youtube guests

since we've been meeting, we have tried to record every sunday on video. we like to be able to see the flow of things and make sure it's okay. it's also a cool thing to hear how songs went.

the other thing that's really cool, is that we can now post the videos on the web at youtube.com. at first i just did that for fun. we had some other videos that we used in our services that we ended up posting as well, basically so our people could reference it and we could put it on the church blog: thebeakeronline.com.

as it went by i realized what an awesome resource that youtube.com is. one of the biggest obstacles that we have as churches, is giving people a feel for what our gatherings are like, what the music is like, etc. the other side of that is, for some people that may come to check out the church, they may not like loud rock music and they could show up at catalyst and totally be turned off, and maybe even complain to us that this isn't right.

with our youtube channel (which we have linked from our "what to expect" section of our main website), we are able to adress both of these issues. people who don't have any idea what church is like can jump on and see our music (along with listening to the message through itunes) and get a good idea what to expect. people who may know from the get go that they don't like the loud rock music, they can figure out that we're probably not the church for them.

all that's fine and dandy but does it work? yes! yesterday we had a first time guest tell levi that they were just on youtube watching some videos and saw one of our videos in the related videos sidebar and watched it. they liked it and decided to check us out.

youtube is turning out to be an exciting ministry tool.