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Web 2.0 with Nathan Clark
WL: What was the impetus for Northland developing an online church expression? Nathan Clark: Our name is a little funny,
Northland, a Church Distributed. Our vision of church is a reflection of how we see church painted in the New Testament: that it's not a place you leave your community to go, it's the gathering of community for worship, service and equipping. So the question I would raise, especially for a growing megachurch in the suburbs is how are we achieving that? As we were processing through this, as I understand, we realized we also had a pragmatic need for space and perhaps in the exploration for satisfaction of that need we could also pursue this theological imperative that we felt. So what we ended up doing was having a second location right down the street from the first location that we wired up with varying technology, so part of our congregation was in one place and part was in another. Sort of an eye-opening experience, realizing that geography wasn't the dictator on who a congregation was. Suddenly we were split, but we weren't' split. We were one congregation. As we further contemplated the truth of that, we started to have other churches around the central Florida area.
WL: How did it grow to what you're experiencing now? Nathan Clark: The question was, "How about us? We're in Texas or Africa or Asia. Let us be a part of worship as well." Some were transplants and had moved away. As they started to do this, there were people who weren't a part of Northland previously who started to come alongside them. And all along, we were anchoring this around worship.
WL: What are your hopes for Northland, A Church Distributed?
Nathan Clark: Our aspiration is not to gather a million people to worship online by themselves. Our hope is that as people connect with us to worship God and serve God and to get equipped that they would connect with one another as well. This weekend and on many occasion we have gone to a certain geographic area to gather people who have worshipped with us in the past so that they can experience community in the hope that they would continue to do that because we're not looking to create a way to make church less intimate and less personal, but to make it more so on both ends.
WL: Can you tell us about some of the Northland's online distinctives? Nathan Clark: There are a couple of unique things about our structure, the first is that it is live, not just a live experience with chat, but the actual video is live which is very unique, very few churches do that. Most churches have pre-recorded services, which is fine. For us, the distinctive is, wherever we are, whether were gathered in ones or tens, hundreds or thousands, that we are gathering to worship our God together. That is key for us and that is what drove us to build the online worship environment that we built.
WL: What are the differences you see between online and offline church? Nathan Clark: They are similar online and offline, but online you can quantify the response. This puts to the forefront the question: Do we develop things that are transactional or transformational?
WL: Could you explore that further?
Nathan Clark: With technology there are some particulars, the questions we grapple with are the same as any church, but because we can so richly quantify some of the metrics of what we're doing and the feedback is so concrete, people can send us email or send us a chat and the pseudo-anonymity makes it very easy for people to ask for/requests that have elements of criticism, not in a bad way, but a good way. But it puts to the forefront, do we develop things that are transactional that allow someone to walk in and get something and then walk out, or transformational? At Northland we gather for three reasons: to worship, to serve and to be equipped for worship and service.
WL: To those who say online interaction (chat, comments, etc.) is sometimes appropriate, sometimes distracting, what would you say? Nathan: I would agree. The irony of where we are with Web technology is that in some ways we're where we are in interpersonal communication. We're there already. In other words, technology is so behind, it creates disjointed experience, where it's easy to say. What does interactive worship look like? Interactive worship looks like walking into a church on Sunday morning. That's extremely interactive, you're sitting with people. They're constantly leaning over and making comments to their spouse or their friends, to their child, people are coughing. Worship or a worship service is not free of the distractions of community. In fact, part of what tends to make those experiences so rich is the community that's distracting you. So the tension is because there are some parts of technology-especially when it comes to communication technology-that are advanced and some in their infancy. How do you provide that sense of life that comes from sharing space with the community while minimizing the distractions that come along with that? We're wrestling with that.
WL: If someone had a question, say in Africa, does that in anyway interactively impact the course of the service? Nathan: That's another thing that we prize. If you said, "Hey could you tell the pastor this?" It might not happen, because there are some logistical hurdles, but our worship leader welcomes people from these various sites. Often at the beginning of a service, someone will pass something along to me and one of the other online ministers and we will relay that to the worship leader, so there is the element of reciprocity, which again what makes the fact that it is live video so vital. It's a very small delay. Sometimes we've incorporated that into the service, when we've had people do things: post your favorite scripture. We've also had people mail us video clips that we've used in the service.
WL: What are the technological challenges?
Nathan: Serving up live video is difficult to deliver well to people all over the world with different computers and different Internet connections-serving so many people in so many places with so many different kinds of hardware and software.
WL: On your site the online viewers post pictures and names. Aren't you concerned about stalkers? Nathan:The concern about stalkers and personal information is a great concern. Between those and the hundreds of things that could go wrong, we engage in prudent hope. So we're not governed by a fear of those things, rather because of cognizance of what could go wrong, we try to take appropriate steps to minimize the risks and then pursue the ministry we think God has called us to, knowing that hope and love will always conquer fear.
WL: As a help to those who might be considering taking church online, what would you do first, knowing what you know now?
Nathan: The thing I wish we'd been a little more intentional about is employing strategy about who we focus our efforts toward, especially in a geographic sense, as it stands right now we have maybe 12,000 people who worshiped with us last year from all over the world, which is humbling and awe-inspiring to see how God uses his people for his work, but because They are in groups of 20 or 50 or 100 all over the country, it makes it harder for us to connect with people, so there are some ways-this is off the cuff-we could have intentionally targeted certain metro areas where we knew we had strong leadership already and just pushed hard for people in those areas.
WL: What do you feel the Internet can never replace? Nathan: The Internet is just technology, just like the phone is just technology, just like a car or paper is just technology. It's the Living Word and the Bible is just printed on paper, it's just a technology to deliver the Living Word to people, so there are certain things, the Internet is not a person, but neither is a phone, but it can connect you to a person. I'm sure there are things it can't replace, at the same time as a tool, the inherent assumption is it's not out to replace something.
WL: How does the online networked congregation differ from the live congregation, if it does? Nathan: I'm sure there are differences. G.K Chesterton had a quote which I'll butcher, but he said that the frame is the essence of art, effectively the restraints you put around something are useful and end up defining what that something is. So there are limitations to church and there are limitations online and I think the limitations and the opposite of those, the strengths, naturally adjust the way people experience the service, thus it changes the way you have to lead them, thus it changes the way you respond. If I'm on a stage or if I'm standing in front of a congregation, I can look out and take visual cues from them. I can't do that if I have hundreds of people that are online, I have to be more resourceful. There are underlying differences, but people are still there because God drew them into worship. Those differences never override that purpose.
WL: What is right, what is working? What isn't working? What are you confused about and what's next? Nathan: The fundamental premise that people can gather to worship God facilitated through technology is working. We have people that are professing a new faith in Christ that are experiencing him facilitated through this technology. We are having people worship and experiencing his forgiveness and grace and his challenge to their lives in profound ways on a weekly basis, deep and substantial connections are being made. What's working... is a question of "Who's working?" And to me it's very clear that this is a tool God is using to do great things for His kingdom.
WL: What's not working?
Nathan: I think the technology side there's still higher thresholds than I would like. I would love for this to be simpler and we're trying to take steps to do that. We're also wrestling with how to naturally connect people and to call up leaders in areas to continue to transform [congregants]. I mentioned the three things we do being worship, serve and equip. We've got the worship but we're not doing the serve and equip in a global capacity. So how to translate that in the way we translated worship, that's not working yet [Northland just recently hooked up with a global online missions ministry to extend their ministry in this way]. That's also what's next. What's next is to enhance the worship experience, to add the capacity wherever people are to find immediate ways to serve their neighbors, to serve God, to honor God through their service and a way for people to get trained through all this. The last thing we want to do is call people for worship and then leave them unequipped...
WL: What about staffing, responding to emails, and so on, when you have that many people watching online? Nathan: We have three regular online ministers, it's not our exclusive job, and we have other jobs. We only offer interactive experience during worship; the staffing has a small footprint. We're trying to provide resources for the communities those who participate are in, rather than draw them into this community. We have a huge communication overhead during the services; we don't have a huge communication overhead outside of the services. So one of the benefits, it allows us to have a small staff support, from a cost perspective, the technology at Northland that supports this is extraordinarily expensive. There are cheaper ways. If you're a church of 75 and you want to webcast your sermon, so that maybe you reach a local nursing home or for people from your congregation who are on the road, there are relatively inexpensive ways to do it. The way we do it is expensive and that has to do with scalability, how many people this could get to, visual and audio quality, ease of administrative use and the flexibility of the ways we can deploy it and reliability, which you pay a huge price for.
WL: It seems that the internet is making some churches more networked-many to many, vs. a top down, hierarchical approach. How is it changing your churches model? Nathan: This is not changing the model of our church. It's just changing the way it's communicated. It's still maintaining the hierarchical structure. There are instances, which are not many right now, but could be more in the future where that might not be the case. Where there are house churches that use this as their service, there would be instances where the many would talk to the many.
Nathan Clark is the Director or Digital Innovation, Media Design at Northland in Orlando, Florida. Northland based out of has multi-sites and a distributed church and internet community that reaches around the globe.
This is an excerpt from Worship Leader magazine. To read more articles like this - click here to subscribe.
