Christ commanded us to love and called us to tell his story. That call is reflected in the purpose of Church of the Resurrection (Leawood, KS).
To build a religious community where non-religious
and nominally religious people
become deeply committed Christians.
The recent success of their current sermon series, “When Christians Get It Wrong,” shows that COR is able to be sensitive to those with little religious background while providing strong Biblically based teaching. Not oly are they reaching those who see things wrong with Christians, they are also challenging people like me to change my behavior and to strengthen my faith.
COR is experiencing success with the Internet broadcasting of their worship services. In about three months, these two services have grown to over 900 ‘computers’ in attendance.
By making these services available on the Internet, there is potential to take a computer and a projector and see thousands brought to Christ. As I see it, the only stumbling block will be whether churches with the capability of projecting the service are willing to try utilizing the evening Internet broadcast to reach people in their communities not being reached by their local services.
It’s interesting that you mention hooking the stream up to a projector and bringing church to the masses. This is something that’s already been happening on an ad-hoc basis. We have several impromptu house-church groups that are forming around the live stream, and it’s fascinating. Adam showed some video footage this evening of this at a local senior living center, and the response has been great.
And in our 2009 strategic goals, we’re going to be more deliberate about this. I’m now trying to figure out a way to make this into an easily deployed hardware package that we can take to one of these new house churches.
Just for clarification, the 900 number is an estimate of how many actual people were watching. Data we’ve collected tells us about how many people are watching per stream on average. That week we had 530 computers pulling down the stream between the two services.