybe one for the GA itself, sometimes a news account, a couple of official individuals and typically a ministry agency or two. Check out the Presbyterian Church in Ireland post if you want a good example and one I consider typical.
But thinking about the PCUSA I knew that it had a bunch more accounts so I started compiling a list. Here is the list of what I found in about an hour of searching. I was surprised at how many different official Twitter accounts the PCUSA has. Besides the general official one (@Presbyterian) I found the following 37 (in no particular order):
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Musings On How Big Is The PC(USA) Big Tent – Part 1: Herding Cats?
Nice title, but even cats have standards!
How bog is the tent?
As a post-Christian entity, the PCUSA more resembles a secular political party or lobby in design, branding, publicity, corporate and public pronouncements. Hence just like any partisan organization, union, or association, people tend to self-select in their affiliations, tweets, associations and linkages to the entity.
Just how big or small is the tent? It is what those who desire to be in it choose to be. And if numbers and metrics are to be believed, the larger the tent gets, the more seats they set out, the fewer and fewer choose to enter, and those still in, cannot wait to get out.
The fact the Evangelism account has not been active for four years pretty much sums it up, and roughly corresponds with other events going on with the denomination.
Yup!
Evangelism???? Start with the Moderator.
I would add……it as big as the Tower of Babel!
Good eye Maunalani– click ‘read rest of story’ above to discover several key/ironic twitter accounts closed or inactive. Just as well though; most twitter activity is a waste of time and resources–something elite liberal/lefties use to entertain each other.
PCUSA is badly missing Machen’s witness. They have lost their way.
“In the sphere of religion, as in other spheres, the things about which men are agreed are apt to be the things that are least worth holding; the really important things are the things about which men will fight.”
― J. Gresham Machen, Christianity and Liberalism
“The truth is that the life-purpose of Jesus discovered by modern liberalism is not the life purpose of the real Jesus, but merely represents those elements in the teaching of Jesus–isolated and misinterpreted–which happen to agree with the modern program. It is not Jesus, then, who is the real authority, but the modern principle by which the selection within Jesus’ recorded teaching has been made. Certain isolated ethical principles of the Sermon on the Mount are accepted, not at all because they are teachings of Jesus, but because they agree with modern ideas.”
― J. Gresham Machen, Christianity and Liberalism