
Q&A with Dwell Co-Founder, Joshua Bailey
In an interview with The Christian Chronicle, Dwell co-founder Joshua…
The Manchester, N.H., church already makes taped videos of its Sunday morning assemblies and shows them on a community cable station, minister Park Linscomb said.
That congregation is considering live streaming for invalids and the occasional ill regular attendee, Linscomb said.
“Our greatest fear about streaming, however, is that people will take this as a substitute for coming to the assembly,” he said.
Neither Flanagan nor Isom plan to make a habit out of online worship.
Isom expressed his gratefulness to the Prestoncrest church for making its service available “for just such an occasion.”
“It was nice to have the option of joining a church family when that snow is coming down and the roads are dangerous,” he said.
In Flanagan’s case, only about one-third of the congregation made it to the Concord Road assembly that Sunday.
Many — like Flanagan — chose the Internet option, and the Web server had trouble supporting all the viewers. “The video seemed a little choppy, but the audio worked fine most of the time,” he said.
If unable to worship with his church family, Flanagan said he’d prefer a small gathering of family and friends to a cyber-service.
But he likes the advancements technology has allowed.
“As far as podcasts go, I am an avid runner, and I often listen to sermons while running,” he said. “I can get between three and seven sermons in a week that way, depending on the preacher. I would rather listen to a sermon than music. Music eventually gets boring, but sermons keep your mind engaged while running.”
Brett Emerson, a missionary in Togo, West Africa, shares Flanagan’s enthusiasm for the sermons available online.
“We have two or three (podcasts) we download regularly and listen to when we have the time,” Emerson said. “It’s enriched our lives tremendously, and we are incredibly thankful for this and other technologies we have available to us.”
Across most parts of Africa, he said, being a missionary is not as logistically and physically difficult as it once was.
“These days, the villagers have cell phones, city dwellers have iPhones and we Skype with our families and download sermons on a high-speed wireless connection,” he said. “What a world!”
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