Youth Worker Hooked on Facebook, Twitter and Blogging Now Blames Web2.0 For His Failed Ministry, Marriage and Golf Handicap

From the news today:

John Smith from Texas recently sought help from a counseling service after his youth group found him unwashed, barely conscious and hallucinating after he recently became addicted to a number of Web2.0 social networking sites.

“We noticed that he’d not turned up to anything for a couple of weeks, and, while he would still regularly poke us on Facebook and our cell phones would regularly receive his twitter updates a few of us became worried that his addictive personality might have got the better of him again.”

More recently Pastor John Smith of the third Baptist Non-Denominational Orthodox Emergent Church of Texas had become addicted to playing Halo 3 after he had used it as an “evangelistic” tool for their youth ministry. After the youth group had held networked games of Halo3 on ten large HD screens for a period of 5 weeks straight he went missing for a month before anyone started to ask where he’d gone to and if he had actually been taken in the Rapture while everyone else was asleep. The church Senior Pastor found John staring at his television screen, almost blinded by the light, surrounded by a month’s worth of pizza boxes and empty Rebull cans.

At the moment the details are sketchy as to how he became addicted to the internet, but from conversations with his youth ministry team, the young people in the church and his now ex-wife it seems as if John had recently started a blog after reading how cool they were on TallskinniKiwi’s, Jonny Baker’s and Tim Schmoyer’s blogs.

After he had accumulated a “bloglist” of almost 3000 senior and youth pastors he’d bumped into a number of articles on how Facebook could help his ministry, after downloading the “Facebook for Pastors” book by Chris Forbes he set up a Facebook account and proceeded to add more and more applications and friends to his profile and sending gifts to all his kids while adding as many bands and actors to his “fans of” list.

Pretty soon John after seems to have become annoyed with the profile update system on Facebook and, after being told by Simply Youth Ministry that he could get a Twitter account that will send text messages to his friends about what he was doing he pretty much made an account and started typing in his second by second activities.

What seems to have happened after that is that John would blog about Twitter, Add applications on Facebook, then tell Twitter that he’d just played on Facebook, which he’d then need to blog about, then twitter that he was blogging, then check his Facebook applications, tell Twitter that he was on Facebook, then blog about how he’d just added another cool application…

The whole thing was a huge mess in the end, and this is where his youth group and lay leaders held an intervention, a few weeks too late unfortunately, just as he was beginning to find the joys of Muxtape.com and blogging about his new Muxtape account…