G. Frink's

Rapidly shrinking enterprises, like the Southern Baptist Convention, are not required to die.

They prefer death to adaptation.

Like the SBC, they often rush to embrace death by refusing to effectively apply easy-to-use, cost-effective technologies and services which speak directly to the markets which are their life's blood.

Technologies like wireless communication and services like Twitter, which was at last poorly employed at the SBC convention in Indianapolis.

Why Twitter? asked pastor Joe Thorn, a Saint Charles, IL-based Baptist blogger whom I see as an SBC technology leader.

His answer offered practical applications of Twitter, without noting that Twitter and other wireless-dominated services can speak directly to cellphone-communication-fixated youth the SBC must reach and convert in order to forestall an almost 50% decline in church numbers forecast for 2030 by Frank Page, past president of the SBC.

"The reality is it's our fault," Page said earlier this year.

Yes, and that means the problem of decline is one Baptist leaders can solve by altering course to seriously apply effective new solutions.

Yet solutions that work for comparable organizations are left on the shelf, or when one like Twitter is taken down and used, merely tasted. Toyed with really, although Ed Stetzer of Lifeway's "tasting" was almost a game try at tweeting the Indianapolis convention.

Game, but unsuccessful. Stetzer's twitterstream did almost nothing to help his followers understand the direction, real import and impact of events. Even Thorn gently derided Sitzer's effort as keeping "people informed about who’s wearing what at the SBC."

Worthwhile application of available wireless technology at the SBC convention in Indianapolis would have seen application of Twitter, not as though it were a toy, but in ways that made it possible to follow the content events. Well, follow the content of events as understood by the Southern Baptist twitterati (an elite which currently has no members).

BrightKite would have been put to work mapping attendee travels so that everyone could follow those in whom they were interested, often literally from room to room.

There would have been proliferation of individual audio and video streams via Qik, Sesmic and their competitors to provide remote audiences with sights and sounds as they occurred and from a wonderfully enriching variety of perspectives.

An entrancing, enlightening, audience-recruiting measure of virtual attendance and participation would have been the result.

Instead of the SBC's continued embrace of inflexibility and decline toward death.