South by South West Interactive is arguably the most import gathering for the Internet of the entire year.

So who’s coming to Austin?

The amount of sessions and keynotes is so overwhelming that I am heading into SXSWi with a very rough penciled in schedule so I have time and space to connect with people.

If you’re going to be here, we should connect.

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Hey pastor, I have a confession: I’ve been pastoring people from your church.

I have had really deep and meaningful spiritual conversations with your sheep. They still show up at your church every Sunday. They say really good things about you. In fact, I have been watching your sermons on the web and talking with your people about it. They asked me to.

This story is becoming quite common; it’s playing out online.

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We started live streaming our Sunday morning experiences this last week and here is a look at version 1.0 of our live page setup:

Big props to @rcjohnson and @andrewbredow for their work on getting this thing going.

This is a Guest Post by Vince Marotte.

Social Media has changed a lot since I had my first  GeoCities (RIP) site.

Most of us started off on MySpace and then moved to Facebook, some of us had or have a blog somewhere in there and then came Twitter. I am a believer that Twitter bridged that massive gap between web space and real life and we are still trying to figure out what this all means, especially in terms of being missional.

Personally I have been changing my social media voice from one that is geared toward Christian leadership and networking to one that is missional and I want to get that conversation started and see what the ChurchCrunch community thinks.

Here’s what I’m thinking… Continue reading »

Six months ago my wife, myself and our two kids (6 & 4 at the time) and our weimaraner packed everything we owned into a Penske moving truck and left Murrieta, CA for Austin, TX. We moved here because I took a job as Internet Campus Pastor at Gateway Church and it has been a fun ride so far, and this is just the beginning.

New Town

Austin has been great. It really is an ideal town for my family and I. In fact, when I was doing assessments prior to coming across the Gateway Church opportunity with a couple church planting networks, the ideal target community for me was one that had a Whole Foods (liberal/highly educated communities) and Austin is where their corporate headquarters are located…sweet! One thing I can say is that I don’t think I could move to any town in Texas other than Austin…if you’ve been here, then you know.

New Church

Well, of course, that’s why we moved out here. It’s always a challenge to come on staff at a church, especially if you come in from out of town. Churches are living breathing things and getting in sync with all of the little peculiarities of a church can take some time. I can say that, in a good way, it feels like we have been here for years.

New Friends

For the last 6 years I have been planting churches in Murrieta and the bond you form with people that you have been in the trenches of church planting with are life-long. For anyone moving, it’s leaving friends that is the hardest part and we feel that all the time; Facebook, Twitter and blogs have helped. We have made some great friends already and we are well on our way to growing solid roots here in Austin.

The Little Things

I miss Mexican food. TexMex sucks.

I am jones’n big time to get on top of a mountain. Probably the single hardest thing for me…I have always had mountains right outside my window. Texas is pretty dang flat.

The arts and culture are incredible here in Austin, it’s as an eclectic of a city as you will find anywhere in the United States and we’re loving it.

The Next Six Months

We launched a new site this year on Wordpress and we are starting to lay the framework for a more long-term and robust solution on Expression Engine 2.0. The Sunday morning portion of our Internet strategy goes live on January 17th and The Intersection is scheduled to go live February 21.

Watch ChurchCrunch for news about our live pre-launch party.

At face value, this sounds like an easy question and you’re thinking what most of us think when we talk about doing church online…live of course!

Well, there is more to it than you might think. The difference between live and ‘taped’ effects equipment needs, manpower needs, bandwidth (read: Money), feel of the event and quality.

You may not realize it, but there is a good chance most of the internet church experiences you have checked out were not live…or completely live anyhow, and this may be for a number of reasons.

Events that are not live are operating off video that has previously been uploaded to a server and is scheduled to play at the predetermined start time or it may be manually fired off instead of streaming live video to a server that viewers tune into.

Here are a few things you may need to consider when thinking about going live or not: Continue reading »

The physical church model has been working pretty well for the last 100 years or so:

• Sing some songs
• Preach a sermon
• Alter call

The above hasn’t changed much. Sure the music has changed. Sermon styles have changed. Architecture has changed and so on.

The biggest way this works on an evangelistic level is that people invite their friends to come to church with them. The reality is that most people aren’t just walking in because they were driving by…although it does happen, it isn’t a part of an effective churches strategy.

It also works, because for the most part people are polite enough to stay in the room for the entire exercise and thus are exposed to a complete story that they can act upon.

It’s clear that this flow isn’t ideal for a church experience on the web, not to say it doesn’t work at all, just that it may not quite line up with the demographics of the web; short attention span, transient and endless options.

We’ve taken these thoughts and decided that we need to offer something a little more targeted at the unchurched internet community. We are planning to do broadcasts of our services like most churches online, we just think it is important to do something that will reach deeper into the culture.

Here’s what we decided:

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We are rolling out two experiences in January that are targeted at different crowds.

One is basically what you have come to expect from an internet campus, essentially a live stream of our Sunday morning experience. This is targeted at people looking for a church experience on the web.

The other experience is our big focus and will consume the bulk of our energies. This second experience is targeted at unchurched people and will look nothing like church.

The Internet Campus, like our physical Campuses, needs to be financially self reliant at three years. At one of our brainstorming sessions a couple weeks ago, the thought of running ads on some of our sites came up. We haven’t made any decision on it yet, it’s just a thought, so I thought I would engage the ChurchCrunch community on this one.

How could ads be used to support ministry oriented web space and still stay on mission, if at all?

Part of our vision for doing church online is to syndicate tons of content. Not all of this content needs the full studio treatment, but it also doesn’t need to be done in a cubicle or well worn office.

What we did was layout my office with video in mind. When we need to kick out a quick video clip, interview, podcast or staffers want to add content to their web space; all they need to do is fire up one camera and go for it.

Check it out:

I think I have been to every Internet Campus in North America in the last four months and I have found that for the most part they had two things in common.

1. Re-Broadcast of the Real Life Experience :: This is cool, and I think it fills a some needs; people who can’t physically get to your church can experience your service. People who want to check you out before showing up can sample your service first, which can be a good or bad thing depending on how it translates to video.
2. For Church People :: Yes, I will agree that non-christian people have been showing up at the internet campuses and becoming Christ Followers as a result based on the conversations that I have had with those involved in them, but all things considered the format is ‘churchie’. I think this works when someone has a prior relationship with someone who can help give context to what otherwise is a weird experience (singing goofy songs and listening to a talking head).

If you are familiar with what Gateway Church has been doing and how we speak to the culture than you already know we are passionate about truly speaking to the culture. I’m not sure that anything that resembles a real life church service speaks to the culture of the internet community.

The internet community will not watch a video much longer than two and a half minutes.

The internet community would rather look at 15 2-minute youtube videos of people crashing than watch a 30 minute worship set.

The internet community would rather mess around on facebook or look at porn than listen to some dude they have never heard of blab for 40 minutes.

I want to execute an experience that speaks to the the people on the web in their language and with a real understanding of their values. Nothing will shut down that conversation faster than if we force our values on them and expect them to engage.

Without giving too much away here’s the formula we are going to try:

Non-linear snack sized segments.

Each segment of the experience will have it’s own resolve while pointing to an overall theme at the same time. Jesus used to spout off a sequence of short parables that all had a similar ‘take away’ but would hit people in different ways. We’re gonna try this formula and see if it works.

Try and truly put your self in the shoes of a completely irreligious person who is stumbling around the internet…how could you capture their attention in the middle of all the noise and get them to think about God?