kylegilbert

I love being the pastor of our Internet Campus, and I love the people who gather there each week. It’s an eclectic group from all over the United States (as well as a few from other parts of the world), and I get to listen to the stories as we see people’s lives impacted by God. It’s amazing.

Some people who log on there are just checking out our church before they visit. Others are attending because they’re sick, home with a new baby, or home bound. Some attend because they are Deaf, and we offer ASL interpreted worship services. Even though it’s different from traditional methods, God is meeting people there.

Let me give you one recent example:

Last week I made a follow up phone call to a young woman who lives out of state but attends online each week and wants to start serving through our Internet Campus.* After a short conversation with her, I realized that she hadn’t committed her life to Christ, and I got to lead her to the Lord. Since then, we’ve connected a couple of times, she’s going to be visiting Faith Promise over the Christmas holidays, and I’m scheduled to baptize her during the service when we do the recording for iCampus. Amazing.

While some are suspicious and fearful of this kind of ministry, we see both the current impact and the future potential. Because of that (and a group of people who have stepped up to the plate in service), I’m very pleased to announce that beginning this Sunday, our iCampus will now feature three service times: 10 am, 11:45 am, and 9:00 pm.

I couldn’t be more thrilled.

Please join with me in praying that God would continue to bless this online ministry – to impact lives for His Glory alone.

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*In case you don’t know, we have online greeters, prayer volunteers, administrators, and soon we’ll have our first online small group. There’s room for more, so shoot me an email or drop a comment on here, if you’re interested.

Prior to coming to Knoxville a year ago, I spent two years as a Campus Pastor at a second campus of my church. It was a great experience, God opened all of our eyes to new ways of doing church, and I built some lifelong friends, but we didn’t see a lot of growth or people coming to Christ. It was a time of enormous sowing, but very little reaping.

In some ways, things did not go the way we hoped and dreamed. It caused me to question my ability to lead and my capacity in ministry, and I began to work through my insecurities to rediscover that my personal worth has nothing to do with my performance. Through Christ, I have worth. I don’t have to spend my life trying to prove myself.

Now, a year later, I’ve found myself in the totally opposite situation. Things are going well. We’ve launched a new website, an Internet Campus, and done a bunch of other cool projects this year. The list of accomplishments is impressive, and people’s lives are being impacted each week through new initiatives.

Now that things are different, who gets the credit?

God, please protect me from my pride. Show me how to give you the credit and glory – for it all belongs to you.

At Faith Promise, we just finished a marathon weekend of five productions of Home Invasion, Sacred Storm, a story of one family’s struggles and the spiritual battle happening around them.

The acting and script was great, and attendance was pretty amazing. All services combined, there were over 5,300 in attendance. From the stories I’ve heard, it’s clear that God impacted a lot of lives.

But not only was it an exciting day on our physical campus, it was also a great day on our Internet Campus as well. Combined online attendance for the day was 504 – a figure that is nearly three times our normal online weekend attendance.

The graphic above is a representation of the 279 connections during our 9:00 broadcast this evening.

Some other interesting stats for the iCampus today:

• Over 600 hours of video were streamed
• People from five countries joined in
• 45 connected in the chat area
• Twelve people streamed the sign language video format

One of the many things I love about my job is the opportunities to build out event-specific websites. The screen capture above is from the re-launch of the Sacred Storm website to promote the upcoming Halloween production at Faith Promise Church called Home Invasion, Sacred Storm.

Even if you’re not in the Knoxville area, you can still be a part of this event since there will be three broadcasts on our Internet Campus on Sunday, November 1st:

• 9:45 AM
• 11:45 AM
• 9:00 PM

We’d also love it if you’d do us a favor and help us spread the word by sharing this event with your social networks. I believe God will use it to make a significant impact in people’s lives.

I’m in the middle of trying to kick off an online small group using webcams for people to connect with each other. I think it will be a great way to build community and discipleship into the lives of people who are already connecting to our Internet Campus each weekend, and several churches seem to be using this technology very effectively.

Just in case someone else trying to do the same thing stumbles across this post, I’ve put together some guidelines and recommendations into a document. I’m sure that it will be a work in progress, but you can download it in a couple of different formats below:

Online Small Group Guidelines (pdf) (Word Doc)

Today we launched our first Internet Campus with iPhone streaming, and it went great. Josh was kind enough to get me some screen captures on his iPod Touch, and you can see them below.

The Faith Promise Internet Campus continues to make progress, and thanks to the help of Brad Roberts and the folks at Light Cast Media, we’ll be testing out streaming on the iPhone this Sunday at 10 & 11:45 am. This is a brand new technology, and I’m glad we get to jump on board so early in the process.

If you have an iPhone or iPod Touch, you can test things out by going to http://faithpromise.org/icampus. If you go there on an iPhone or iPod Touch, you should just see a iPhone specific countdown page. From there, you’ll be able to select whether you want the stream with or without sign language. (Yes, you’ll be able to stream the sign language video on your iPhone.) Even without an iPhone, you can see what it looks like here.

If everything goes well, in addition to the iPhone stream, we will also see substantial improvements with both our audio and video quality. Matt James has helped me to set up a better encoding process, and Phil Bledsoe helped me to work out some kinks in the audio – providing the iCampus with a better range of sound.

What a blessing to work with such a great team! Pray with me that our iCampus will continue to make an impact in the lives of people online.

I love my job, and one of the things I get to do each day is make decisions. Decisions like:

• What new projects will my team take on?
• What will be priority?
• Where will we focus our time and money?
• Should we do option A, B, or C?

I hope that I make good decisions most of the time, but even when I don’t, I often get the opportunity to revisit those decisions again. The Deaf interpretation on the Internet Campus is a good example of this very thing.

You see, when we first launched the Internet Campus, I got a kind email that I quickly dismissed as outside our scope for the Internet Campus. That was three months ago.

Fortunately, our Graphic Artist Heather Burson, mentioned the idea to me a few weeks later and cast a vision for the impact the iCampus could have in the Deaf community. This second time, I listened.

Has that every happened to you? Have you ever dismissed an idea but later come back with a new perspective?

Thanks to the Hurculean efforts of Matt James, and the support of our great tech ministry at Faith Promise, we’re still on course to add an additional feed to the Internet Campus this weekend for the Deaf community.

This is a shot of our recording room. The monitors in the foreground are for recording both of the video streams. The board is for the sound recording, and the monitors in the top right are what the camera director uses to select camera shots. (In case you can’t tell, things are a bit of a mess right now.)

PS – In addition to the new video feed, I think we’ll also see improvements to the audio and video quality online this week, and video on the iPhone should be happening soon as well.

In my last post I mentioned a big project that I’m excited to launch. Tonight, Pastor Chris made the announcement, and you can watch the short video below.