Did your Pastor lead the way? Or was he convinced by someone?

Our web church experience started where most everything starts in a church: with one person who had a dream. In our case it was a guy named Jim Krause who told the church board that he wanted to buy a camera and show the church services over this thing called the Internet. No one believed him, and one person told him that no one was going to watch, but he managed to persuade them to give him some money to get started and so he did. Jim ran everything, every week, by himself, for many years. And people started watching. And it grew from there to include more and more volunteers, more equipment, more cameras, more lights and more people online. Then the church hired a Pastor for Media Ministries (a female, no less) and things just took off from there. The ministry outgrew first one room and then another as more and more equipment came onboard. And what started as a ministry to shut-ins started picking up non-local people until the church outgrew its Internet connection and had to start telling people to stop using wireless access on Sabbath mornings otherwise it would take down the Internet web stream. Once the online attendance hit 50, people would get kicked off and would get upset because they couldn't get back on to the web stream. So finally the church upgraded it's streaming server and streaming connection to where we are up to our current 250-300 concurrent connections. What was 1 camera, became 3 and then 4. The original character generator with two fonts was replaced with a computer system and then MediaShout was thrown into the mix as well, just so Bible texts could be called up and displayed on a moment's notice.

All of this was in place by the time the current pastor, Dr. Derek Morris, came on board, so there was no escaping it. To his credit, Pastor Morris is a huge advocate of the online church community and loves sharing emails with the congregation that he or I get from online attenders from around the world. His basic attitude is: "Why are we here? To share the Gospel." So Pastor Morris took no convincing and saw the potential in it right away. I suppose that original pastor took convincing all those years ago, but nobody remembers his name anymore. :-)

--delwin