My wife and I haven't taken a Sunday off in over a year. I mean really off, not just leading worship somewhere else. About a week ago we decided to take April 1st off. No foolin'.
At the time we thought our children were going to be house sitting for a friend. The friend's trip ended up not happening, so now our Sunday off plans included our kids. No problem there, we love to do stuff with our kids, and with our schedules of late, time together has been precious and rare.
Early this morning I got a phone call from the Bahamas that changed our plans right away. CNN was doing a profile, or actually a series of segments on "The Worship Experience" and they were highlighting Streaming Faith. The morning quickly morphed into a series of calls with co-workers, clients, friends, and, oh, yeah, a quick call to Chicago to alert tech support that they were about to be slammed with a huge increase in our already large Sunday morning traffic.
Surprisingly, the CNN segments were incredibly positive, as were all of the teasers and on air talent banter about the subject. It was obvious the reporter, T.J. Holmes, and the on air hosts were very sympathetic to church in general and online worship in particular. When the main clip aired again just after 10 am EST, another anchor reviewed the e-mail responses from CNN viewers to the idea of attending church online.
While most of those resposes were positive, a former Catholic priest stated, "I am not for that at all" referring to online worship attendance. He cited the fact that you could only experience community in person.
That may be true, but increasing numbers of people are turning away from church and others are unable to attend due to physical limitations. The church needs to reach out to those folks as well.
Online worship will never take the place of assembling together face to face. But we must use every means at our disposal to reach both of those groups.
See the main video segment here.
If you are not a regular reader of this blog, in the real world, Alan is Director of Web Operations for Multicast Media Networks in Atlanta and serves as the Managing Editor of their faith-based online communities, including Streaming Faith.
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