THE alarm goes off. I’ve probably been listening to the Today programme for half an hour already.

My first instinct these days is to pick up the mobile phone, check it for messages and then I have to stop myself immediately checking Facebook and Twitter.

But I’ll be on both of those sites while I’m eating my porridge, drinking a strong cup of tea and watching breakfast television news. I was a regional newspaper reporter for 11 years and old habits die hard. I like to have more than one source of news every morning.

I’m still a journalist. I edit a monthly newspaper for the Diocese of Oxford. That’s the Church of England for Oxfordshire, Berkshire and Buckinghamshire and do communications work for the Diocese.

So the need to keep up with the news has not changed, but whereas early in my career I would have spent the first part of the working day scouring the nationals for stories, I now follow all of the major news outlets (the nationals and of course the Oxford Mail and Oxford Times) on Twitter. I can get a bite sized round-up of the news from that micro blogging site and return to any stories that catch my eye later.

So what’s this got to do with faith? Well I moved to work here because I’m a Christian and I believe that this massive organisation does fantastic work on a local, national and international level.

It’s a privilege to do what I do and I’m constantly looking for the most up to date and relevant ways of communicating. Recently I’ve run stories on how churches have reacted to the floods, the Church’s response to Government welfare reforms and food banks among others.

But the world is changing fast. When I joined the Diocese just over five years ago, I was using Facebook socially but had not even signed up for Twitter. Now I am using both sites on a daily basis for my job.

Prayer is at the heart of the Church and the Door runs a monthly prayer diary with requests from different parishes and deaneries.

I’ve recently started using Hootsuite – a dashboard that allows you to update multiple Facebook and Twitter accounts at once – to Tweet that prayer diary each day.

That means reaching a digital audience with prayers for specific, local church projects. Those prayer requests get the most ‘likes’ on our Facebook page, which proves they are an effective way of communicating.

There are ethics to think of. We run courses for clergy on social media use, and the first piece of advice we give is simply to remember that a Facebook status or Tweet is publishing in the same way a piece of news in a newspaper is publishing.

It’s subject to the same laws. But I also encourage clergy not to be afraid of these sites. They need to be used wisely and they can be addictive.

But with decent boundaries they can be a great way of telling stories and promoting the diverse range of work an organisation like the Church is involved in.