Today I wrote a post on the new Faith Promise Blog to recap some of the cool stuff that’s been happening on the Internet Campus. I can’t believe it’s only been 13 weeks since we started, but the stories are great.
This is a stitched panorama of photos that I took at our church’s 4th of July event. (You can drag the top image to move it around.)
If you haven’t already, you can check out some of the other photos I took by going here.
Over the past few months, I’ve noticed that there are quite a few things that would be good to communicate at church that fall outside the scope of the church website. For me, that usually entails some kind of media, but I can also see how other things – like leadership articles or other ministry items – should be finding their way to a centralized location on the internet. Twitter & Facebook are both avenues that we’ve been using for communication, but something more central and intertwined is the approach I’ve come to enjoy here with this blog (the blog being central, and FB and Twitter as offshoots).
To meet that need, I launched a blog for Faith Promise Church a few days ago. Should be a fun project. You can check it out here.
Things on the Internet Campus have been going great, and I’m very super-happy to report that starting this weekend we’re adding an additional service. That means that you can now connect up with Faith Promise Church each Sunday at 10 am or 11:45 am (Eastern Time).
In addition to that, there’s some fantastic top secret stuff going on for the iCampus that I really hope will come together in the next few weeks.
For a couple of months, we’ve been operating with four workstations in our office. Two spots are for our financial team, and the other two are for our communications team (an interesting combo for sure). Together, we called ourselves the “Office of Awesome.”
This week, our office got even a little more awesome. We turned the workstations around to face the walls and opened everything up in the middle.
Josh Whitehead asked me to write a post for his blog today. If you’re interested in specific details of the iCampus, you can can check that out here.
Well, the Internet Campus has gone great these past two weekends. Here’s a bit of recap:
If all of that wasn’t cool enough, I heard a great story tonight from a couple that’s been attending our Knoxville campus for about a month now. As we were talking, I mentioned the iCampus, and the wife said, “Oh, I was on there this morning.” I was surprised to hear that, but I was even more surprised about what she said next. She said, “When I realized what the Pastor was preaching about, I decided that my family needed to be there, so I logged off, told everybody to get ready, and we came to the 11:45 service.”
I can’t wait to hear more stories over the next months! We are doing ministry in very exciting times!
For several weeks now, we’ve been planning towards launching our Internet Campus this Easter weekend with a rebroadcast of Sacred Storm. There’s still a lot to do to get things ready, but tonight Josh and I decided to push the envelope a little further and do two services on Easter Sunday, 4/12/09. We’ll broadcast at both 3pm and 8pm EST.
Honestly, this is terrifying, and the potential for failure just got cranked up a notch, but so did the potential of making an eternal impact in people’s lives. Now, not only will we have six amazing productions in Knoxville, we’ll also have two productions that are aired globally. That’s amazing, and it’s worth the risk!
As you pray for these productions and invite people to attend, please also pray for my great friend Brad Roberts and I as we continue to build the Internet Campus and get it ready to roll.
A few months ago, I was impressed to see Firefox open up a graphic t-shirt selection online, and I was inspired to do the same sort of thing for Faith Promise. Well, now I have! Our Communications Team has put together some designs, and I’ve posted them up so that people can order their own custom colors, sizes, and styles. I got my own order in the mail last week, and I love it. I’m hoping that these t-shirts will be a helpful resource for many in our church to start conversations with people who are unchurched or disconnected from God.
Its been a fun project to work on in between other projects, and we’ll be adding new designs to the lineup over the next few months.
PS – I do still have arms and a head, but it was really late, and I took this photo myself.
One part of my job that I really enjoy is working with amazingly talented people at Faith Promise and leveraging the internet and social media to promote the ministry that is happening there.
This weekend I had the opportunity to put together a really cool website. Sacred Storm is the dramatic Easter production that our church has done for the past few years. I’ve not personally watched it, but from the photos and the testimonials of my friends, it’s pretty amazing. This year, we’re doing Sacred Storm the weekend before Easter (six productions), and if things go well in the development of our Internet Campus, we’re going to rebroadcast it the afternoon on Easter Sunday – probably 3 pm EST.
Kyle Gilbert is the Pastor of Communications & Internet Campus Pastor of Faith Promise Church [more]