The kids at New Life Christian Church get phone calls from God.

Or texts, more accurately. Although he doesn’t actually type them.

That job goes to John Bryan Lowe III, a skinny, charismatic youth pastor in Warsaw who likes to broadcast the Word of God on MySpace, Facebook and cell phone screens.

Lowe is at the vanguard of a burgeoning movement to minister to youth “where they are,” and he sees technology as a way to energize Christians and reach non-believers.

“You always want to follow the stream of media because that shows a stream of communication,” says Lowe, 28, who uses mass texts to send Scripture. “Our job as a ministry is to communicate the gospel. The message stays the same, but the ways of communicating it are always changing.”

In some ways, technology might be making it easier for Christians to spread their faith, especially among a younger demographic. It takes seconds to send a religious-themed text message; Scripture posted on Facebook can be seen by hundreds of “friends.” And some Christians see status updates on social networking sites as a way of determining who needs a spiritual pick-me-up.

However, technology is only one of many ministry tools, local Christian leaders say. A Facebook update, tweet or text message can spark a serious conversation about love, loss and faith. But the most effective kind of ministry, they believe, needs to happen face to face.

Churches might be a bit behind the technology wave, but their use of the Internet is expanding, according to The Barna Group, a Christian research organization based in California. One out of four Protestant churches has a presence on a social-networking site, according to its 2008 study. Charismatic churches, like Lowe’s, were notably more likely than either mainline or evangelical congregations to use the sites for ministry efforts. Blogging was used by 13 percent of churches surveyed; podcasting was used by 16 percent. Sixty-two percent of churches had a Web site – up from 34 percent in 2000.

But adopting technology is different from knowing how to use it, says David Kinnaman, Barna Group president. And in that sense, he believes churches have room for improvement.

“Very few congregation and faith leaders spend much time at all teaching people to view technology as a matter of stewardship,” he says. “We’re here to make the world a better place. And very few Christians at this point are being able to connect the dots between their use of technology as a consumer and their use of technology as a spiritual influencer.”

Lowe might be one of the few starting to make the connection.

After a Wednesday night church service in May, he sat in a youth group meeting room, facing 30 teenagers. The topic for the evening was how Christians can use unconventional tools to spread the Gospel.

Lowe, looking sleek in jeans and a casual black button-up, asked the teens to describe a time when technology inspired them to share their faith. Hands shot up, and Lowe tossed a neon-green microphone across the room to Vincent Baumgartner, 18, who caught it with a loud thud.

“I saw a Facebook status update the other day that said, ‘Tell five people you know about Jesus,’ ” he said. “It was pretty cool.”

Baumgartner turned to his girlfriend, Bridgett Leiter, who sent the message, and smiled. When she updated her Facebook status, Baumgartner got the notice through text.

“What did that message make you want to do?” Lowe asked Baumgartner.

“Text!” he replied.

“So you got a text on your cell phone that made you want to send another message to spread the love of Jesus?” Lowe asked.

Baumgartner nodded enthusiastically, and then other teens shared stories about how Facebook messages, texts and instant messages helped them reach out to people who weren’t yet “saved” by God’s love.

Lowe is one of several area religious leaders who believe Christians must understand technology if they want to reach out to teenagers.

“I definitely use Facebook and Twitter to communicate with the kids,” says Liz Adams, a Campus Life director for Homestead High School. “I’ve had some pretty serious conversations with kids over Facebook chat. It’s easier for them to bring up tough things.”

Adams, 28, says her online presence evolved naturally and not as part of an official Campus Life strategy. Her organization is one of many pondering how to incorporate social-networking sites and other technologies into its ministry work.

Sarah Knott, public relations coordinator for Young Life, an international Christian outreach organization, says her group has developed strict technology guidelines. Leaders can use social-networking sites as ministry tools, but only in conversations with kids they already know.

“We’re not going to be some weird adult reaching out to kids trying to minister to them,” she says. “If we’re talking to a kid online and conversing, it’s because we have an established relationship with a kid. We’re not using it as a new way to spread the Word of Jesus. ... Could it change? Who knows where we’ll be 120 years down the road.”

Church leaders aren’t only using technology to reach out to younger members. They’re also using the tools to reach out to their wider congregations.

James Cotton, interim pastor at Fort Wayne’s First Christian Church, says many of the middle-aged adults in his congregation are on Facebook.

“It’s a great way of keeping in touch,” he says. But it can also have its downsides.

“My concern is that we start to think, ‘We’ve been online three times so there’s no need to go to church and be together,’ ” he says. “It’s a whole lot easier to say whatever you want over the keyboard than it is to say to someone face to face. I don’t talk politics, and I don’t talk religion unless you can look me in the eye. More often than not, our greatest assets are also our greatest weakness. And I think with social networking, that is true.”

Lowe and his youth group agree. At the end of their meeting, they ranked various forms of communication from 1 to 10 according to their ministry power. A Facebook wall post is a 2 or 3. A text message is between a 5 and an 8. A handwritten letter – because of its rarity – is a 10.

Nevertheless, Lowe urges his teenagers to use any and all methods at their disposal to spread the Gospel.

“We know we have a tool right at our fingertips, and we’ve seen that it’s effective – that it opens up doors to communication,” he says.

The meeting ended in a prayer. Earlier, Lowe handed out “please text me” fliers, and students carried these and their Bibles as they filed out of the room.

Depending on who pays their cell phone bills, it might be time to pray for unlimited texting.

dhaynie@jg.net