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:

Enter theintersection.tv

The Intersection is the brand and space where we will be investing the bulk of our time and resources in terms of what, until now, the Church community has been calling ‘Internet Campus‘ or ‘Church Online‘. This space is a front door to the Internet Campus.

The resulting live experience will not look like church; no worship nor a sermon yet we are going to try and make the same evangelistic presentation in a live environment.

The experience that we are planning, for lack of a better example, will look like a late night TV show. Only instead of featuring pop-culture, we want to feature the truth about God. You’ll have to wait and see what I mean. I’ll be sure and invite the ChurchCrunch community to a sneak peek soon.

We have a wordpress site up right now and we are putting up some content while we develop the live environment and finish getting our studio space together.

We are building each experience with clips from sermons, cover songs, interviews, videos and interactive segments. These ‘bits’ will all point to a single take away thought. The benefit for the internet community is that the program will be segmented and non-linear so that someone checking in late or leaving early will have experienced a complete story, rather than coming in late on a 40 minute sermon and not being up to speed on all of the thoughts.

This might work. We’re willing to try.