Kyle's Random

(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!

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.

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.

The other day I happened to have a phone conversation with the pastor and author Douglas Estes.  When I got off the phone, I knew that I needed to check out his book, titled SimChurch.  I finished the book last night, and I have to say that it took me by surprise.

Honestly, when I first came across the book, I thought it was just another debate about whether or not the church can really meet online.  I was very wrong.

This book has challenged me in a huge way.  He brings up so many important concerns and ideas that hadn’t crossed my mind before.

Here’s one of many quotes that really made a bit impact on me:

…a recent survey of virtual-world citizens found that 50 percent of people surveyed don’t even believe the virtual world has sin in it. Why? Because it’s not real. Here the church is poised to fail big-time – to drop a ball of monumental proportions. Here’s how it will play out. As tens of millions of people flock to virtual worlds, traditional Christians who fear change in the church at large will see alarmist headlines about the virtual world and will dismiss the virtual world as one big sinful fantasy, as being not real. They will turn the virtual world over to its own devices, and tens of millions of people – with no true ethical compass – will embrace greater free agency and then write their own rules on what is right and what is wrong. Before long, sin in the virtual world will start to redefine [people's perception of] sin in the real world; what’s permissible in the virtual world will start to seem less wrong in the real world. After a generation passes, new church leaders will ask, “How did we get into this mess?”

It’s a well-written book, and it has bolstered my passion for the Faith Promise Internet Campus.  I’m very grateful for Douglas Estes’ thoughtful observations, and I’d highly recommend it to any pastoral staff who are interested in making a greater impact online.

If you’ve ever attended an Internet Campus and dropped into the chat room, you’ll probably like this video.  It’s a parody done by LifeChurch.tv, and I recognize quite a few of their staff playing roles in the video.

Funny stuff!  Thanks, LifeChurch.tv for your innovation and humor.

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.