Intimate Confessions Pour Out on Church's Web Site

From an article of the same title by Neela Banerjee in the NY Times:

On a Web site called mysecret.tv, there is the writer who was molested years ago by her baby sitter and who still cannot forgive herself for failing to protect her younger siblings from the same abuse. There is the happy father, businessman and churchgoer who is having a sexual relationship with another man in his church. There is the young woman who shot an abusive boyfriend when she was high on methamphetamine. Then there is this entry: "Years ago I asked my father, ‘How does a daddy justify selling his little girl?' He replied, ‘I needed to pay the rent, put food on the table and I liked having a few coins to jangle in my pocket.' " About a month ago, LifeChurch, an evangelical network with nine locations and based in Edmond, Okla., set up mysecret.tv as a forum for people to confess anonymously on the Internet. The LifeChurch founder, the Rev. Craig Groeschel, said that after 16 years in the ministry he knew that the smiles and eager handshakes that greeted him each week often masked a lot of pain. But the accounts of anguish and guilt that have poured into mysecret.tv have stunned him, Mr. Groeschel said, and affirmed his belief in the need for confession. "We confess to God for forgiveness but to each other for healing," Mr. Groeschel said. "Secrets isolate you, and keep you away from God, from those people closest to you."... Since its inception, mysecret.tv has received more than 150,000 hits and more than 1,500 confessions...

I just went to the site and read a few of the confessions. Interesting stuff. Is some of the power of confession lost when it is anonymous? Probably, since you lose the compassion, understanding, accountability that comes from the one to whom you confess. When you confess to the net, are you confessing to God? Probably.