TruthBook Religious News Blog

Posted on Sat, Sep. 15, 2007
BY SCOTT ANDRON
sandron@MiamiHerald.com

Every Sunday morning, while hundreds of South Floridians converge on Flamingo Road Church in Cooper City, Stephanie Smith boots up her computer and joins the services -- from 1,400 miles away.

Instead of attending a bricks-and-mortar church near her home in Fort Worth, Texas, Smith hooks her computer up to her big-screen TV and watches a live, web-based videocast via Flamingo Road's ''Internet Campus.'' Some Sundays, she invites family and friends to join her.

Smith is one of a growing number of Americans for whom the Internet plays a central role in their spiritual lives.

Many pastors are coming to see the website as a ministry in itself, not only as a way to bring people to church, but as a way to bring them to God -- even if they never set foot in the physical building.

While most houses of worship now have websites, few use them as aggressively and creatively in seeking new converts as evangelicals, for a variety of reasons.

For Roman Catholics, important sacraments like communion are hard or impossible to translate into binary digits. Jews generally don't seek new converts, although the Orthodox Chabad Lubavitch sect, for example, has extensive Web offerings aimed at attracting non-observant Jews.

LIFECHURCH.TV

For at least one church, the Internet is so central that the church has a ''dot'' in its name.

Lifechurch.tv has 11 campuses in six states, including a new congregation that meets at Palm Beach Central High School in Wellington. Its 12th campus is on the Internet, and the church tries to give online participants the same experience as those worshiping in person.

YOUTH MOVEMENT

Thanks to online shopping, online dating, online social networking and online darn-near-everything-else, many young Americans don't distinguish between their friends from school and those from Facebook. These youngsters just see them all as friends, said David Kinnaman, president of the Barna Group, a consulting firm that conducts survey research for churches and other religious groups.

In fact, Kinnaman's firm predicts that by 2010, 10 percent of Americans will rely exclusively on the Internet for their religious experience.

But no one is predicting that the Internet church will replace the physical church -- at least not yet.

'The big fear, especially in the mid '90s and late '90s, was, `Would people leave the pews?' '' said Heidi Campbell, a professor of communication who studies religion on the Internet at Texas A&M University.

That didn't happen -- at least, no faster than it was happening before. In fact, many people Campbell has interviewed say they would prefer to participate in church in person if their life circumstances allowed it.

You'd get no argument from Smith. While she likes participating in Flamingo Road over the Web and introducing family and friends to the church, her longer-term hope is to have a branch campus in Fort Worth.

It may take some time to get there, but the church also would like to see it happen.

Labels: church, Internet, ministry, Scott Andron