Web 2.0 with Dan Lacich - Dan Lacich and Worship Leader
Worship Leader: Will you please share with us your journey, how you got to be running an Internet company?
Dan: I think in a lot of ways, it always fits with my journey, you know, in a kind of strange way. I do not--I did not come to Christ from a church background. I was definitely a non-church, non-Christian family and so the--sort of all the enculturation of what church is supposed to be and the box that the church is supposed to be in, I didn't have.
So, to be thinking about the church being connected through technology on the Internet, to me that's--there's nothing unusual about that. It's just one more way to use technology that's available to advance the Kingdom.
Worship Leader: And what do your days look like now? How are you incorporating the Internet and technology with your studies of theology?
Dan: Well, my title at Northland, is Pastor for Distributed Sites, and what that originally meant was our overseeing on multi-site ministry with four different campuses. Shortly after taking on that role, we expanded the ministry to do the web streaming that we do.
The first step in the web streaming was just a pure one-way audio-video web stream, you know, it wasn't a whole lot different from watching a church service on your television, it was just on your computer screen. And then, a little over a year ago, we changed the format to make it a fully interactive experience so that people on the--you know, on the Web can connect with one another, can communicate, doing worship.
We even have them communicating with the folks in the various sanctuaries during worship as well. And that all became part of my role to--in order to make use of the web stream as our first step towards developing house churches around the world.
Worship Leader: Tell us about your ministry philosophy as it relates to distributed or multi-church sites.
Dan: Basically, what we're about, the whole idea of being the church distributed is how can we help believers be the church wherever they are, 24/7. You know, people spend most of their time outside of the walls of the church building, yet they are still the church.
So, how do they live that out in their community? And we have found that the best way for us to help them do that is to connect them with one another locally in order for them to serve other people in their community and then to worship together wherever they are and be equipped wherever they are.
Worship Leader: So, what does a fully networked church look like?
Dan: Messy. I've never thought about what it really looks like. It's more, kind of what it feels like. It really feels like a whole lot bigger than we ever imagine it being. There's just this sense that we really are connected to people around the world and we know we're connected to them spiritually.
I mean, we know that in our head, we know that from the Bible telling us that, but somehow when we are worshiping online with people from all parts of the globe, it somehow feels so vast and just so--so much like, God is really doing this thing.
Worship Leader: And how many sites do you have right now?
Dan: That's--well, it's a little hard to define because people thought about sites in different ways. We have four traditional multi-sites that people usually think of. Four--but you know, physical locations with congregations, but we've probably got close to 20 locations that we would identify as a house church or a non-traditional site. And--but then, in addition to that, there's groups of two's and three's that probably number in the hundreds that gather with us each weekend.
Worship Leader: Ultimately, we don't really know what a fully networked church looks like other than that we're becoming more and more networked. Would you say that's the right idea?
Dan: Yeah, absolutely, because--even when we talk about fully networked as a church, there will be those house churches that connect with Northland and they will be part of what we're calling a Northland network, you know, and they will see themselves as Northland. They'll use our equipping materials. They'll buy into the philosophy of ministry that we're a part of that sort of thing.
But we're looking way beyond that to far larger numbers of people who will be equipped to gather together and start house churches, without us ever really even knowing about it, but it will be because we continue to put materials available on the Internet and develop strategic alliances with other ministries to help people come to know Christ and start a church right where they are.
Worship Leader: For someone who is either is completely starting a brand new Web site, has never done a Web site before or has a Web site that's basically the yellow pages, what are the most important things that they need to have on their interactive site? Let's say, a worship leader wanted to start a blog or something like that. What were--what are suggestions for him or her that they could put on their--that would get interactive with their congregation?
Dan: I'll give you a couple of things that we have figured out to do and then, and then some stuff, I think, we're still working on. One of the things that we've seen people make use of on the Web and make use of badly are, what we would call equipping tools, you know, the adult education kind of things. What seems to happen is, most churches, they're doing a class or something in a room, in their location, so they film it.
And then they put it on the Web as, here it is, now it's a class they have on the web. And it completely misses the opportunity and just doesn't work at all. So, what we're doing is, as of about four or five months ago is any new class that we design, it gets designed for the web first and then, gets reverse engineered into a physical classroom space. And that's just really important, because how people learn and experience education and training on an Internet is very different from what happens in a classroom.
So we're using lots of little three and four-minute video clips that become kind of like a daily thing to take a class for a month. There's interactive question and answers, where you can write responses, click a button and it goes to a feed that actually keeps all of your answers stored, but then also, gives you a PDF printout of everything that you've done so far, all your answers.
So, you can take it in hand to a Bible study with other people that have been doing the same study online. So, making sure that whatever you want to do from an education standpoint is interactive, that the person is actually doing something online, they're not just reading text. It's harder to do that. It takes more effort--no, it takes more effort to actually videotape all these little vignettes than it does to teach a one-hour class.
And then tape it and put it on the Web. But the results are phenomenal and we've just--we've had so many people start taking those classes online with us and found that it make such a difference. One of the other aspects of it that's important is having people online who, in some ways, get into some kind of cohort together. We've got a guy, part of our church who started a company that eventually did a majority of the Internet-based learning...
Along with 500 other people and never going to get to know each other. So, if you can keep people connected in smaller groups with anything they're doing interactive on the internet, they actually seem to develop a better sort of a stronger bond with one another than we would ever imagine.
Pastor Dan Lacich serves as pastor of distributed sites at Northland, in Longwood, Florida, helping the distributed church worship and serve together for the glory and honor of Christ. Dan has a bachelor's degree from Franciscan University, with a double major in theology and psychology, a Master of Divinity from Trinity Episcopal School for Ministry and a Doctor of Ministry from Reformed Theological Seminary.
