On Sunday, I went to church online.
I had seen and been told about LifeChurch.tv and this week my wife and I decided to check it out. Here’s what I thought.
The message was great. I think God reminded me of a few things. I liked that the worship music was included in the service. The podcasts or vodcasts I know of don’t do that (admittedly, I only know of a few).
Overall, I think this is a brilliant idea. Church online had more attendees than some small local churches I know. There is even interactivity, via chat rooms and virtual hand raising. People connecting and praying.
This is a great outreach opportunity. The relative cost of going to church online is zip. You can just jump in, no questions asked. It allows for people wondering about God and church to check something out, and maybe get connected with a church and God. It allows people who, for whatever reason, can’t make it to services to “go” to church. This is leveraging the technology of the internet!
I think we should still seek face-to-face interactions in our communities, though. Being at church online made me miss being with everyone. I think that people connecting offline will never be replaced. Not that this is what I think LifeChurch.tv is trying to do (they have physical campuses all over).
But church online is good. Check out this post if you want proof! God moves in it. Welcome to a new era.
With all the means to get news, blog posts, and almost anything else on the web, which tools do you use? How efficient are they? Could they work better?
I was inspired by this post to think about my subscription practices, and I’ve found they could use some work. For my RSS feeds, I use Google Reader. I love it. But the number of articles per day has grown beyond what I can read everyday. What the above article suggested was to use email subscriptions for your must-read feeds. This would act as a filter and let you spend less time checking your feed reader. Cool.
So, my mind is taking that idea one step further. I find that for the few sites I frequent daily, I end up just checking their actual website. Why? Well, I comment on the posts. To do that, I have to be on their site. So why go through the RSS middleman? I did subscribe by email to these sites to see if it helped me at all. I think it has, at least a little.
I’ve found that I will probably end up with three categories of “feeds.”
Of course, the feeds are always in flux. If I really start liking a feed in the third category, I’ll jump it somewhere above.
So what’s your way? Any cool tools you use to make it easier?