Rumor on the street is that LifeChurch.tv is about ready to launch another campus. Only this one won’t be like their other seven locations in three different states. The new one will be located in cyberspace. It will be an Internet campus. It’ll be fascinating to see how this one unfolds. I’m not familiar with any other Internet campuses on the Web. Looks like LifeChurch.tv may be clearing a new path once again.
So, if you were designing an Internet campus, what would it look like?
we’re in the middle of designing one ourselves. it’s pretty cool to know now that lifechurch.tv is gonna be trailblazing for us to learn alongside with them.
there’s so many options for how to do this. we’ve been doing a live webcast for over a year now and we have a steady 25+ viewers online every weekend without really promoting the idea. what we have decided so far is to keep it very simple and simply “host” the experience from start to finish. the missing element in a live webcast the way we’ve been doing it is that there’s no direct communication to the “congregation” online. there’s no handshake, no smile in the parking lot, no clean bathrooms, nothing. so we’re going to take the components of the church experience that we do have control of online and bump them way up. humanizing the online church experience is our biggest goal. providing the lateral communication – the peripherals – that make a good weekend service experience a great one when done right.
sounds a lot like some stuff i read in a “simply” book. or wait – was that in mark waltz’s book? it’s just applying those principles y’all teach so well in another environment yet again.
you can bet i’ll be paying close attention to lifechurch.tv’s online campus. thanks for the heads up!
I don’t know exactly how it would look but I would want it to reflect what the physical venues reflect. One thing I do know, If I had the money and know-how, I would make sure all the venues had wireless internet connections with access to the site that would offer many other things that people couldn’t get in the service, like background info and study on the messages. Also it would be cool to have a video link to the nursery or childrens church areas if my kids were in them so I wouldn’t have to leave my seat.