Adventures in Church 2.0 | Guest Blog - Kelsen Depp

Cathy, It’s been a while since our first conversation on Church 2. 0 and after reading your last post, I was reminded I need to send an update.

Countryside is a church with a passion to help each other take their next step toward freedom in Christ through community, discipleship, and mission.  We are a community of believers who desire to have a “high-view” of God.  This “high-view” has God in the foreground of all of our vision.  This placement of God in our lives allows our hopes, dreams, desires, relationships, decisions, and actions to have Christ at its center.

The move toward church 2.0 developed from a desire to reach the congregation where they are at and develop an added layer of community that spans beyond one day a week.  An unforeseen benefit has been a narrowing of the age gap.  We are seeing a younger generation taking a greater part in our worship services.  People converse with each other over the forums who might never have before.

We’ve been using Shapevine during our services for about two months now.  The intention was to create more community within our congregation and allow for the two-way conversation during the services.  While the video feed Shapevine provides is unneeded for those in the worship center, it has been excellent for the few who have been out of town.

The one drawback we’ve seen so far is that the conversation from Sunday morning can not be continued throughout the week on Shapevine.  As an alternative we’ve been pasting the context into our group on Facebook  and continuing the conversation there.  Facebook also allows us to post added teaching videos, images, and links to relevant books on Amazon.  There are plans in the works to bridge this gap however.

The handful of people who regularly take part in what we’re calling “Fusion” cover a pretty wide age range.  All in all it has yet to take off to the level we would like for it.  Some love it, others are indifferent.  The only negative comments I have received have been from those who tried it once and said they felt they were distracted and missed the message.  Those who have not tried yet do not see the need to.  I can understand this as I felt the same way about Facebook for the first few years after it was released.  I saw the benefits of it, but never felt I needed to jump in myself.

As far as polling, have you checked out Polleverywhere.com? It allows polling from cell phones via texting so that you don't have to rent the equipment.  A real-time meter can be fed to projection screens via powerpoint or a webpage.  The text string can be a bit cumbersome for one time use and those unfamiliar with texting but if used regularly it could be stored as a shortcut. 

--Kelsen Depp, Technical Director, Countryside Church

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