(Digital Collections) On A (Little Blue Bird’s) Wing and a Prayer: Announcing the @GWTruettSermons Twitter Account!

This is the third and final installment in a special three-part blog series on the project to digitize and present online the final sermons of George W. Truett (1867-1944), noted pastor of First Baptist Church of Dallas and namesake of Baylor University’s George W. Truett Theological Seminary. Read Part I here and Part II here.

Over the past two weeks, we’ve seen how technology and theology worked hand-in-hand to deliver the sermons of George W. Truett to thousands of Americans in the early 1940s. The process of creating transcription disk-based recordings of his live church sessions, shipping them to a 50,000 watt “border blaster” radio station and playing them over the air a week after their original delivery was a state-of-the-art approach in 1941. Truett and his broadcast partners understood the powerful ability of radio to transmit his message to a vastly larger audience than could be accommodated at First Baptist Church of Dallas’ sanctuary, and it is impossible to gauge the impact those sermons had on the listeners who tuned in on Sunday evenings at 9:30 for three years from 1941-1943.

Today, we’re excited to announce a decidedly 21st century update of this process with the launch of our first-ever specialized Twitter account!

Starting today, you can follow @GWTruettSermons for twice-weekly messages taken directly from the George W. Truett Sermons Collection. On Tuesdays and Thursdays each week, you will receive tweets containing transcribed quotes from Truett’s sermons found in our collection, and with many, an accompanying link will give you access directly to that item for your further examination.

Our first Tweet, sent on August 7, 2013. Many more to come!

If you’re a Twitter user, we’d love for you to follow us. If you’re not, this could be just the uplifting, historically intriguing account that makes signing up worth it. We promise not to turn this account into a promotional source for the Digital Collections; it will remain solely dedicated to delivering Truett’s words to your social media consumption device of choice. And with more than 80 total sermons to distribute, there’s no shortage of material to keep this account freshly updated for a long time to come.

We hope you’ve enjoyed this special three-part blog series on the George W. Truett Sermons Collection. We’re excited to see what new directions may come from creating this exciting new resource, and we look forward to hearing from you, our readers, about ways the collection has been of help to you in your personal, scholarly or spiritual research. Drop us a line at digitalcollectionsinfo@baylor.edu or feel free to retweet or direct message us on Twitter at @GWTruettSermons.

Bonus Content: Suggested Twitter Hashtags

When you’re retweeting the messages from this collection, feel free to use any of these hashtags – or create your own!

#TruettSermons

#BaylorDigitalCollections

#GWTruett

#sermoninsight

#uplifting

#makesyouthink

#Baylor

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