Remote communion has Methodist church in a twitter
Poor old Tim Ross. The Methodist minister, who had organised the first ever Twitter communion service, had to back down and cancel it after getting a call from the enforcement arm of the Methodist church. He said that while he "hadn't been absolutely forbidden" to perform the rite, he had been "strongly urged" to do so. (Always Hope notes in passing that the Methodists can now expect a few calls from C of E Bishops, who will be dying to know how to exert that level of control over their clergy). I hadn't really followed this incident, and only looked into it after encountering Tim on Twitter this week. Initially, I had imagined it to be an insubstantial idea, something novel just for the sake of a quick headline, but the fact is that there's nothing particularly controversial about it at all. Essentially, the proposal was to tweet the communion service ( ie . broadcast the liturgy by text-based messages), and then, at the appropriate moment, for particip...