I’ve been excited about Doug Estes book SimChurch ever since I heard about it in the spring.

I’ve been among a number of web pastors/bloggers who have been trying to break through the resistance to online church by explaining both what we are trying to do and not trying to do.

But I’ve been looking forward to someone with credibility and maturity offering up a reasonable, respectable and theologically sound book-length case for why gathering as the church online can be powerful and God-honoring. (Books still seem to be the ultimate path to credibility, no?)

If the Q&A with Doug Estes at ChurchRelevance.com was anything to go by, all practitioners of online church might be strengthened and encouraged — and in some cases humbled, no doubt — by the book.

I was nodding my head all the way through.

(And, selfishly, it was comforting to see echoes of many positions I’ve expressed here over the last year.)

This quote really stood out for me:

“… a lot of testimonies from virtual churchgoers that I saw, read, heard, or heard about are in fact from people the world would write off—but why would the church do this? Just because a person feels uncomfortable in a Western-style brick and mortar church makes them unworthy of Christian community?”

I would read the whole interview. And buy the book.

It doesn’t feel like 8 months since NewSpring launched Sunday worship services on the Web, and it’s hard to believe how much they have become a part of NewSpring life for nearly 800 people week after week who otherwise wouldn’t be able to be part of the NewSpring family.

Everyone knew online services are a major opportunity to expand NewSpring’s mission to spread the word about Jesus and see people far from Christ come to know him as Lord and Savior.

But we also knew that it was the kind of experiment that would lead us into territory whose theology and methodology was far from clear, and for which we would beg desperately for God’s grace and leading.

No one felt that dangerous tension more than me, as NewSpring’s first “web pastor” — and a non-ministry, non-religious professional at that.

Anyone who’s followed this blog can trace the “arc” of my thinking.

From the early excitement about how Web services could pioneer a new frontier in church growth, offering a response to a post-Christian world where “going to church” is not the first or natural place one thinks to encounter a life-giving spiritual message.

To a prophetic recognition that our use of the Web will radically and inevitably reshape the way we minister to one another and worship.

To a sobering view of the practical challenges of ministering in an online environment where the motivations, learnings, and behaviors of attenders are hard to fathom and even more difficult to guide.

And finally — now — to a theological “peace” about the fact that worship on the Web is just another tool in realizing and actualizing the “visible church.” As messy, flawed, inspiring, and incomplete as any gathering of believers in a sanctuary in Anytown, USA.

The last month of silence on this blog has coincided with a refining of the vision of the NewSpring Web Service that focuses the vision, resources and efforts of everyone on our team toward maxing out our opportunity for evangelism.

There’s a lot we don’t know about how to “do church” online. And we want to be humble as we seek to shepherd people online. We certainly don’t want to — inadvertently, naively — lower the bar for what it means to belong to and “be” the church.

But what we do know is that the Web gives us an opportunity — just like the printing press, radio and television before it — to spread the message of God in a new world without boundaries — geographic, temporal or cultural.

I came to know Jesus because NewSpring did everything in its power to remove barriers to hearing, believing and living the Gospel of Jesus.

As long as there are people who are intimidated to step foot in church …

As long as there are people who have never heard the good news of Jesus …

As long as there are people who do not live near a church where Jesus is lifted up …

The NewSpring Web Service will be valued, needed and used.

We figure that when people are connecting and engaging and surrendering to Jesus, that’s when we have the true opportunity to disciple people into local, physical, grace-filled and grace-giving communities of faith that are God’s plan A for glorifying himself through his son Jesus Christ.

Perhaps we don’t need to reinvent the church online? Perhaps the wisest thing to do is work with other Christ-centered churches and courageous church planters to help seed communities of faith?

Our strategy is to be OK in taking this journey one faith step at a time.

if you’re active in web ministry and web evangelism, where are you on this learning curve?

A few months ago, I caused quite a stir with my post “The Rise of Net Campuses: Are Local Churches on the Ropes?” It picked up 903 page views, and dozens of comments, which in my opinion far outclassed the quality of my ideas.

In a post that seems to take up where I left off, Matthew Anderson challenged evangelicals to “properly articulate why the Church gathers and hears the Word of God, and then shapes its churches accordingly, [or] we will continue to be co-opted by technologism.”

I think Anderson is right to suggest that the “local sermon is crumbling” amid the abundance of excellent teaching now available online — in video podcasts, live web services, and even services like VideoTeaching.com. In fact, Kent Shaffer wrote an excellent blog series on why VideoTeaching.com is the next big church model.

NewSpring is a multi-site church, so I obviously believe in the power of video teaching as it is used in the context of a local body of believers overseen by a local pastor.

But where I worry is not that mediocre local teaching will be superseded by excellent remote teaching, but that this trend will be accompanied by an erosion of understanding of the importance of both local gathering and local authority.

Ecclesiology isn’t sexy in church circles. And I don’t think it packs pews or auditoriums. But the stakes are high enough that we need to do better in explaining the importance of being the church in a local context, and why membership of the “universal church” is not sufficient.

Typically, we cast the importance of local church as the ministry of the body. But I wonder whether it has to be more expansive even than that, perhaps along the lines of Frank Viola’s recent musings on Ekklesia and discipleship.

Anderson will be debating Andrew Jones as part of the Christian Web Conference at Biola in September.

I’m going to do my best to be there. It should be fun.

“Instead of asking, “Is virtual community real community?” Let’s spend more time considering “What is Biblical community?” Which leads us to consider “How can technology assist the life of a Biblical community?” — Drew Goodmanson, Is Online Community Real Community?

Wisdom.

Check out Matthew Lee Anderson’s response.

Does an online community of believers function as the body of Christ is exactly the standard by which we should be testing church online.

That’s why I’m increasingly more comfortable thinking about the web as a ministry tool, not an actualization of the visible church.

Agreed?

“When the Word of God, tailored to our need, comes to us in a per-
son who gives us his very self, there is a great triumph of love that almost
always leads to joy.” – John Piper, When I Don’t Desire God, p. 132.

A lot is being written about the new social media age, but i think it’s easy to over-complicate the payoff for the church in leveraging web social tools for ministry to the church.

Like never before, services like Twitter and Facebook and blogs give everyone an opportunity to walk alongside other Christians and listen to their hearts as they grapple with what it means to live out faith.

This seam of gold, incarnation and imitation, is of the highest value in the equipping of the saints. Is this not the power of so many of the psalms?

The word of God — its power, its joy, its truth — is meant to be proved all-good and all-sufficient when it is embodied in the lives of faithful, enduring saints.

And from old to young, we are meant to be engaged in the daily habit of “holy emulation” as we seek to embody that word. First we follow Christ, but as the Apostle Paul mercifully advised, “Be imitators of me,” or of elders or of entire churches.

If social media did nothing more than encourage imitation and incarnation it will have made a dramatic contribution to the church and the individuals lives of so many Christians laboring to fight for joy and perseverence where true Christian community is rare, and daily support and encouragement is generally unavailable.

Can social media be a vacuuous, trivial exercise in self-glorification? Of course. But that does not mean it cannot add to our spiritual armor.

Do you have people in your network who are remarkable in this way?

I’m enjoying the recent spike in Christian blog chatter about the web and the church, which is being touched off by the impending Christian Web Conference, which I am hoping to attend.

I thought Tall Skinny Kiwi Andrew Jones had a really thoughtful piece challenging our biases.

“Why ask if an online community is really a church when we can ask “how can we as the church use the tools of the internet to fulfill the church’s mission”?

Did that global-based web-community experience “real” fellowship or should they all fly to the same city to do it right? Did the pastor’s phone call count as “real” counseling or do we demand a return to the neglected practise of pastoral home visitation? Did those Christian soldiers in WWII experience “real” church as they sat around the radio broadcasts, or just a shadow of the real? Did those paypal money transfers to missionaries constitute “real” giving and therefore “real” worship?

He goes on to wonder whether all church is virtual, since the New Jerusalem has not yet been fully “actualized,” and he connects this thought to the letter to the Hebrews.

When I read through the letter to the Hebrews, I am reminded that we, the church of God, are essentially the invisible, virtual, spiritual, mystical body of Christ operating in the world in ways that are tangible and lasting and transforming, although not always visible. There is no defining boundary that divides the on-line church that meets in cyberspace with the off-line church that meets in buildings. We are a spiritual, invisible, community that represents the firstfruts of an unshakeable Kingdom that will last forever. We are a virtual church that finds tangible ways to live out our calling in the world, whether the forms we chose are touchable or not. Reality is not found in bricks and mortar. Reality is found in the ways in which our worship and service correspond to the God’s invisible Kingdom reality and purposes.

I think his concluding point is where I have landed in this debate until the Lord directs me otherwise:

The virtual online church happens every day as believers in Christ aggregate on the web around missional tasks, fulfil their obligation to each other to share all things and exhort each other daily, as they publish glad tidings daily in electronic forms that will outlast paper books, as they meet globally in ways that could never be achieved in the physical realm.

Go ahead and read the whole thing.

Eastern Orthodoxy sees the church as “truly the Ark in which mankind may be saved from the flood of corruption and sin.”

It’s more than just a family. It’s literally the “mothership.” It’s actually part of the design and construction of Eastern Orthodox churches to have the long, tall building resemble a ship, “journeying towards the kingdom with Christ at the helm.”

As the “always reforming” New Calvinists like Matt Chandler and Mark Driscoll make bold moves in redefining how we view belonging to a church and being the church, I think even Protestants are moving to a higher view of Christian community.

But it strikes me that the “weak link” is how difficult deep fellowship appears to be, the kind of abounding “love for each other and for all” that Paul describes in 1 Thessalonians as pre-requisite for being “blameless in holiness.”

How do we get along with, live alongside and love our brothers and sisters in Christ? Not very well, if you consider the common complaints in every church.

The response to Perry Noble’s preaching this Sunday on “judging others” touched a lot of raw nerves, for sure. And Ed Stetzer’s Lifeway research found that “not feeling connected to the people in my church,” ranks as one of the Top 10 reasons that 18-22 year olds leave the church.

I’ve spent a lot of time defending the potential for online “community.” But it seems to me that those critiquing the shallowness of the fellowship shouldn’t be throwing stones.

I think a Jewish teacher put it well in drawing analogy about seeing the speck of sawdust in another’s eye and missing the plank in one’s own eye.

The question is not: which methods do we use to fellowship?

The question is: how does the church lead its people in fellowship? The kind of fellowship that is apparently not only a great witness but also fundamental to keeping Christians afloat in the Christian life?

Isn’t it time we moved beyond concerns or fears about holy huddles and koombayas?

What say you?

I’ve been thrilled about the entry of North Point into the online ministry space. With such a world class staff, there’s no question that we’ll learn a ton from their efforts.

I thought its most recent blog introducing its connections strategy was fascinating, revealing a cautious, humble approach to how the new digital space its opening up will help attenders grow in faith.

They see online connection as:

• An opportunity for enhancing connection, sharing and growing
• A path away from isolation toward conversation
• Not a replacement for face-to-face connection
• Not a full expression of community.

I particularly love pastor Jeff Henderson’s? closing comment:

You may have noticed that we haven’t used the term community or online groups in the talk of our next step connections. This is intentional since we still have questions about the depth to which we can know and grow online. We are not ready yet to say that we can provide a full expression of group life or community online. But, we are ready to connect our viewers into conversations, exploration and relationships that will enhance the North Point Online experience and help lead our guests into a growing relationship with Jesus Christ!

The truth is all of us pastoring online yearn and feel the “birth pangs” even of our physical churches can be fully expressed by supplementing our lived experience in and through digital tools.

I am growing clearer every day of the reality that the Web Church doesn’t have to arrogate to itself the idea that it is a complete or perfect expression of “church” for it to be worthy and redeeming way to advance God’s kingdom that is truly, permanently and dramatically changing lives.

Who’s with me?

Beth Kantor had an interesting post today at her social media blog, lending her expertise and considerable network of social media professionals to trying to leverage faith using digital tools.

Here’s an excerpt of the post, but you should read the whole thing:

I sense a lot of fear among traditional religious institutions around embracing and leveraging technology change. They seem to fear losing control and having traditional hierarchies challenged in an increasingly open source and bottom up world. Ironically, the best of social media leads to the kind of direct peer to peer communication among people of faith that was the origin of most mainstream religions before formal institutions and hierarchies were established. No doubt the new technologies can be distracting and take away from mindfulness and rich spiritual practice, but they also offer tremendous opportunities for enhancing and supporting religious communities in unprecedented ways. And many folks don’t seem to understand, as the book Groundswell articulates so clearly, at the end of the day it’s really all about relationships and NOT the technology tools.

When you look at the whole scope of faith institutions online, I think she’s right. But I’m also deeply encouraged by the breadth and depth of engagement with digital tools by evangelical churches.

I’ve volunteered to be a part of whatever workshops and initiative Beth gets rolling.

The quicker we get to social media being a standard engagement tool rather than a faddish effort to prove our “relevance” to the culture, the better in my opinion.

It was only a matter of time before the mobile revolution caught up with the online church revolution.

The result: A Hawaii church, New Hope Christian Fellowship, will become the first to livestream its services via the iPhone. Other churches, like Flamingo Road, have been offering that kind of mobility for a while using U-Stream’s iPhone app.

I’m a fan of anything we can do to break down the barriers for people to experience church and hear the word of God. As Bobby Greuenwald of Lifechurch.tv has pointed out, the mobile handset will be the predominant way to access the Web in the not-too-distant future, especially in the developing world. That’s reason alone to refocus our web projects to the mobile phone.

But as my post about “What can Web Campus attenders tell us about church,” seems to indicate, there’s definitely a question about whether the convenience of church might affect the significance of church.

I think it’s legitimate to ask whether there’s a special form of attention that’s required in worship, rather than in just consuming information? Can you get as focused on God if you’re viewing while riding the train or walking down the street?

To reframe a comment made by John Piper regarding the need to twitter during a service, isn’t it part of worship to stop for God?

Naturally, many people will want to create a “private sanctuary” — real or atmospheric — so they can pay complete attention to a church service on an iPhone. But i think there’s no question that the technology will effect the nature of our engagement, as John Dyer’s blog warns us.

What’s your take?

Reading Mark Batterson’s recent interview with Neue Ministry on community rung so many bells it felt like a carnival in my head this morning.

Some choice snippets: (emphasis mine)

“To me, the greatest adventure is God inviting us into this thing called the Great Commission—how He didn’t call us to do something on our own. God loves the adventure of doing things together … We have a range of about 90 different groups, and they range from Bible studies to running a marathon together. They are so diverse; they’re as diverse as our leaders are. What it is, is just finding touch points. … I think one reason why God wants to be in commission with us is because nothing brings people together like common mission.

…. Ultimately, we want people to have a face-to-face, physical community, but we’re discovering that often starts with a virtual community …

To me, my late-blooming fascination with technology, which resulted in pastoring the NewSpring Web Campus, is all about exploring how our social web tools can help us become visiable, powerful, contagious, “communities of grace.”

Slowly but surely, i believe we are building a community on the web campus. But i can’t shake the feeling that the more opportunities we give to our attenders to do something together, the more likely we are to building deep, lasting relationships — and far quicker, with far more of them.

For instance, the kind of lifestyle groups Mark talks about absolutely flourish online. Crafts, photos, music, you name it. It takes my breath away just thinking about the impact that one surrendered Christ follower can make in that kind of environment.

Do you have thoughts to share in crafting an online active community strategy?

I’m a fan of Seth Godin’s pithy wisdom along with thousands of other people.

I like him most when he pops bubbles, as he did with this comment over the weekend on The Paradox of the Middle of the Market.

The middle of the market is a paradox because of the inherent contradiction between the ease of reaching the nerds and the geeks and the need to reach the middle.

The solution, if there is one, is to enter a market to the enthusiastic cheers of those in search of the new, but to build a product/service that appeals to those in the middle. After the initial wave of enthusiasm, you hunker down and ignore those that first embraced you, obsessing instead on the needs and networks of the middle. It’s a difficult balancing act, but it’s the only one that works.

Ultimately, you end up disappointing the hard core that first found you, but because of their initial enthusiasm (and more important, because you designed your work for the masses in the first place), your product crosses the chasm and reaches a larger group. The formula starts with a service or product that’s purple enough to spread, but not so hyper-fashionable that it merely entertains the insiders.

Over the first several months of the NewSpring Web Church experiment, there’s one common denominator I’ve observed:

Almost all the people who are committed attenders, volunteers and those who depend on the Web Campus as their only form of church aren’t techno geeks.

Most are ordinary people who “need a job done.”

Most are, in a lot of ways, old school.

They’re not into pioneering a new form of church. Or rebelling from traditional church.

They’re just craving the word of God preached passionately, and they’re wanting to live out their faith in whatever environment helps them do that best, and according to the personal situation they are in.

That’s why our team works hard to resist adding layers of bells and whistles to the NewSpring Web Campus.

And why I personally think about my mother-in-law before I even make any suggestions about changes. (She is a new believer in south Louisiana who never thought about using twitter or Facebook or chatrooms until it became vital to living in Christian community on the Web Campus.)

How simple is too simple? How techie is too techie?

And how do we know when we’ve struck the right balance?

A little while back, I mused about whether my two reformed heroes, John Piper and Mark Driscoll, considered the Web church blasphemy.

Mark Driscoll responded in the last 8 or 10 minutes of his Advance ‘09 talk on What is the Church? recapping his arguments (direct link) in Vintage Church.

Now it’s John Piper’s turn to weigh in, and he doesn’t mince words. Here’s the full transcript of the question, “what are your thoughts on worshiping and being part of Christ’s body through an online church?” sent in to “Ask Pastor John.”

“If the question means, “as your only experience of worship,” it seems sick. We are created in bodies, not just in minds. And there is something docetic about this. That may not mean anything to a lot of people. Docetism was an early heresy that said that the body is not very important, and that life in the flesh and the created world is not very important, and that Jesus Christ only seemed to have a body. And usually material is evil.

God made us with bodies. He made us to give holy kisses to one another—embraces, handshakes, eyeball-to-eyeball conversation. He made husband and wife not to have imaginary video sex through Skype. He made them to go to bed together in the same bed. He made them to raise children in the same house, with hands-on hugs and spanks on the bottom and love. And he made churches to get together to hear each other sing, and to look at each other and talk to teach other, and minister to each other and help each other die well.

So to dispense with the entire bodily dimension of togetherness in order to substitute a video dimension of togetherness—like this right now—would, I think, be spiritually defective, would be contrary to Christ’s understanding of the church, and would be hurtful to the soul.

There are mysteries here in human relationships that we can’t quantify. And I don’t think that they can be replaced by electronic symbols.”

I think this critique, like Pastor Mark’s, takes the Web church too literally. The NewSpring Web Campus and other churches are actively encouraging relationships in the real world to complete the web campus experience.

But he also is clear that communal worship must be physical and is not sufficient if it is only a sense of communal gathering, as would happen in a chatroom.

What’s your take?

By now, you probably know that I’m pretty serious about exploring whether the church can be the church online.

I feel like I’m called to that purpose, and I feel like we need to be brave enough to try things that we aren’t entirely comfortable with in order to “by testing discern what is the will of God.” I have plans to take Mark Driscoll’s critique of the Web Church and offer my view of whether his theological points are sufficient to disqualify the web church at this point in its maturity.

I don’t want to be an uncritical apologist for the Web Church. There are many aspects of the Web Church that I’ve got personal reservations about, and many others that I think need to be tested before we can claim that it can fit within Biblical orthodoxy.

But what does bother me is that so often the critiques are coming from the point of view that the web church is a church expression that is incomplete, artificial (p.14 of link) or limited.

To which my response is: When has any church at any time not struggled with those things in one form or another?

Overall, it just seems like the church — even the early church! — was and is always and gloriously in the process of reaching toward the full expression of God’s grace and glory in the world — and failing backwards and forwards.

Why should the web church be held to a higher standard?

Unless you’re a really hardened cynic, I think it’s fair to say that most everyone wants to do good, even if don’t always act on it or even if we don’t really know what that is

It’s obvious that social good is hot right now. Google’s All for Good, Twitter’s Twestival and all sorts of micro-sites are tapping to that desire for people to “contribute.” The web’s core values of collaboration and creativity; its smart, curious, and socially savvy users; and its astounding network effects have created fertile soil for social activism that dares to change the world.

So why don’t we do more as the church to embrace Jesus command to do good to others as an evangelism opportunity?

I’m convinced that when people stand shoulder to shoulder with sold-out believers “working out” their salvation, that the gospel will get preached in dramatic ways. In fact, I think the church should choose personal missions above financial mission work wherever possible for this very reason.

One of the most joyful moments of my life as a newspaper editor was my decision in 2005, under the prompting of the Holy Spirit, to send a curious, spiritually seeking reporter to Hurricane-Katrina ravaged Mississippi with two Christian congregations who were ministering there.

She returned with a deep, profound, life-transforming understanding of Christ that led her to become a member of her church, be baptized in Christ and eventually become a part-time children’s ministry worker.

I think there’s plenty of opportunities for us to engage with people who want to do good locally, since who knows local communities and there needs better than local churches? Why are we leaving this to the United Ways and the Rotary Clubs of the world?

Mission activity energizes local congregations, gets them focused on the point of living for Jesus and gives us an opportunity to talk about Jesus — and build the relationships with non-believers who may later be interested in finding out a little more about why we choose to live such other-focused and sacrificial lives.

We can start by registering what missions opportunities we do have on search engines like All For Good. And then we can start designing and executing high-contact, flexible and inspiring missions opportunities in our local communities.

What’s stopping us?

A lot of the critical and necessary debate on this blog comes around one way or the other to: How does the church handle the rising tide of consumerism in its expression?

It’s not an accident: The web has empowered the individual like no other time in history, and the act of accomplishing ministry in this context is bound to flirt, sometimes dangerously, with abetting the self-seeking, vain, prideful human heart without God, rather than calling it to repentence in light of the manifest glories of God.

It seems to me that man has always seen himself at the center of all things. This is not new. What is new is the extent to which man can now do it in almost all phases of life. And the remedy for this heart sickness is and always will be the cross of Jesus.

So here’s my question: When God calls you to salvation, do you really have a choice to “opt out” of the body of Christ? Is it not one of the most magnificent promises of scripture that it’s not possible?

Only “Christians” with unregenerate hearts go shopping for God “experiences,” rather than surrender to him.

Only “Christians” with no understanding of Lordship believe that God is a vending machine of blessings.

Only “Christians” who have never heard the truth will allow themselves to be swayed by every wind of doctrine.

Is it not the gospel, the good news, the freedom from captivity, that human agency, human choice, for the regenerated heart, is always for good?

Our hyper-consumerist society is still relatively young, probably 100 years old at best. And for the church, for thousands of years a local phenomenon, our history with it is even shorter. Perhaps 50, if that. And i think that, if anything, there is a reckoning coming for the church as it wrestles with this, which probably explains some of my passion for the Web Church: It accelerates the urgency of figuring this out.

I submit that the battle is not between consumerism and whatever some Christians think can control it — authority structures, whatever. The battle is to get anointed, gospel-saturated teaching that places the supremacy of Christ above all things into earshot of as many dead hearts as possible so they can be convicted and awakened to life in Christ.

We need to make sure that people choose the church rather than Oprah, Dr. Phil, Tom Cruise and every other self-help guru who is leading people dancing and singing straight to the gates of hell.

Only then will they know difference between a true and false gospel.

Only then will they know the difference between a life that glorifies self and a life that serves God

Only then will they know that Jesus’ call to total surrender can not be resisted except with tears.

And only then will the Holy Spirit magnificently insist that the appetite for seeing, savoring and treasuring the joy of Christ be fed insatiably.

I ask again: Where does the path lead for Christ-centered churches who work in this “crooked and twisted generation” without an understanding of choice?

This is my last post exploring the fascintating conclusions from Hartford Seminary’s groundbreaking study on megachurch attenders and what the web church can learn from it. You can read posts one, two and three and four if you missed them.

One of the more fascinating parts of the study showed that:

some people intentionally don’t want to establish friendships, even if they are highly committed to the church. Certain people come because they can be, and want to remain, anonymous. … almost a third of those at these churches over five years still report having very few close friends there. For some attenders even long-term participation in the megachurch is about something other than having a network of close friendships.

Let’s face it: “community” can be intimidating to some people, especially those who may only be just starting to live the Christian life.

That’s where the Web church’s perceived weakness — its so-called anonymity — might prove to be one of its greatest assets.

To begin with, it might provide a private, anonymous, low-commitment way to experience Christians and Christian teaching. But there’s also a clear path toward Christian community for those who want to explore it in a controlled environment, calibrated along a continuum of casual conversation, friending, commenting, messaging and physical meetups, to name just a few.

From a theological standpoint and a practical standpoint, discipleship occurs best in a community context, and the Web Church could provide that safe, community space in a believers’ formative years.

Thoughts?

I’ve been looking at the Hartford Seminaryanalysis of megachurch attenders because I think it could be useful in understanding the Web Church’s potential mission field and how it can extend what we’ve learned from modern church methods. You can read past posts in this series here, here and here.

One of the study’s most dramatic conclusions was that:

involvement at these (and perhaps all) churches may be less about creating an idealized plan to move someone toward commitment and more about providing many ways by which people could craft their unique, customized spiritual experience to meet their needs.

It’s logical that the Web Church respond to this apparent desire for customizing church experience. Web culture, after all, is about empowering individual choice, and letting you set the terms of your engagement with content and people.

Many NewSpring Web Campus attenders are already actively engaged in designing their own path to spiritual growth and assembling the building blocks of an online church life, spurred on by the breathtaking amount and quality of podcasts, books, and blogs that fan the flames of someone’s spiritual fires on demand.

There’s no reason to think that wouldn’t extend to all aspects of church life as they migrate online. Someone could choose one church’s online worship experiences, another’s online small groups, yet another’s online discipleship program etc. and another’s online outreach and missions program.

I think the megachurch lesson here is that offering many paths for spiritual exploration and engagement and involvement could be the Web Church’s supreme value proposition.

That could include providing social guides or personal recommendations toward other trusted, high-quality content. Or it could be offering opportunities for spiritual growth in partnership with regional, national and international ministries. It could even be providing the support systems, resources and “open access” to the Web church’s people to build new ministries and recruit for them across the web.

A believer’s attachment, then, to a Web church might not be traditional “membership,” but in the personal relationships with individual believers as they come across them in different ministry area.

What do you think?

The Hartford Seminary megachurch study illuminated, among other things, the fact that their appeal was dramatically greater among the young and the mobile. In fact, the study found that it was precisely that demographic that was missing from more traditional churches.

So what happens when these highly mobile individuals decide to, well, be mobile?

I think it’s obvious that the Web Church can provide a home to those “young and mobile” individuals, especially if there’s no megachurch-like environment where they live. It’s a demographic primed to adopt technology and most interested in redefining their engagement with church.

But the web church can also help this mobile group avoid the potential for Christians to fall out of fellowship and find themselves outside the church for months or years as they move from place to place — more than enough time for Satan to attack and potentially shipwreck someone’s faith.

What I’m calling the “seasonal audience” could be huge for the church: Those people in every demographic who find themselves unable to attend physical church regularly because of chronic illness, relocation, work schedules or a myriad of other artificial barriers. Some of those barriers may originate from poor Lordship or discipleship, but the church must be open enough to work with people where they are — and encourage them to grow into who God wants them to be.

In being able to “take your church with you,” believers can maintain the healthy connections and the spiritual family that has helped believers grow as lifestage and lifestyles change, or at least until they are in a position to plug in at brick and mortar churches.

The megachurch study by the folks over at Hartford Seminary has grabbed my attention, largely because I think it proves that “church different” has created a new “market” of believers.

The study’s authors marvel at the megachurch’s role as an “assimilation engine,” taking people from every demographic, religious and cultural background and helping them connect and integrate within the Christian faith.

They found that 25 percent of attenders were new to church. And 28 percent of all attenders had recently relocated — representing 40 percent of all those who had church background.

The lesson here is that traditional churches apparently carried a lot of cultural and even “theological” baggage that turned people off and created barriers to entry.

I think the web church, as the megachurch has done, can remove artificial, and largely cultural barriers to Christianity and allow for sampling of the experience on an attender’s own terms.

There are many hundreds of millions of people worldwide, but especially in the post-Christian west, who don’t have any real understanding whatsoever of the basics of Christianity and would simply not see the point of going to church at all.

The Web church could be ideally positioned to create a new type of experience that intentionally refuses to trade on old and outdated assumptions about faith and its centrality to one’s life, and instead chooses to address spiritual seekers and immature believers head-on. (The megacurch study found that only 6 percent of attenders were new converts, so there’s lots of progress to be made in that area.)

Web church worship environments tap into the spirit of our technological, experiential, explorational age. And the web church can dovetail nicely with personal and relational evangelism that can overcome hostility to institutional church and “organized religion.”

Given that personal invites were, by an overwhelming margin, the No. 1 method that megachurches attracted attenders, I think there’s reason to be optimistic that Web churches, properly positioned, can truly take advantage of the Web’s network effects.