It’s Sunday night at Woodlands Church, and Pastor Kerry Shook tells parishioners to pull out their cell phones.
He has pocketed his own iPhone for now, but tells everyone else to turn theirs on.
“OK guys, you can start the twitters,” he tells the crowd of about 250.
This statement caught my eye:
[blockquote]“At a Catholic church it would be seen as a disruption, just as it would be at any established church, because power flows from the priest to the parishioners. In this case … it certainly allows parishioners to have a great deal more involvement in what one might call ‘doing church.’ â€[/blockquote]
Hm. I hope the professor was grossly misquoted, because that is a seriously poor way to characterize traditional worship (“power flows from the priest to the parishioners”). I’m afraid to ask what this “professor in the religion department” might call “doing church.”
So we get from a Houston suburb to a Massachusetts college professor. How does that happen, unless the reporter started calling around until s/he found someone who would define worship in terms of power, which is a favored meme of the secular reporter.