Deep or Wide

Recently I've become addicted to a social networking site called "Twitter." Not sure why, but I like it. It is similar to the Face Book Status feature, and that's all it does. Status's. You go to your home page and it asks you to type in (140 characters or less since it works like MMS text messaging) "what are you doing?" That's it, you type in what you're doing and then everyone who cares to know, can know. There's more to it than that, and the strategies and uses is broad, but essentially it's about social networking.

When you have a Twitter account you can search for people to "follow." That means whenever they update their status, it will show up on your home page. Now, the polite thing to do is to follow the people that follow you. Not everyone does this, and there are some people that I've found I really don't want to know what they're doing... I mean some provide TMI. Others share bad jokes and totally useless links, etc.

My original goal in doing this was to follow people who might be able to share things that are helpful to me as a pastor. I branched out from that a little to include news sources, interesting posts, and even some political types. Every time someone decides to follow my posts I get an email that states "So and So" is following you. Sometimes that's a little intimidating, like when I got the note that "Jesus Christ" is following you (people can pick any name they want for their profile.) It was also a little scary when I learned that "Karl Rove" is following me too.

It seems there is a huge number of Twitterers who have made it their goal in life to garner as many followers as possible. I think the top is around 250,000. I have about 80. People constantly click to follow me in hopes that I will in turn follow them, even if I'm not interested in what they have to say.

Life is like that as well. Some people want to be known and to know as many people as they possibly can. Others want to deeply know the people they know, and thus limit the number they know. I find myself in the middle on that. As the pastor of a church with 550 on a Sunday, and having served in 4 churches, and having had a career life before ministry, there are a whole bunch of people I know. You might say that my relationships are "wide." But "deep" is really the way of a Christ follower.

While I'm sure Jesus knew a wide number of people during his ministry, he only went deep with 12. Of those 12 he only went way deep with three (Peter, James, and John.) But it was that depth that made all the difference in the influence that spread all over the world and down through two millenia. I think there's a lesson in there. When it comes to width, seek to have as much positive influence on as many people as you possibly can. When it comes to depth, work on knowing and being fully known by a few people (12 seems to be a good model), and really work on those relationships.