Huffington Magazine Issue 52 | Page 39

CLICK ‘PRAY’ TO PRAY But at this moment, those emailed entreaties have no prayer of reaching anyone. The email address Osteen’s helpers have supplied is the wrong one. It’s one that doesn’t exist — the staff was meant to offer up “[email protected].” Thanks to the error, an auto-generated email reply informs the faithful that delivery of their prayers has “failed permanently.” “It bounced back,” types one of the people in the chat room, who has tried to email from her home in Canada. “I need your prayers.” She tersely summarizes her feelings about the situation: “=(.” THE ORIGINAL SOCIAL MEDIA Social networking sites, long celebrated as avenues for up-to-theminute information from friends, pundits, celebrities and corporations, are now being deployed in the spirit of higher powers. They have emerged as vehicles for spiritual salvation. Increasingly, the road to Damascus is a hyperlink and the Epistle is a tweet. In some sense, this seems inevitable. The Internet is effectively doing for present-day pastors what television once did for Jerry Falwell, Jimmy Swaggart and the rest of the so-called televangelists: helping HUFFINGTON 06.09.13 Increasingly, the road to Damascus is a hyperlink and the Epistle is a tweet.” them spread Christianity on a mass scale while liberating their congregations from the confines of the physical church. Beyond the tens of millions of viewers who can be reached via television broadcasts, the Web has amplified the potential audience to the hundreds of millions, while transcending geographic boundaries. Pastors need not concern themselves with buying TV time in the appropriate markets. They can instead use tweets, streaming video, podcasts and Facebook status updates — free, accessible anytime and widely shared — to turn hearts and shepherd their flock. And while TV is a one-way form of communication, the Internet enables interaction, letting ministries converse with the people tuning in. “Thirty years ago, televangelists used technology that did not exist