Churches Use Technology to Spread the Word
Mar 17, 2005 3:42 PM
"God is reconnecting the church in many ways," says Neil Morrison, producer at Northland, A Church Distributed in Longwood, Fla., describing the philosophy driving his church's approach to multi-site worship.
Northland's strategy has even led to joint services with a partner church in Egypt, and a similar event is scheduled for May in cooperation with churches in Ukraine.
Northland emphasizes full two-way interactivity among its sites. "We combine all elements of the service together rather than separate worship and the message," Morrison says. "All locations include live musicians and singers that both participate locally in their venue and contribute elements back to the other locations."
From Northland's main campus in Longwood, a self-installed, dedicated 12-stand fiber-optic line runs to the Lyman campus about a mile away. In Lyman, congregants gather in a high school performing arts center of about 900 seats. The connection provides 56 channels of bi-directional audio and eight channels of digital and analog video.
"The total system delay is just over one millisecond," Morrison says, "enabling us to split the band and singers seamlessly between the locations."
Morrison notes, though, that the fiber-optic solution isn't always the best. "It does have scalability issues due to the high cost of acquiring third-party fiber connectivity and the relative difficulty of finding sites with direct geographic access to our main location," he explains.
About 25 miles away, the Mount Dora location is linked to Longwood by six T1 lines, allowing digital video in each direction along with 14 channels of audio. The newest location—West Oaks, about 15 miles from Longwood—is served by a 5.8Ghz wireless WAN connection providing 50Mbs of data capacity. "We have tremendous capacity to add additional video and audio channels to this location," Morrison says.
For its Egyptian venture, Northland has relied on four ISDN lines supported by what Morrison calls, "standard videoconference equipment."
Northland also provides a worship experience via DVD for a congregation about 200 miles away, and is exploring similar alliances with churches as far off as New York and Los Angeles.
DVD is often the preferred tool of multi-site churches when it comes to integrating a lead pastor's weekly teaching into local services. For example, Community Christian Church, a six-location church in Suburban Chicago, records a message by lead pastor Dave Ferguson and the teaching team at its Saturday evening service, which is then distributed on DVD to its other locations for use the next morning.
Each location is equipped with high-end projection equipment and multiple screens so that the image of the lead pastor can be augmented with texts, illustrations, and other supporting material.
Community Christian has been pursuing a multi-site strategy for about six years, and will add two new sites in 2005, Ferguson says.
Each site has its own campus or congregational pastor, who is the main daily contact for members. But being allied into a multi-site community offers considerable benefits, according to Ferguson—chiefly, access to a higher level of content than most small, independent churches would be able to create on their own.
This content includes "The Big Idea," a program that uses music, theater, video, and other media tools to reinforce the central message of each week's teaching. Each Big Idea emerges from roughly eight weeks of planning and includes a discussion guide so that each church community can develop the theme for itself.
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