I have seen a lot of amazing gatherings of Christians on the web. This Christian blogger over here get’s 30,000 hits a day. That blogger over there has 20,000 subscribers. This Christian tweet has 42,000 followers.

15,000 Facebook fans

90,000 viewers on Livestream

And on and on.

Really cool. Seeing movements grow and blossom is awesome. Especially when the movement is gathered around Christ.

Take a closer look at the numbers and see who is a part of these movements…

Christians.

That’s a good thing…right?

Sure it’s good, but I don’t think we need to go patting ourselves on the back just yet.

Why can’t the Christian community take the effort and resources that go into these Christian movements and point them in an outward direction?

Why do Christian ‘leaders’ on the web compete for the attention of the same people? …and these people are Christians by the way.

I don’t have the answers. I wish I did.

The way it works online is we  throw some content up and see who is listening and contributing back to the conversation and then continue to craft content that speaks to this audience. Or we find and audience that already exists and we try and grab their attention.

It takes a lot of time, energy and resources to build an audience from scratch, it’s much easier to just speak to an audience that is already there.

How can we build a missional movement on the web?

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As a church planter I find myself around a lot of driven people, maybe ‘cuz we attract one another. One thing that has been a major part of fast church plant growth has been the events they put on. It makes sense. Church plants don’t usually have a building that people get to drive by and decide if they will one day go to church there. The church generally hasn’t been around very long and therefore hasn’t penetrated the community with buzz. So the solution has always been events.

Big events give you a chance to showcase yourself to the community and provide something for people to do. Sounds like a win win situation.

Last night for Halloween we thought it would be a cool idea to roll by the big ‘Harvest Fest’ being put on by a church in our neighborhood. The event was HUGE! Search lights guided you in from miles away, which was good because we had to park miles away. We got out of the car and started making the trek to the big event off in the distance. On a side note, I’m really glad we had the kids do some trick-or-treating in our neighborhood before we left, the candy gave us some much needed sustenance for the journey.
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