Celebrate Recovery

Assuming that Celebrate Recovery understands the importance of Twitter, especially with its presence in @celebraterecvry, @johnnycr, @geraldsharon, and @rickwarren (especially with his outburst on the webcast that everyone should be on Twitter; “if you’re not on Twitter already, get on Twitter.”). How can Celebrate Recovery (national/international) use Twitter? Here are 11 (actually 13 since 1 has 3 embedded) ways that Celebrate Recovery can use Twitter.

Encourage All Celebrate Recovery Groups to have an official Twitter username. This will automatically open lines of communication between the national/international office and the “field.” This could also be expanded to include a private Group tweet for more sensitive conversation, which could be hosted by Group Tweet. It is easier to Twitter (micro-blog) than it is to blog.

Use Twitter to promote events, blog(s), and the curriculum. First, Celebrate Recovery can use Twitter to announce its one day events or any event that they are officially apart. Second, Celebrate Recovery should use Twitter to promote their blogs (however, their blogs need some help), and their blogs can promote their Twitter handles. Furthermore, many tweets could be converted into quality blog posts. These tweets can be comments made by the Celebrate Recovery staff or those in the “field.” Also, Twitter has now in many respects began to challenge Google in real-time searching of blog entries. I know many blogs that Twitter accounts for any where between 30-50% of their traffic, including my own (if not more). Third, Celebrate Recovery should use Twitter to promote the curriculum. With the new initiative for Life’s Healing Choices, Celebrate Recovery could use Twitter to help walk and guide people through the curriculum, highlighting important principles, quotes, and questions. This will also be another way to help standardize or bring everyone into “array,” in a good way. This reinforces Celebrate Recovery as a Christian movement, which is what Rick Warren and John Baker are attempting saying that America needs recovery.

Celebrate Recovery could use Twitter to highlight successful Celebrate Recovery groups and “best practices.” This is a great and free way to recognize your strongest advocates. Let’s face it, Celebrate Recovery is not perfect and does not “uniformly” fit everywhere. In other words, it does not look the same everywhere. And it shouldn’t though the principles should be in operation. And Twitter could serve as an idea generator on how ABC Church does X and XYZ does B. Furthermore, people love success stories and are encouraged by others’ success.

Celebrate Recovery could use Twitter to highlight testimonies. Since testimonies are part of the backbone of Celebrate Recovery, Twitter can serve as a source of some good testimonials. Celebrate Recovery national/international then serves as a facilitator or a vettor of various great testimonials, not that places or people are trying to achieve such a status (and efforts should be made to minimize that).

Celebrate Recovery could use Twitter to raise money (along with a Facebook cause). While this should not necessarily be Celebrate Recovery’s goal per se, it is a great way to get feedback from donors and to inform donors on their investment. For a donor, it is extremely exciting to hear how Celebrate Recovery is achieving “success” through saving the lives of 1, 100, 1,000, or 100,000! Wouldn’t that encourage donors to give more so that Celebrate Recovery can do more?

Celebrate Recovery could use Twitter to give real-time advice and pointers. This would be a superb use of Twitter, and this is how many people, businesses, and professionals use Twitter. Imagine this: the speaker or ministry church staff leader doesn’t show up (for whatever reason), a Celebrate Recovery leader now needs to “teach” on something. What can he do? Tweet for help, and within seconds, he could have an outline to “preach” from on his phone.

Celebrate Recover needs to use Twitter to listen to their customers. Their customers are the ministry leaders in the field, and they need to know about issues these leaders are facing. And they need to respond as Twitter is a two-way street. For example, I once asked @celebraterecvry, “Is addiction a disease?” and “Why does CR use a paraphrase even when they have a NIV Bible?” And neither question to this date have been answered. Another example is: we were discussing the question in book 3, Getting Right with God, over the chapter called Grace. The question was something like: “How can you model God’s gift of grace in making your amends?” However, some people had issue with this question. “Given that making amends is to those we hurt and grace is unmerited favor or receiving what we do not deserve, how then can grace be demonstrated?” Or more simply, since making amends is referring to people we hurt (forgiveness refers to people that hurt us) then how can I show them grace when they already deserve “favor” and good things, not the bad things that I’ve done? So Twitter can be used to find answers to these types of questions in real-time (if there are enough CR people and support on Twitter). If the question was, “How can you model God’s gift of grace in making your forgiveness?”, then it is really easy to answer and that is how most people answered the question. However, it says amends. And God’s action towards humanity is not the access. God did not hurt us, so He is offering peace and forgiveness through Jesus, not amends.

[To answer the question, here was my response to the group: This is a result of a limited view of grace. Grace is not simply "receiving what we do not deserve." While it is that, it is much more. (However, "receiving what we do not deserve" is a very large umbrella that is often just limited to salvific grace, or simply Jesus dying on the cross, by those of us who do not really understand the grace of God. But grace is much more than Jesus' death. It is his resurrection. It is the giving of the Holy Spirit to all believers. Grace is also the empowering and purifying agent that enables us to be holy. Beyond the salutation (the greeting or the hello or the DEAR ROMANS part of Romans), grace is first mentioned in Romans 3:24, and Dr. Douglas Moo, author and commentator, defines this as "eschatological grace," where the focus is on the ultimate salvation (glorification) of the believer, not just his justification (Romans, NICNT, 228ff). Colossians 2:6 says, "Therefore, just as you received Christ Jesus as Lord,continue to live your lives in him." While this can refer to receiving Jesus in faith (which is very probable considering Galatians 3:1-5) or receiving Jesus by grace (considering Eph 2:8-10) or both (which is what I prefer because of my confessed "exegetical agnosticism" [simply my unwillingness to put myself out there choosing one over the other ]), this shows that grace is much more than simply receiving something we don’t deserve while including that as well. While there are many other verses that can support this, I will spare it for now. Suffice it to say: grace is more than just becoming a Christian. It also entails living as a Christian. So for a concrete example, modeling grace while making amends is modeling Jesus when people react (negatively) to that which you are making amends (since we all deserve the anger).]

Celebrate Recovery could use Twitter to find out and point to various resources. Much of Twitter is the collaboration or cooperation between people on various issues, topics, etc. It is the sharing of ideas, thoughts, blogs, internet websites, etc. It is adding value to another person. Yes, while there are some people who do nothing but negate, they can be blocked, reported, etc.

Celebrate Recovery could use Twitter to reveal announcements or give ministry updates or organizational news. This is really a no brainer, and was slightly hinted or overlapped with a previous use (Use Twitter to promote events). Consider this: John Baker (Lord forbid) gets into a wreck, and within seconds, it could be tweeted. And within in a couple more seconds, hundreds and thousands are praying for him. Consider this: Celebrate Recovery announces that they wish to go to Africa (or somewhere they are not currently). Within seconds, there could be feedback, encouragement, and even people willing to go (that don’t live in CA). Yes, there will be some negative talk and criticism; however, since it is a two way conversation, Celebrate Recovery needs to have an answer ready for these people. Because simply, the Celebrate Recovery brand does not belong to Celebrate Recovery national/international. It belongs to the masses. But Celebrate Recovery can help that brand by assisting local Celebrate Recovery groups and answering some criticisms (which everyone may be thinking but fearful to say/ask).

Celebrate Recovery could use Twitter for their conferences (crowd engagement). At this last conference, there were about 30 tweeps tweeting on Twitter in the Twubs (like that sentence?). 43 people tweeted with the hastag #CRSummit09 and of those 19 were part of the Twub. While that is an embarrassingly low number considering the number of people at the conference, it is also understandable considering that the Celebrate Recovery leadership has only recently joined Twitter.

Celebrate Recovery could use Twitter to build a truly interactive social network. Thus implicitly anyone who @celebraterecvry is a silent recommendation. It can serve as an alternative way of finding celebrate recovery groups for people who travel and cannot attend one specific celebrate recovery group (simply due to their job).

For some great informational posts about non-profits and the use of Twitter go here (Beth Kanter, a great coach for non-profits’ use of social media!), here, here, and here.

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