The Future of the Church

View Commentstony • 25th Sep 2007 • Church, Church Planting, Tech

I’ve been processing a lot of information lately regarding what the church of the future looks like. I’ve recently watched some videos on the LifeChurch.tv site centered around Life Groups that take place totally online. I was intrigued that there were women from all across the country, from Maine to Chicago to Ohio and beyond, that are in a Life Group together. They are members of LifeChurch.tv’s Internet Campus and traveled to the Oklahoma City campus for three of their women to get baptized. These women appear to be very involved in each other’s lives, using social networking, letters, phone calls and care packages to stay in touch and love each other. Their reasons for utilizing the internet tools ranged from being former members at the OKC campus to not having a church like LifeChurch.tv in their area (Maine isn’t known for innovative churches).

I was talking about this whole idea with my wife today. The idea that a church can be made up of people from all around the country can be a part of the same group, discipling each other and loving each other, it kind of mind bending. In a way, it is like the old days of AOL chat rooms or the old old school BBS (for the record, I never really experienced BBS, I’m not that g33ky). You are with like minded people who come together for a purpose. What is the difference between that or being part of a Life Group with a local church? If you are able to take the technology aspect out of it, there really isn’t a difference. A group of people doing life together. I have no doubt that the women in the group I described earlier do life together. They are on each other’s Myspace pages. They know about the struggles each one is going through. The argument that people might not be as involved in these Life Groups really doesn’t hold water because that same thing can be said for any gathering of people.

So what is the church of the future? There are many churches around the country that are planting multiple campuses and using a single teacher/preacher. Each of these campuses have a campus pastor or group of pastors on the ground who take care of the pastoral care and normal ‘church stuff.’ The difference is that the teaching isn’t always done by the campus pastor. Several weeks a year, in LifeChurch.tv’s campuses, the campus pastor will teach to the entire LifeChurch.tv Network. LifeChurch.tv really is just one of the churches using this model and doing it very well. Doesn’t this negate what God needs to say to the people locally? Maybe. Probably not, though. There are churches all over the country who have different preachers giving essentially the same message(sadly it is sometimes the exact same message that they stole from someone else anyway), so why can’t a preacher from OKC give a message to people in Dallas?

What would this look like in your area? Could you join LIfeChurch.tv’s network, plant a church and use the LifeChurch.tv messages and materials and take the area by storm? Does being a pastor of a local church mean that you have to preach the word on Sunday mornings? Essentially, doing church in this way is simply a different way to multi-site.
I’m just using LifeChurch.tv as an example. Some other churches that have some similarities:

Seacoast Church

National Community Church

Community Christian Church

NorthCoast Church

Discovery Church

NorthPoint Church

Your thoughts?

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