Online video a budget-pleasing trend in ministry

Ben Smith/First Baptist Adel

The small webcam in the balcony of First Baptist Adel captures sermons each Sunday in the South Georgia church to be uploaded to the Internet. In addition to viewers having the opportunity to watch live services at fbcadel.org, sermons are also archived at the church’s account on GodTube.com. Smith said one advantage of GodTube is that videos up to 30 minutes may be uploaded to the site, whereas there is a ten-minute time limit on YouTube.

ADEL — On Sundays Ben Smith estimates he preaches to a crowd of 200. However, a $100 investment has led many more than that to hear his message.

Shortly after assuming the pastorate of First Baptist Church here, Smith installed a small webcam on the church’s balcony facing the stage. “Interest built so we purchased a computer specifically for it for speed reasons,” he said. “We want to be able to interact with folks and give them a portal into our church.

“People moving into our community have been on our site and get to know a lot about us. It gives a pretty inexpensive way to expand the ministry.”

That step led to posting the church’s sermons online via YouTube, a social networking site where users can upload videos for free. In addition to the webcam, anyone with a digital video camera – staff member, parent, youth with a cameraphone – now has the ability to contribute to First Baptist’s presence in cyberspace.

Posting online video has become the medium of choice to reach the masses quickly without killing the pocketbook. Forums for presidential debates have been based on it. Newspapers now produce video vignettes. In basketball dunking on an opponent is no longer referred to as being posterized but YouTubed.

Growth of the site is so staggering wrangling hard numbers has been catchy. In July 2006 USA Today reported 100 million videos being viewed daily. A month later The Wall Street Journal reported YouTube having 6.1 million total videos uploaded by some 500,000 users. Both of those figures have had more than a year to escalate.

For ministries, videos of events and sermons have become available for anyone with a computer and online access. Smith took advantage of this and embedded a link to the church’s website where visitors to www.fbcadel.org could see a welcome video on the home page.

The Augusta State University BCM, top, and Oak Leaf Church in Cartersville, bottom, are two ministries utilizing YouTube. The video-sharing giant, where members can upload video for free, has proved to be beneficial in outreach evangelism.

A problem soon rose, however, from YouTube’s process of promoting other videos after the current one is played.

“One day I was watching a video we had placed on our site,” said Smith, 32. “When the next ones suggested came on after it was through there was one terribly inappropriate. We wanted to find another alternative.”

A suitable replacement First Adel is trying is GodTube. Churches, ministries, and individuals post videos to the site that was rated in August as the fastest-growing on the Web by comScore, a provider of trends on the Internet.

“The great thing about it is that [sites such as GodTube] give us a place to host a video,” said Smith. “It affects our connectivity speed to host videos on our site. If it’s a long video clip, it would take a significantly longer time to load it. Sites like YouTube and GodTube can stream the video faster than we can.”

For those unfamiliar with Internet jargon, imagine a simple email representing one person. Sending an email with nothing but a text message goes relatively quick. An online video would be represented by a group of one hundred. Much more space is needed to move one hundred as opposed to one. A bicycle is good enough for one; a tour bus is needed for the hundred.

Spread the buzz

Services of Oak Leaf Church in Cartersville are posted directly to the church website using a flash-based movie player, said pastor Michael Lukaszewski. Other videos are posted to YouTube at http://youtube.com/profile?user=lavalamp775.

“We use YouTube because it’s popular,” he said. “People are familiar with it already. I don’t have to re-educate or re-orient people towards a new system. They can access our stuff alongside their other content.”

Lukaszewski, Oak Leaf’s lead pastor since its launch in August 2006, said the use of online video has helped increase the church’s visibility in Bartow County.

“Posting some of our funny videos has helped spread buzz about the church,” he added. “Some of our people forward the links to co-workers or friends who are also familiar with YouTube.

“I have a philosophical problem with trying to Christianize everything. I’d rather infiltrate it and be light in a dark world. With that framework of thinking, we just use YouTube.”

Smith and Lukaszewski can both be filed as the new order of pastor with the techie background and love for evangelism, constantly looking for ways to mesh both in spreading the gospel.

Allan Thomas, campus minister at Augusta State University, said members of Baptist Collegiate Ministries use both GodTube and YouTube.

One-and-a-half million hours of video were viewed on GodTube in October, making it the world’s largest broadcaster of Christian video. In addition to offering user-generated video, the site now offers users social networking capabilities (a la Facebook and MySpace) and live webscasting.

“Some students use GodTube to watch sermons if they can’t make it to church,” he said. “Although we use YouTube to post videos about our ministry, I can understand a pastor’s concerns [about wanting to have greater control over content] and deciding to go with GodTube.”

Whichever avenue is chosen, Thomas agrees that the medium has had an impact on his ministry.

“We’re a commuter campus and so it’s more difficult to have a lot of face-to-face conversations. In the last year we changed our name from Baptist Student Union to Baptist Collegiate Ministries. We’ve since established ourselves on social networking site such as MySpace, Facebook, and YouTube to re-introduce ourselves and help students become more familiar with us.

“When students go to our website they look over everything pretty good. I’m confident the videos play a part in their deciding to drop by.”

“I’m a tech nerd,” Smith laughs. “With the Web presence being so strong today, we understand that one of the first places people are going to investigate us is online. That’s our front door for a lot of people.”

GodTube has its own warts, Smith pointed out.

“We’ve been posting things to GodTube for only the past few months,” he said. “Recently we’ve noticed that other videos are promoted after ours play. Everything on the site is religious-based, but there are still videos we wouldn’t want to be associated with.”

And what about GodTube being a Christianized YouTube? Smith said its unfair to label something negatively due to its Christian foundation.

“Copying culture and participating in it are two different things. We imitate Christ, not the latest fad. We live in a culture that is shaped by technology. When Gutenburg first printed books, it’s inconceivable that churches wouldn’t use that,” he stated.

“I think you see Christianity sprinkled in places all over the world,” said Lukaszewski. “A church puts a slide in a movie theater pre-show and it’s followed by something that isn’t ‘appropriate.’ Churches advertise on secular radio. Just because there is the potential misuse, that doesn’t immediately negate the effectiveness of a medium.”