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