Twitter is, as it self-defines, ‘a service for friends, family, and co–workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing?’ As a web page resource it appears to be becoming increasingly popular for fast paced interaction.
Recently (http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/article_print.html?id=81195), pastor Rob Bell was asked to ‘Twitter’ the gospel. A Twitter post has to be 140 characters or less, so the challenge is not incommensurate to the challenge to summarise the gospel very briefly. It gets at the issue: what is the gospel at its heart? If you had to leave out everything but 140 characters what would you say? No doubt the challenge to Twitter the gospel also gets at the difficulty of offering the gospel (preaching the gospel) in an appealing way in such short compass. Is that possible? Can you actually summarise the essential elements of the biblical gospel in just a few short sentences? What would you write?
Write a precis
It would certainly be an interesting task for any youth group, leadership team, elders, or family, to attempt to summarise the gospel in 140 characters or less (or Twitter the gospel). If you are a Bible college teacher you might like to suggest it as an interesting exercise for an incoming class of potential ministers. What is their essential gospel at this point in their development? Very often, this ‘message’ becomes the DNA of a minister’s ministry, and so it is valuable to identify that gospel DNA explicitly, and then, of course, seek to reshape that message to be more faithful to the biblical gospel. If you are a pastor you might like to lead your staff or leadership team through a similar exercise. A week or so ago, our staff team here discussed together a comparable question on the basis of a simple chart on a white board. We drew three lines to demarcate three questions — What is the gospel? What is not the gospel? How do we promote the gospel? This certainly fueled interesting discussion, helpful clarification, and we trust some renewed promotion of the biblical gospel.
