daveingland.com   about church relevance, culture, life, community, & transformational faith

As I’ve been thinking more and more about leading a missional community through Revolution Church Sacramento next year, I’ve also had thoughts about video preaching as part of what we do. Coinciding with these thoughts was a blog post by Perry Noble that reinforced his position that video teaching honors God and connects with people.

When we did our first month of preview services to share our vision with the members of our mother church, it was video preaching for 3 weeks, with me preaching 1 week. We participated in the One Prayer with LifeChurch.tv which many of you know about already. I was so totally blown away by the quality of the preaching from Perry Noble and Steven Furtick that I was hooked. I mean, I think I can be a pretty funny guy, but usually I evoke a laugh or two during a message while Noble just raised the roof and kept it up the whole 30 minutes. The guy seems like he isn’t even trying, yet he causes us to fire on several emotions in just one message. All this and he wasn’t even in the building! How can a guy in South Carolina talking about eating big, buttery biscuits and people believing or not believing in the power of Christ connect so well with us here in California? I don’t know how or why, but I just know what I saw and how people responded and it was amazing and incredible. Pastor Furtick is another one of those guys that doesn’t seem like he is trying, yet he can convey passion about watching an ice cube in such a way that you never thought possible all through the power of Christ in his life and his love for seeing people hear the gospel and come to know the saving grace of Christ. I was teary-eyed during the last half of his message and again, he wasn’t even in the building!

Can a guy like Noble or Furtick cause things to be stirred up here in Sacramento through video preaching? I think they could. As Revolution Church Sacramento takes shape and launches next year, we are looking to connect with a younger generation for Saturday and/or Sunday evening service. Mostly singles and young couples. However, could we partner with a great visionary preacher like a Pastor Noble or Pastor Furtick (or a Craig Groeschel or Ed Young, Jr. or…) and provide a gathering for families on Sunday mornings and see the kingdom grow even more? Could being missional and putting our faith into practice and sharing the love of Christ with the world be the glue that binds us together, even though we have two different worship styles, with two different meeting times, and two different demographics? I’m beginning to think we could. I’m feeling like the work that needs to be done here in Sacramento is far greater than what I could do even on my best days, and that partnering with another ministry with someone that can lead the way through their preaching and teaching while we work to connect people into service could honor God hugely. Who says that multiple services on a weekend must be the same exact message with the same exact preacher every time?

Maybe this is just another one of those dreams too big for the moment or my abilities. Could be that my mind is wandering and this isn’t what my thoughts should be on these days. However, I just can’t help but feel like this is worth some prayer and discussion and seeing what God would have me do here. My preaching doesn’t really translate well to video, but I’ve seen others with the gift for it and know that it’s being used to make a big impact on people in awesome ways. Just consider me more than a little intrigued at this point.

I invite your prayers and thoughts on this.

With so many people flocking to google’s apps such as gmail, maps, and picasa as well as its news reader for keeping up with blog posts such as this one, it makes sense that google enters into the browser wars. For me I tend to do everything with one computer and am online with a broadband connection 90% of the time so I don’t particularly care for having to log into google every time I want to check email or catch up on blogs. However, I just updated to Firefox 3 so I could take advantage of some cool add ons that required version 3 and I don’t like it at all! I’ve been loyal to Firefox from day one, but now I’m looking to switch.

Unfortunately Chrome by google isn’t initially going to be available for us Mac users. When are people going to learn that Mac users are the important ones? Hahahaha

Read the full article from BBC News here.