On Sunday morning, Northland, A Church Distributed will officially open the doors to its new Facebook app, which will allow worshipers to invite their Facebook friends to go to church with them—without leaving the familiar Facebook environment. Plus, even when live worship isn’t happening, the opportunity for worship is readily available because the previous week's service will be posted and available for viewing 24 hours a day. “We encourage people to be the church everywhere, every day, so it just makes sense to put resources out there that will help people to be that church,” explains Nathan Clark, Northland’s director of digital innovation. With a congregation of 12,000 worshipers meeting throughout Metro Orlando and worldwide via interactive webcast, the church started webcasting live services in January 2006 and, 18 months later, launched an interactive webstream of its services that includes immediate access to an online pastor and the ability to chat instantly with other worshipers. Approximately 2,000 people use this venue each weekend. Two hundred of Northland’s congregants now serve as online missionaries, replying to emails from thousands of seekers around the world. Northland’s live Sunday services will now also be accessible on Facebook. Clark says the motivation behind this new tool is to “take the church where people live.” “At Northland, we often talk about the need to take the church to the people, versus asking them to come to us. For us, it was a wake-up call to realize that we were doing precisely that online—asking people to come to our website for worship. Why require a virtual commute over to our website when you can have church where people are?”
PR Newswire 3/11/10
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