Toward an Internet Campus

earth_population

According to ComScore, there are now over 1 billion people who have internet access –  that is between 15 & 22 percent of the people alive on earth.  It’s an amazing number of people, and the implications are huge, especially for the church.

For the past couple of months, I’ve been working through the details of launching an Internet Campus at Faith Promise Church.  Our hope is to stream the entire service on Sunday mornings at 10 am (ET) by March 2009.  More than just sermons, this would include all the drama, video, and music of the weekend service.

This will allow two things to take place:

  • People who aren’t ready to set foot on our physical campus will have the opportunity to experience Faith Promise over the internet.
  • People who are physically or geographically unable to attend our church will have the ability to worship with us.

My prayer is that our Internet Campus will be a tool that is used by God to change lives all over the world as they hear God’s message of redemption and are inspired by authentic biblical leadership.  Please join with me in praying, and I’ll keep you posted as things progress.

6 thoughts on “Toward an Internet Campus

  1. It’s a great idea. I’ll come “visit your church” when you get it up and running.

  2. Hey Kyle. I was thinking. That is a cool goal and I hope you are able to accomplish it. But one thing that you don’t see anybody doing is, inviting the people who share in the service over the internet into the service so that others can physically see them there in the service. (After you think about the implications of this crazy idea, you will probably only want to invite the listener to join the service with a picture and no audio, rather than a teleconference.) Can you imagine physically sitting in church, with a screen next to you that has someone’s picture on it, that lives in China. Oh… and maybe the guys who tape the sermon can show shots of the internet attendees. Hummmmm…….. that would be cool.
    BJL

  3. Aaron, thanks for the continued encouragement!

    Nate, cool! That will be great!

    Ben, that’s a really great idea, and it’s the sort of thing that many churches are already experimenting with. While it’s pretty obvious that life change and discipleship can happen to some extent through the internet, there are some radical churches out there (LifeChurch, National Community Church, SeaCoast Church, Flamingo Road, etc.) who are already paving the way in this regard.

  4. Let me know if you need any help. I think I mentioned this already, but I have extensive experience with online streaming for professional sports, live events and church services. It is kind of scary looking back at usenet posts all the way back to 1993 http://groups.google.com/group/comp.sys.tandy/browse_thread/thread/621b5812125b8055?q=biddle%40mtsu.edu ! That was back when BBS’ were popular. As you can imagine anything internet related I am game for.

    My wife got me to come to FPC many years ago by listening to one of pastor Chris’ sermons online and bringing a VHS welcome tape home. This was back when Leland Blake would take a cassette tape and convert the sermon over and upload it to the site. A few months later I showed them how to encode the services directly to the computer via digital format which saves a lot of time.

    There have been several times that I have been talking to people and something we were talking about was related to recent services and i have emailed them a link to listen to it. It is an awesome resource. It would be nice to have a way to search for an archived sermon by topic as well.

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