Last Sunday, Pastor Irwin Allen of Peoria, Arizona, deliverd a sermon about sins so specific that some people in the audience gasped with recognition.
So how did Pastor Allen gave such a "prophetic" sermon? He read the blogs of the people in his congregation:
Pastor Alton, who cultivates a reputation as a computer illiterate techno-phobe, is actually an avid reader of MySpace pages, blogs and personal websites of the people in his congregation. "I appear, shall we say, un-hip," he says. "Therein lies my advantage."
Though he publicly refers to the Worldwide Web as the "Worldwide Waste" and e-mail as "sin-mail," in his home office is a bank of computer screens with more than 170 bookmarked sites — personal web pages, blogs, Twitter, MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn, Digg, Flickr and more.
Each week Alton surfs the sites for hours to find evidence of questionable behavior by people in his church. He jots offenses down and incorporates them into his Sunday sermons.
http://www.larknews.com/august_2008/secondary.php?page=1 - via Locust & Honey
Update 8/4/08 - It's a satire, LarkNews is like the Onion for evangelicals (which, I fully admit, I didn't know though I did look for references to the story and could only find it on LarkNews - Thanks Rev. Kate Layzer)
There's a difference.
Since when is myspace or facebook private. It's a hard lesson for teenagers to learn, if you want it to be private write it in a diary.