Not too long ago, someone posited me with a question: “What is an online/digital church all about?” What a great question! Out of the conversation that followed, I developed what I now call The Digital-Church Manifesto, my personal collection of convictions about what the Church should look like online.

(Credit: Bridge Element, CreativeMYK)

Before you go any further, you need to understand something about my personal theology about the Internet. The Internet is not a “parallel universe” in which some people live a life that does not intersect with the “physical universe.” In other words, your life online is not separate from your life offline. For more on this, you should read this and this conversation from earlier.

The Niche of the Digital Church

What I see as being the killer app for the Digital Church is the fact it can be used by God in many ways that physical churches and ministries cannot. Of course, the opposite

The other day, I wrote about 5 Core Elements to Be a True Online Expression of Jesus. I’d like to think it was a good article, and you should read it and leave a comment. Now. Go ahead, I’ll wait.

Jane Jetson's all over telepresence!

All caught up now? Good. One of the terms I threw around was telepresence. While I would love to say I coined that word gilded in its shiny pants goodness, I did not. The first time I saw it was in SimChurch by Douglas Estes. In the book, he describes this theological concept of togetherness as described in Acts 4:32, but in the context of doing it online. His summary of the concept of telepresence is thus,

Today is a vision dreaming sort of day for me. The worship gathering with our local church body was fantastic and intimate. I even had the pleasure of doing lunch with a good friend afterward. All in all, it’s been a pretty good day if you ask me!

At lunch, we chatted about the upcoming Online Campus we’ll be launching. Since the gears are turning, I’ve been mulling over a few elements which I believe define an Online Campus. While this is not a conclusive list, it is the very bare minimum five requirements to become a functional, biblically ecclesiological expression of Jesus.

(Credit: Doug Shelton, CreativeMYK)

1. Be in sync with the church’s vision. Habakkuk 2:2f

This is the first and foremost requirement. If an Online Campus is not

How much thought has gone into your church’s website? Aside from the original though, “Hey, weneed a website!” has any thought gone into your church’s website? There is a harking reality that most church websites are a hastily-posted page (or group of pages) built by someone with just enough experience to be dangerous. Not to discredit the efforts of those who donated their hard-earned free time, but we do need to face reality here; those dated and shoddy websites “looked bad then, and they look positively prehistory by today’s standard.”^[1] If your website looks like it could be a Sega or Super Nintendo game, that’s NOT good, and you would be more effective by taking it down.

(Credit: Bridge Element, CreativeMYK)

Most websites used by churches today do little—if anything at all—to serve the community the church resides in. Think about it like this, the Bible clearly tells the church to serve where they are, ergo; all extensions of the church should as well (James 1:27, 1 Peter 4:10f, Romans 12:1f). This means the website, or online presence, of the church should serve the people just as the church should be. (Now, if your church isn’t serving the community to start with, that’s another conversation altogether.)

How does a church website serve its community? Simple! Who is

1. Douglas Estes, SimChurch: Being the Church in the Virtual World (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2009), 177. [↩]

In reading the articles posted on this site, it’s pretty hard to miss the fact that God has called me into online ministry. What that looks like exactly is, well, figuring that out is half the fun! If you want to join me on this adventure, why not subscribe to my RSS feed, or contribute through the comments below.

(Credit: Todd White, CreativeMYK)

As part of my serving at our local church (and I am strongly convicted that any believer should be part of a local, physical expression of the Church), is working with the Media Arts Team. Specifically within that Team, I am helping to birth a fully functional digital campus for the church. While thinking about what that may look like, and thinking about ministry in general within the local church, this thought came to mind:

When you spend a lot of time finding people to attend your ministry, you are really putting on an event. But when you put on an event to fulfill the needs of your people, you are then doing real ministry. (Tweet this idea!)

Let’s unpack that a little bit.