So, Gateway Church has been Multi-site for about 17 months. Our South Campus continues to grow steadily and we’re gaining more knowledge and experience in how this multi-site thing works for Gateway. Gateway is a church that was raised up out of the culture in Austin. The weird, eclectic, liberal and funky culture that is Austin. What Gateway is doing is working! Unfortunately, we’re limited in our current facilities. Multi-site is the only way to continue to reach this city.
We’re planning to launch one or two new campuses in 2010. This is very exciting. However, neither of these will be our next campus. We’re launching a new web campus by the end of 2009.
Our web campus will be a full experience. It’s not just about getting the video out on the web or getting a crowd in a virtual room experiencing it together. It’s all those things and community. Gateway was a church of small groups before it was a Sunday morning experience. It’s still a church of small groups. Now it will also be a virtual community as well.
To do this, Gateway hired a new Internet Campus Pastor (not sure if that is his specific title). He’s a pastor with a ton of tech and web know-how. So, he’s diving in head first to completely rebuild our current church website and then launch the web campus. Exciting!
As we venture into this whole web presence, it beckons me to ask, “Who do I do my job (Next Generation) in the online world?” For those of you with online campuses, what do you do for Kids and Students? Anything? Ideas?
Well, at my church, we have a full slate of our kids elementary experiences online with video, memory verse and Main Idea. So the kids who attend church online go to the most current video teaching that’s out there and view that. Also, our discipleship program has all of its video content out there as well. But by June 1, we’ll also have our preschool video teaching with storybook content for the parent to read with their child and worship music so they can do worship together as well. Also in June we’ll have bible passages that will enrich the elementary teaching. One more cool thing by September 1, we’ll have a short video with a super cool presentation of the gospel for kids to use as an evangelistic tool with their friends. We are really praying that we will be able to reach a ton of kids whose parents are attending our church online experiences. I would love to share ideas and learn from you guys as you branch out into this fairly new territory for us in kids ministry.
Okay, I think we’ll just be linking to lifekids.tv! Ha! I have seen your elementary stuff and it does rock! I look forward to seeing what you do with the preschool stuff as well. Thanks for pioneering the way.
At my church we have been doing a full online experience for families for over a year now and so we started doing a kids page and because people who attended our online services said that they needed more of a full family experience at home.
So we started in 2009 and with just a short message from me along with some resources for elementary, preschool and nursery. Then we added some praise and worship songs and now we have a mini 25 minute service right online. Our numbers are starting to grow and so I think our next step in the fall will be to have more video options and to also venture into doing some live kids services online much like we already have been doing for a year and a half with our adult services.
Check it out here at http://www.highimpactkidz.tv
That’s actually pretty cool. Not many places doing this yet… way to put this out there. I’d be interested in what kind of feedback you’re getting!