MySpace part Deux

Under the “Missing The Memo” Category

I made the mistake of “devil’s advocating” myspace as an extremely imperfect means of staying connected with friends, in a previous post. For this stance, myself and another commenter on another blog (an outstanding blog) were rather vigorously challenged for our worldly-sounding stance by the majority of that blog’s commenters (mostly like-minded prayer missionaries).

The episode ended when my myspace password was hacked by a pornographer who sent porn spam bulletins from my account to All my “friends”, including former pastors, long time worship leader heroes, some of which I had just met. Some of my heroes actually wrote me to warn me of what was happening, which was mortifying! I felt so bad!

I figured that’s what I get for advocating such a smut-friendly site, and backed off the issue. Actually I changed my stance on it from one of tolerance to basically cursing the day Myspace was born and calling it the “spawn of satan” in my meta-tag for the post.

Fast forward to yesterday, when I got my Joseph Company / IHOP newsletter, inviting me to visit their myspace page. Lo and behold, not only is there a JoCo page, but also an (official?) IHOP page, and even their emerging Forerunner ministry school/seminary has a myspace page, which is probably the first seminary to have a myspace (cool/not cool?!?).

Was I the only one trying not to pay attention to the Victoria’s Secret ads that consumed about 92% of the banner time last week? Needless to say, I didn’t get the memo.

For the record, I think the decision to venture onto turf where millions of people already are is shrewd, despite my unforgiveness toward myspace. Use what people are using, and hopefully change the system in the process – would it be so hard for the millions of myspace believers to give “Tom” some better marketing ideas for our niche community?

However one caveat: ministry myspace administrators, a word of advice – DON’T GET HACKED! Have a damage control plan in place when this happens!