The online minister at Cottonwood Creek Church in Allen, Texas, has been involved with technical ministry for over 30 years. He’s also a certified speaker, trainer and coach with the Maxwell Leadership Team, as well as a contributing writer for CPM. We spend this Five Minutes getting to know more about Will Chapman.
Two Godly men saw something in me, invested in me, and allowed me to serve in my school and church.
CPM: How did you first become interested in production?
Chapman: My 6th grade middle school choir teacher, Bill Orvis, took an interest in me because I started accompanying choirs on the piano as a 5th grader. So, in addition to playing piano for the choir, he asked me to help with the setup of the school’s synthesizer and our small audio system. Not long after that, my youth pastor, Wayne Slay, invited me to play keyboards in our student ministry band and operate our youth room audio system. That’s how I got my start so young … two Godly men saw something in me, invested in me, and allowed me to serve in my school and church. Many others have influenced me over the years, but these two men were the first to introduce me to the production field.
CPM: What is an online minister? How did this role evolve?
Chapman: It’s funny that you ask this, because I’ve recently been answering this question with some of my colleagues. But at my church, the online minister is the person who is in charge of making personal, meaningful connections with people online for the purpose of encouraging them in their relationship with Christ. I partner with our technical, I.T., discipleship, and communication ministries to interact with people on all our social media, church online, and broadcasting sites.
This role has evolved greatly since we first started broadcasting over our website. At this time in 2008, I was the technical director at Cottonwood Creek Church, and we felt the need to start broadcasting online with a CDN (Content Delivery Network) partner for the purpose of reaching our sick, homebound, and other church attenders who couldn’t be physically on-campus with us for worship services. This broadcast was a simple, embedded video stream on our website with no features to interact with others like through a public chat area.
Our largest jump in our online ministry evolution came in 2020 during the COVID shutdown.
A few years later as I took on some additional duties in our communications department with social media and even as our interim communications director, we expanded to start broadcasting live over YouTube and Facebook in addition to using a brand new, free platform called the Church Online Platform. This is when we realized the power of interacting with people during our live and on-demand videos. This also caused us to notice that we needed to upgrade our lighting, audio, and video to support this growing ministry.
Finally, our largest jump in our online ministry evolution came in 2020 during the COVID shutdown. We transitioned to being completely online easily. However, our ministry vision grew when we saw how God was using our online ministry in a higher capacity. So, we’ve been going through a massive upgrade over the last two years of our audio, video, lighting, and I.T. infrastructure in addition to transitioning to a more robust church management system that fits our needs both now and in the future. This includes some wonderful new capabilities that our online ministry will be using.
Part of being an effective online minister is being able to help people in their next step with Christ using online tools.
CPM: How did your production experiences prepare you for being an online minister?
Chapman: My production experience was critical in preparing me to be an effective online minister. First, to be an effective online minister, you must be comfortable with technology and always be learning about new and innovative gear, software, and web-based tools. Secondly, my production experiences helped me to know how to analyze systems. Part of being an effective online minister is being able to help people in their next step with Christ using online tools. Having system analysis experience has helped me to know what it means to carve out an effective next step system for people who want to connect with Christ and with my church better. Finally, my production experience has taught me how to operate well under pressure. In online ministry, like in live production, you have to be able to think fast on your feet and be able to train others how to do that as well. That experience has served me well as I have developed some systems to help our online volunteers and staff effectively minister to people. I can go on and on about how production experience has helped prepare me for online ministry, but these are the top three things.
CPM: You’ve been kind enough to write for Church Production on occasion. Tell us how you got started?
Chapman: Ha! I was thinking about this the other day, because I’m working on an article that I’m submitting to Brian [Blackmore, CPM’s Editor] very soon. I’m blessed to have friends in technical ministry who recommended me years ago to Brian as a possible contributor to Church Production Magazine. Brian was kind, yet honest, that writing is not for everyone, but he’d love to see a sample of my writing. The rest is history. In the coming months, I plan on contributing more regularly to Church Production Magazine. I’m realizing that becoming an empty nester is opening up some time on my schedule.
