Photo by fmgbain (license), adapted by Jon Reid

This is part 5 of a series on Twitter Practical How-to's.

It happens sooner or later: Twitter notifies you that someone "is now following you on Twitter," but you have no idea who they are. Your first followers were the friends you told, and maybe a handful of services you followed which automatically followed you back. But eventually, you are followed by a complete stranger. Who are they? What do they want? Are you being stalked?

It can feel especially odd if you are used to the enclosed walls of Facebook, where friendship is always mutual. But remember, Twitter is not simply Facebook status updates, without Facebook. By default, everything you tweet is public, and anyone can follow you. (If this bothers you, go to your Twitter Settings and select "Protect my updates". But think twice before you do so, because you will be missing out on the opportunity to meet interesting people you don't know.)

So how did they find you? Here are a few different ways:

They looked in the public timeline

A "timeline" is a series of Twitter updates (that is, "tweets") shown in reverse chronological order (the most recent on top). What you usually see on Twitter is a personalized timeline of the people you follow. But did you know there is also a public timeline showing all unprotected tweets? (That may make you think twice about what you tweet!)

The public timeline is no longer featured on Twitter's web interface, but it is still easy to find. With many Twitter clients, it is just a click away. Whatever you tweet goes there. Of course, it is quickly left in the dust by the tweets of thousands of other people, but someone may happen to see what just wrote, and decide to follow you, for two different reasons:

1. They are interested in you. Or,
2. They want you to be interested in them and follow them back.

The second is a very common means of self-promotion on Twitter. Self-promotion may feel cheap but is it necessarily wrong? Remember, you have no obligation to follow anyone back just because they follow you.

They searched for keywords

You may have just tweeted about the problems you are having with ants in your house. Suddenly, you are followed by a firm that does insect extermination! How did that happen? They probably entered "ant problem" into Twitter Search to find potential clients.

It may be annoying, but there is nothing nefarious about this. I even tried doing a little of this myself. Why? I thought that by finding people who were brand-new to Twitter, I might share tips with them, like this blog post. Sure, it was self-promotion, but I genuinely want to help people.

I quit doing that once I remembered that for someone new to Twitter, being followed by a stranger can feel creepy. But I wanted to illustrate that being followed because of a specific word you typed into Twitter is not necessarily wrong. You may discover something helpful. …Or not, in which case you can safely ignore them.

Someone mentioned you

When someone mentions another person by their Twitter name (with an at-sign, like @jonmreid), it becomes a link to the other person's profile, showing all of their tweets. If you follow someone because you are interested in them, and they mention someone else in an interesting tweet, there's a decent chance that the other person will also be interesting to you. This is how Twitter is like a cocktail party, and it's a great way to discover other people.

So if someone mentions you, some of their followers may try following you. Some may be genuinely interested, curious to learn more about you. Some may be doing that self-promotion thing, hoping you will follow back.

Someone replied to you

Replies — where you begin by clicking the reply arrow on someone else's tweet — used to function in the same cocktail-party fashion. More so, in fact, because replies are the most natural way to carry on conversations in Twitter. Unfortunately, the personalized timeline of the people you follow no longer shows replies to people you don't follow. But they can still be seen through other means. Using me as an example,

• My Twitter profile shows all of my tweets, including my replies.
• Tweetree provides an expanded view of anyone's profile. In particular, it shows the context of replies, so you can see who (and specifically, what) I am replying to.
• Twitoaster shows who is replying to me, and what they said.

The links above use me as an example to show how the browser location includes the person's Twitter name. Replace my name with someone you know, and you will discover other people. And maybe others are discovering you in this fashion.

Don't worry, be happy

So the next time you are followed by a stranger (on Twitter), don't worry. Again, either they are interested in you, or they want you to be interested in them. The first is nice, but either is fine. (Except for spammers. I'll address them separately.) Relax, and enjoy the strange world of Twitter!

If you liked this post, please subscribe to blog one another or follow me on Twitter. And if you have further questions about Twitter, I'd love to help you get started; feel free to email me, or leave a comment below.

Twitter Practical How-to's series:

1. Twitter characters: @, d, RT, #
2. Use a Twitter client
3. What to tweet (and what not to)
4. Who to follow on Twitter
5. I'm being followed on Twitter!
6. Dealing with Twitter spam
7. More to come…

Photo by tinkernoonoo (license), adapted by Jon Reid

One of my favorite new blogs I read regularly is Missions, Misunderstood by "Ernest Goodman," a pseudonym for a former missionary. A recent post titled Expectations began,

It usually goes something like this:

“Yay, we’re going to be missionaries! We love the nations! God’s glory! Passion! Finish the task”

Then, “It’s okay to be uncomfortable. Different isn’t necessarily bad. We can do this.”

Finally, “I’m just not cut out for missions. The missionaries here aren’t cut out for missions. I’m never leaving home again.”

Those lines in particular really resonated with me. I left the following comment, but decided to share it here as well:

Either God didn’t exist, or he hated us.

Ow, this is so familiar. My wife & I went to Japan, expecting to start concerts of prayer that would lead to revival. The culture itself would be no problem, as we had both grown up in Japan as missionary kids.

After a year, we concluded that either God didn’t exist, or he hated us. I imagined returning to the States and never volunteering to lead any ministry again, because it might bring up the fact that I had once been a missionary. And I wouldn’t want that to get out, because it would only fill me with shame.

At our lowest point, we met other missionaries who were much more seasoned and long-term than we were, yet were also at a low point. Together we prayed, desperately. And our small group (we called the group “the gropers” because we felt like we were groping in the dark) experienced revival. Miracles. Prophetic guidance. Physical healing happening before our astounded eyes.

And then, just when we thought again that we were going to conquer the world, the leaders of our group lost their son to leukemia. Despite all our prayers, prophecies, and apparent signs to the contrary, he died. We were all rocked, helpless, confused.

Maybe God doesn’t want us to be "strong" and "successful" after all.

As I wrote in a worship song, "Teach me the power of total dependency."

Spencer Burke interviews Andrew Marin about what he's learned about ministry, and about Jesus, in the center of Chicago's gay community. This is terrific stuff from TheOOZE.TV.

Part 1:

Part 2:

I think this may be one of the biggest missional challenges of our day. How we approach it affects not only our interaction with the LGBT community, but also our credibility with postmodern straights.

I'd love to hear your thoughts. (But like we were taught in kindergarten, remember to play nice.) Spencer does a great job of elevating the issues beyond "progressive" and "conservative." Can we?

Photo by Darren Hester (license )

"What does your church measure, and why?" That's how my latest blog post starts. But you won't find it here! Instead, go on over to ChurchETHOS, a blog by my friend Nathan Creitz. There you will find Social Acceptance: A Missional Metric.

While you're there, check out the rest of Nathan's blog. Like me, Nathan questions things about church, out of love for the Church. Besides, he has a really cool logo. Reset!

Here's a fascinating new song called "Laughing With" by Regina Spektor. Apparently she performed this on Letterman last Friday.

A taste of the lyrics: "No one laughs at God in a hospital" … "But God can be funny"
(h/t: Mike Todd)

Well, another radio show critiqued my 14 Reasons to Stop Evangelizing Your Friends. Ambassador's Alliance Radio is by Tony Miano of Last Words Radio, except that this is an Internet radio show (as opposed to broadcast through the air.) Tony must really like my article, because he keeps using it.

The show is two hours long (podcast available here), with the first hour devoted to critiquing my post. Actually, they spend a lot of time getting things set up and introducing the guest who joins in the critique. They don't get started with me until 15 minutes in.

I don't intend to do a point-by-point rebuttal of their criticism. You can listen and come to your own conclusions. But overall, the thing that kept striking me was their focus on "what happens when you die" and the dualism that naturally results from making the gospel about life after death rather than about the kingdom of God being here, now. Also, their gospel seems extremely hell-centric. Isn't that backwards?

They concluded that I am probably not born again.

Tony opened by reading the explanatory disclaimer I added at the beginning of my 14 Reasons after I got a lot of criticism from some listeners of Last Words Radio: "By not trying so hard, I have found the gospel flows more naturally, and have enjoyed sharing the gospel with my friends much more freely and frequently." What is odd is that they then ignored that statement completely, concluding the worst about my statements.

My last reason (which they get to at 59:40) is the summarizing kicker of the whole fourteen: "It makes you think their lack of interest in your evangelism means they are not interested in Jesus or spiritual questions." The guest's immediate response: "Yeah, well they're definitely not interested in Jesus because there's no one that seeks after God." Um. This really is Adventures in Missing the Point, guys. May I recommend Dan Kimball's excellent book They Like Jesus but Not the Church?

But the highlight for me is when they begin their discussing their overall conclusions at one hour in: I am probably not born again.

To listen to the podcast of the show, click here. You can either listen to it directly on that page, or download it to iTunes. Again, the portion focusing on what I wrote starts 15 minutes in. Thanks to Ambassador's Alliance Radio for featuring my post.

Today, Farrah Fawcett and Michael Jackson died. But my tears were for Puzzle, our twenty-year-old cat.

Puzzle died peacefully in his bed this afternoon. I am sad, but glad that he was not in any apparent distress. He just gradually slowed down. I would like to go like that when it's my turn.

We got Puzzle when we were missionaries in Japan, twenty years ago. He was from our favorite place in the whole world, Lake Nojiri, where Kay & I met. He joins his adopted brother Tigger beyond the veil. Hey guys, further up and further in. Oh wait, you're cats, you don't take instructions. Never mind, you'll figure it out.

Twenty years. Peace, old friend. You deserve it.

What if there were a single design that explained the meaning of life — the universe — everything? What if it pulled together the nature of God with the mission of humanity? What if it were so simple that, when sliced and labeled, many will brush it off saying, "That's obvious. So what?" That was my initial reaction when I saw that the front cover of Leonard Sweet's new book So Beautiful has the words, "Missional — Relational — Incarnational: Divine Design for Life and the Church." Because those concepts are already important to me, I was inclined to respond, "That's cool," shrug, and dismiss it as something I already "get."

Friends, do not dismiss this book.

I pressed beyond my initial dismissal because the author, Leonard Sweet, had already impacted my life before. When I made the transition out of modernistic Christianity, it was a very scary and painful time; I was afraid I was losing my faith. Three things saved me:

• SoulTsunami by Leonard Sweet helped me understand my new context.
• A New Kind of Christian by Brian McLaren helped me find faith again.
• The Soliton Sessions showed me I was not alone, and created a space for me to encounter Jesus all over again.

So Len Sweet helped me get reoriented when I needed it. His latest book again catches me at just the right time. When I read SoulTsunami, I characterized Len as a Christian futurist. But in So Beautiful, I see that he is a preacher, a wordsmith.

It could be that Len Sweet has created the perfect bathroom reading.

One of the first things that struck me about this book was the playful way he uses words. He is not just being flippant or injecting illustrations; there is a method to his mad wordplay. His goal is to take you beyond words and labels, which is quite a trick when your tools are words and labels. Like an Impressionistic painting, you have to step back and not look at the individual dots (words), but let them blend until something larger pops out. (You have seen this before in the parables of Jesus, though you may not have recognized that that is what Jesus is doing — using words to take us beyond the words. So Beautiful also serves as an example of this kind of teaching.)

Having said that the book takes you beyond labels, let me quickly highlight the key words to whet your appetite. One great way of clarifying a concept is by describing an opposite idea:

Missional. Opposite: Attractional. We've heard this before, but I'm afraid my understanding grew utilitarian, focused on "different ways of doing church." No, no; it's much deeper than that, rooted in the very nature of God.

Relational. Opposite: Propositional. Do we commit ourselves to a set of ideas, or to a Person? Do we call others to a set of ideas, or to a Person?

Incarnational. Opposite: Colonial. For the sake of expedience, have we attempted to create a one-size-fits-all gospel, and in so doing, deprived both "the lost" and ourselves of the gospel?

Len is careful to state that MRI does not mean we stop attracting, stop using propositional statements, or stop colonizing the earth with heaven. But if we do not get the order and emphasis right, our outcome will be all wrong. As he says in the book's Introduction:

Attractional Christianity creates members.
Propositional Christianity creates believers.
Colonial Christianity creates consumers.

Members, believers, consumers. Yup, that's largely "church as we know it." Len argues for (or more accurately, does Impressionistic word paintings of) an alternative vision, not just of church, but of life.

The book is organized into three parts — The Missional Life, The Relational Life, The Incarnational Life — with an Introduction setting the stage, and an Epilogue tying it together. Each of the three major parts is divided into small chunks too short to be called chapters. Perhaps they are Len's way of casting his message into short "blog posts" for an electronically ADD-ized tweeting culture. Personally, I think of them as "meditations" to be read in small bites and pondered throughout the day. It could be that Len Sweet has created the perfect bathroom reading!

I am writing this review when I am just halfway through the book. Based on my experience so far, I anticipate a few things happening when I finish reading it:

• I will reread the book, probably using random access rather than a linear sequence.
• I will reread the Bible with new eyes. (It's been a long time since I've read a book that made me want to reread the Book.)
• I will "reread" my personal missionary context, looking for ways to live out MRI communally.

I encourage you to check out the online sample. If anything I have described — the key terms, or the curious structure of the book, or the things it is doing in me — has caught your attention, you owe it to yourself to get a copy of So Beautiful. I am sure Len won't mind if you place it in the bathroom.

Fresh on the heels of Twitter Is A Cocktail Party comes my second TwiTip guest post, Twitter WAS A Cocktail Party. Has Twitter seemed unusually quiet to you this past month? It's because you no longer see what one person says to another. This is a big deal because @replies were the main thing that created Twitter's virtual cocktail party effect.

In my article, I explain the old (and easily misunderstood) @replies option, what Twitter changed, and how you can work around the change for selected tweets. Following the metaphor to its bitter end, it's like the host of the party turned up the music so loud that it's possible to have conversations, but difficult to overhear any. But if you think your conversation might benefit others, you can shout. See my article.

More Twitter tips here on blog one another:

• Why Twitter?
• Before You Sign Up for Twitter
• Twitter Practical How-to's

And just for fun (or is it serious?), Saint Francis on Twitter.

Hi-ho, hi-ho: I head back to work this morning for the first time in six months!

This all happened so quickly that it's still a blur. On Monday, a praying friend asked if I had any news about jobs. I replied, "All quiet on the job front." And now it is Thursday, and I have to get ready for my first day on the job.

This is a 4-6 month contract, so I am still looking for a full-time job (with good benefits to support a family). But this buys me valuable time, which was running out. And because I get no benefits, we get to keep COBRA, which continues the excellent coverage I had in my last job. And thanks to the federal stimulus package, our payments have been reduced a whopping 65%, which has been credited retroactively, so now we have a positive balance to draw on for a few months and low payments after that!

I tell you, we have a weird Just-In-Time God.

The company I will be working for is Data Robotics, makers of a cool Mac/Win product which looks like a great product for anyone who needs to store a lot of important data (and that data keeps increasing). I think of it as "RAID for Dummies, heck it's even better than RAID." If that sounds confusing, it makes much more sense in the demo video.

Hi-ho!