I was in a conversation with a senior pastor that was considering starting a Twitter account so that he had a way to communicate about his life and ministry with his congregation. His hesitancy was in opening up yet more of his life – which already feels like living in a glass box – and giving up even more personal space.

What’s interesting about you, as a senior pastor Twittering, is that you control both the topics you Twitter about and the amount of information that you share.

With a lot of people showing up each weekend, there’s no way for you to know all of them, but THEY want to know YOU.

The scalability of your time on Twitter and the kind of information you want to share (hey, you’re still human – not living on a pedestal – a realization some have a hard time understanding) is far easier to manage than the non-scalability of personal face time with you and hundreds or even thousands of people.

My suggestion is to be who you are – the sometimes funny, sometimes eccentric, usually normal guy – so that they see your sermon illustrations about your life played out in real-life application. They’ll see that you’re not perfect, that grace and mercy are an ever present battle of the spirit against the soul and that you live a life not too dissimilar from theirs.

It’s hard enough being in ministry and living in the proverbial “glass house”. I recommend using Twitter for pastors as a way to keep people from wanting to go and stand next to the bedroom glass wall of that house.