FRANKLIN, Tenn. — When Stephen Anderson's young son was hospitalized in a cancer scare last year, he wanted to ask friends and family to pray.

Since he didn't have time to make a phone call, he Twittered them instead.

"We were concerned for about four days that it was cancer," he said. "So I Twittered on the way to the hospital, and I Twittered while we were there. And I got a lot of people to send messages saying they were praying for him."

Anderson, vice president for design at startup search engine company Viewzi, spoke at a recent conference called Ministry 2.0 in Franklin. He explained to about 45 pastors and church webmasters how they could create spiritual ties through the same affordable technology that their kids use to talk about school, clothes or Hannah Montana.

Twitter, for example, lets users share one- or two-sentence messages about their day-to-day lives from their cell phones or Web sites. They can let friends know when they are caught in traffic or what they had for dinner or if they're at a kid's soccer game.

Those details may sound trivial, said Anderson, but they help build social ties.

"When we all lived in small towns, we knew those details about people's lives," he said. "Today, we are so fragmented. We live very independent lives, and these tools allow us to stay connected."

The conference was the brainchild of Matt Carlisle, who runs a Web design firm in Nashville, Tenn., and Sean McAtee, who works for United Methodist Communications, also in Nashville.

Carlisle said he's seeing more congregations that want to "leverage technology to spread their message."

That includes using social media sites like Facebook or MySpace, where people can post photos, videos, updates about daily activities and other content.

"We want to use Facebook and MySpace to reach people for Christ," Carlisle said. "If I had said that three years ago, people would have said, 'You are crazy — that's a scary place for people to be.' "

The Rev. David Foster, pastor of the Gathering, a congregation that meets in a Franklin movie theater, is a regular Twitter user. He also runs a weblog and posts audio and video sermons from his congregation online.

It's a big change from when he started in ministry more than 20 years ago.

"When I started out," he said, "the only tools you had for ministry were Sunday mornings, some pews and polyester choir robes."

At that time, he said, churches focused mainly on Sunday worship as the high point of their week. The idea was, "You've got to come where we are when we are open and hear what we've got to say," he said.

Now technology allows access to sermons and other church-related content around the clock, so churches need to use social media and other Web tools to keep up.

"It's one thing to have a Web site," Foster said. "It's another to have content on that Web site that won't embarrass you, God and the whole world."

Susan Steen, who volunteers as the webmaster at First Presbyterian in Murfreesboro, Tenn., said she had posted audio of Sunday sermons online. At the Ministry 2.0 conference, she learned how to post those sermons on iTunes, Apple's digital content portal.

"I did my first podcast today, so I am very excited about that," she said.

Carlisle said that five years ago churches were limited in what they could do online because of prohibitive costs. Today, he said, any size church can take advantage of tools such as Facebook or streaming video on the Web.

"The technology is so affordable that a lot of small churches can use it," he said.