Meet NewSpring’s Internet Pastor

As we ramp up to launch some significant changes in our web strategy to reach people for Jesus, we’d added a key leader to help us make that happen. Nick Charalambous will be starting his role as NewSpring’s Internet Pastor. Nick has an interesting story, so I asked him to succumb to the pressure of responding to my five questions. Here’s the interview:

TONY: We’re making up your role as we go, but how would you best describe what you’re going to be doing as NewSpring’s new Internet Pastor?

NICK: In the early stages, our team’s focus will be on extending NewSpring’s worship services live on the web, but we’ll likely have to consider how other church services can and should be extended too, such as care and discipleship.

I think the more important, difficult and exciting work will involve exploring 1) how we use social media to empower the body of believers to minister fully and radically to each other and 2) how we use social media to build an alternative “gateway” into Christian faith for those who are turned off by “church.”

I think many of the essential tools are out there, but there are some we should innovate to meet the unique needs of an active Chuch body.

TONY: You’ve actually been around NewSpring for quite some time. Would you be willing to share a little bit of your spiritual journey and how you landed at NewSpring?

NICK: I just celebrated my fifth year as a Christ-follower, actually! I came to Christ at NewSpring in 2003 at the conclusion of a six-week reporting assignment about the rise of NewSpring in our community. A lot of folks thought it was a cult; at least dangerous to the church. I guess I saw an opportunity to make a name for myself.

I was born to Greek Orthodox parents in North London (UK), and I’d attended an Anglican elementary school, so I had some Christian reference points. But I had long ago made up my mind that Christianity was just superstition. The crash course in theology, church history and the rise of the alternative church movement the project entailed, didn’t shake my belief that it was all a “God delusion.”

It was during my final interview, when Perry asked me “where do you stand with Jesus?”  that I believe the Holy Spirit, quite literally, slapped me upside the head. It felt like a panic attack, actually. I sputtered the typical stuff — he’s a wise teacher but not God etc. — and ended up agreeing to revisit NewSpring as a non-journalist. I returned the day the story was published, probably because I wanted to face any critics. It was during a sermon on Solomon that God spoke very clearly to my heart that Jesus was very real, and that I should follow Him with everything I had in me. You could say it was a miracle mashup of “I was blind and now I can see” and the road to Damascus.

TONY: I think folks are going to be shocked that you don’t really sound anything like someone from Anderson, South Carolina should sound. How did a Greek guy with a British accent end up in the South?

NICK: I had always been fascinated with the American story, with all its drama and excess, and I jumped at the chance to live here when I won a full-ride scholarship from the University of Birmingham (UK) to study a master’s degree in journalism and mass communications at the University of Kansas in Lawrence.

When I graduated, I moved quickly to a small newspaper in the Mormon-dominated Northwest in Pocatello, Idaho, so I could qualify for an extra year on my U.S. student visa. After I got hastily married (for love, honest! although the Green Card was handy), I was resolved to hopping around the states using newspapers as my stepping stones.

After experiencing the Midwest and Northwest, I didn’t want to go to the Northeast or California because I felt like I knew those areas from TV and movies and I thought Texas would make me feel way too unmanly and European. In a toss up between the Southwest and the Southeast, I chose the Southeast because I was interested to see the British colonial influence. Within a couple years in Anderson, my marriage failed and I was making plans to go back to England with my tail between my legs. But God had other plans.

TONY: What about your previous roles at the newspaper has prepared you for what’s coming next?

NICK: As a reporter and editor, what I learned most about in my job was people. They are obsessed with life change, and if you want to communicate with them, you need to know the questions they have; their needs; their desires, and you need to help them. You realize that people learn best through identifying with other people and their experiences — imitatively. You discover that people instinctively “socialize” good information and are pre-disposed to create community around it, and if you want your message to transform, you’ve got to help do that.

In the last years of my career, working as director of digital platforms and products, it became obvious that media’s ultimate success was tied to that understanding of social connectedness. You have to know your audience specifically, how your audience encounters your message specifically and then how they use your message specifically, and you’ve got to constantly adjust to your audience in its ever-changing forms of relationship with your message and, most importantly, other people.

If the Church is a media entity at base, it would seem the collapse of the “mainstream media” and the decline of the western Church have a common root: Both fell into the trap of mistaking that the power of their message was in the medium. We need to remember the power of the message is in the messenger.

TONY: What most excites you as you consider where ministry and the Web are about ready to collide?

NICK: I think its the tantalizing possibility that we can make our message truly viral once again, where faith in Christ can come from people “rubbing up” against Christ-followers in their day-to-day lives and (hopefully!) their seeing Christ in us. At their base, Christians are a people who have made a joyful discovery of what it means to have a true relationship with God, and if people see that real, enduring joy, they are instinctively drawn to it.

We’ve seen in the rapidly secularizing West that the decline of Christian faith is the result of people no longer associating physical church or its people with anything useful, either spiritually or socially. Rather than spend all our energy re-wiring people’s bad associations with physical church, how about putting our energy into wiring good associations with the collective of individual Christians who form the true temple of God?