Kyle's Random

Two years ago, Keri, the kids, and I flew to Knoxville, hung out with our friends, Josh and Kim Whitehead, visited Faith Promise Church, met up with Pastor Chris and Michele for lunch after the services, and visited a small group.  That weekend marked the beginning of our transition from Fort Worth, TX to Knoxville, TN.

Wow, we had no idea what we were getting into!

Honestly, these past two years have been the best years of my life in so many ways.

Thank you, God, for the privilege and joy of serving at such a great church and with such an amazing staff.

(This is a repost from my guest post over on the Faith Promise Blog earlier this morning.)

Over the past few months, we’ve made plans for a major update to the Faith Promise Church website as we prepare for the launch of our Blount County Campus in October.  As Brad Roberts and I worked through the process, here are a few things we had in mind:

Let’s help people easily find information that is accurate for their campus.
While the vision, direction, teaching, and core ministries will be consistent across campuses, there are many small variations between campuses, such as different location and contact info, different service times, and different ways of getting integrated into groups.  We set out to make sure that people get the correct information based on the campus they attend or plan on attending.  This means that depending on your campus, certain page contents, graphics, and menu options will be different.

Once people have chosen a campus, don’t make them pick again.
Rather than the annoyance of having to choose your campus every time you visit the site, we’ll store that information for you and take you straight into the site.

Make it easy and intuitive to switch between campuses.
Forced selections on a website make us feel like we’ve stepped into a choose-your-own-adventure book.  (One bad choice, and you’re trapped inside a spooky house or dragged off into the woods by Big Foot.)  Instead, we tried to make the campus selection feel like a light choice that can be easily switched at any time.

Provide a solution that scales well with additional campuses.
Rather than build a system that will only accommodate three campuses (Pellissippi, Internet, and Bount), we’ve built a system that will scale as we continue to add new campuses in the future.

While we were at it, we also enabled mobile video and overhauled the blog.
When you visit the  Series Media page on your HTML5 web-enabled mobile device, you can now watch sermon videos.  In addition, our church blog got a significant facelift.

As of this evening, we’ve rolled out the update.  We’re still in the tweaking process, but you can check it out!

This past weekend, I got to baptize one of my friends from church.  I’ve known Carol for several months now, we’ve talked on the phone about salvation and theology, and she’s a member of the Tuesday night small group that Keri and I lead.  Despite all that, yesterday was our first time to meet Carol face-to-face.

Carol lives in Utah, attends Faith Promise Church on our Internet Campus, and attends our online small group.  Yesterday, she was in town, so we had a cookout at my house then went to church together, where Carol was baptized.  It was an awesome day.

Check out the video here:

To celebrate the 4th of July, my church held a large event at a nearby college (similar to last year).  The community was invited, and everything was free – including food, drinks, games, and inflatables.  In the middle of the event, we held a worship service, and we concluded the evening with a fireworks show.

Some of the highlights:

1. Approximately 9,000 people attended the event.
2. Many people responded to the message by making commitments of their lives to Jesus.
3. 36 people were baptized (I got to baptize about 30 of these).

During the course of the evening I met several people who are a part of my online small group face-to-face for the first time.  I also met up with several individuals who normally attend online and got to baptize one of them.

Volunteer Teams setting up one of the Drink Stations

Baptisms

Keri, her mom, and the kids

More photos on Facebook

We’re planning to relaunch our Internet Campus this weekend.  We worked with a fantastic design company to improve our interface and arrange things so that people will have an easier time finding their way around the features.  Like normal, my good friend, Brad Roberts built out the site, and we’ve both been amazed to see the project come together.

Some of the new features include:

• Greater emphasis on the chat room, built from scratch so that it will include all the features we’ve wanted for a while.  Most importantly, it no longer requires the Java plugin to work.
• A map that shows all the connections.
• Easier access to the sharing/invite buttons.
• And some really cool transitions – opening and closing the chat window as well as “turning down the lights”.

Our biggest hope is that these changes will help more people discover the truth of Jesus and connect to the growing community of Faith Promise Church.

For a few months now, we’ve had three three worship service times each weekend on our Internet Campus.  Starting in May, we’re changing a time and adding a new service to our Sunday lineup:

• 9:00 am
• 10:20 am
• 11:45 am
• 9:00 pm

Father, please use our church and Internet Campus to bring glory to yourself.  All our efforts are for you – that more may know and worship you.

Service times are changing at our Pellissippi Campus too.  You can read more about the changes here.

It’s hard to believe that it’s only been a year since we first launched our Internet Campus at Faith Promise Church.  Since then, we’ve seen God work in a powerful way, and we’ve heard many stories of lives being impacted as a result.  Although I haven’t included the numbers for the snow weekend where our church met only online (about 750 connections during peak times for each service), this graph does show the increase in people attending online over the past year.

This coming weekend we will have seven performances of Sacred Storm: Final Exam on our physical campus and six broadcasts online.  I pray that over this weekend we will break new ground and see record numbers of people attend online and make important spiritual next step decisions.

Less than a year ago, Faith Promise took a new step of faith and started an Internet Campus. This weekend, because of ice and snow, we were forced to cancel our services on our Pellissippi Campus, and all of our weekend services happened exclusively online.

Here’s how it all played out: On Thursday, the weather report predicted massive amounts of ice and snow for the area, and since Pastor Chris already had the message ready to go, we set up cameras in the Worship Center, and he preached to four cameras and an empty room.

After he was done, our video guy, Matt James, edited the video to include the weekend announcements as well as several songs from a recent Wednesday night worship service.  All of this was done before the weather got bad – just in case the weather forecast was right.

When the ice made our hill-top campus inaccessible, and we canceled all Pellissippi Campus services, Brad Roberts helped me rewire the iCampus for six worship services.

The services online went very well, and Pastor Chris got to experience the iCampus for the first time.  It was really great to see he and his wife take an active role in the chat room over the weekend.

Online numbers are difficult to judge since each video connection likely represents multiple people – especially when people are snowed in at home.  From what I can tell, I’d guess that at least one third of our congregation (and possibly over half) connected online over the weekend.

Crazy stuff!  Who would have ever guessed that a whole congregation would be worshiping together online?

This past week I finally got around to updating Josh Whitehead’s blog, and I think it turned out pretty nice.  It’s the same basic theme that he already had on there, but I spruced it up a bit.

You’ll need a wide-screen monitor to get the full effect.

I’m a rather huge fan of the Faith Promise Internet Campus.  We’ve added a third service at 9 pm, and this online ministry continues to gain momentum.

The ministry happening online continues to blow me away.  Just this weekend:

• People were connected from four countries outside the United States (Canada, the Philippines, Nicaragua, and El Salvador).
• One family connected from their hospital room the day after their new baby was born. (Yay, Crass family!)
• One family connected while traveling on vacation to Disney. (I think to make the rest of us jealous.)
• Our worship staff connected while traveling home after the roads were closed on their way back from a mission trip in NYC.
• I spoke on the phone with someone who gave his life to Christ three weeks ago while watching the iCampus and now wants to follow up by being baptized.

And that’s just the stories I heard about this weekend.  Many others attend anonymously until they are ready to take the next spiritual step.

My favorite part of the iCampus is that although the staff has provided this tool, it’s people leveraging their social networks via email, Facebook, and Twitter that has spread the word.  If you haven’t already, you’re help letting people know about this would be appreciated and could even make an eternal difference in someone’s life.  Just make sure that you include http:// so that the link will be clickable, and posting right before or during an online service is the most helpful.

To those of you who already play a part in spreading the word and who serve online as volunteers… thanks so much!  You guys rock!