Church Online

(This is a guest blog post by Michael McMinn)

1. Find a cause that you can all get behind and donate such as sending Lifestraws or PermaNets to a needy village somewhere. Or participate in a movement like 5DaysInMay.com and donate online. Research other options such as AdventConspiracy.org or Bloodwatermission.com to consider supporting as a group.
2. In your own locations, find a cause in your community to invite new people to participate in to do good in the community, and then invite all the participants to a church-online watching party.
3. Decide as a group to target specific groups in the community each week to bless with a simple gift, note of appreciation and invite card to watch church online or come to a watching party. i.e.: take food to the local Firehouse one week, take cupcakes to a nearby police station, take donuts or breakfast burritos to the night shift at the hospital ER. All these are people we can appreciate in our community and who often don’t know how to make time for church because of odd work schedules. Think also of teachers, nursing homes, and on and on.
4. Consider having a church-online watching party at a local restaurant that you know has a meeting room/reserved rooms and wifi. Lots of restaurants have flatscreens which make it easy to connect to a laptop and watch on something larger than a computer screen. Reach out to the foodies…
5. Find a way to bless the children and parents struggling through a tough time at the local children’s hospital and leave cards inviting them to watch church online together as a family in the hospital.  Give the families gift cards to a fast food place near the hospital so they can quickly run and get food nearby.
6. Coordinate with a local apartment complex with a community room and host a watching party for the complex. The same can be done by reaching into nursing homes, assisted living facilities, half-way houses, rehab facilities, battered women’s shelters, homeless shelters, prisons, anywhere it may be difficult for people to get out and about but easy to gather them together in one place to watch online.
7. Adopt the concept “Take Church to the People” and brainstorm with your online group to identify pockets of people that you could possibly take church online to.
8. Think of a public place that you could baptize (with permission) those who come to Christ through church-online. Handout invite cards to church-online to their friends and family that come to watch them be baptized, as well as hand out invite cards to other onlookers (if it is in a public place.)
9. At work, at bus terminals, on the train or subway hand out $5 gift cards to McDonald’s, Starbucks or similar, (as few or as many as you can afford) with an invite card to church online.
10. Discover other online communities like Twitter, Plurk, Identi.ca, etc. to search for people that use key words like “pray,” “help,” “ER/hospital,” “difficulties,” “hard times,”  ”problem(s),” “need/want,” and reach out to them online by offering to pray for their needs, and over time, invite them to church-online.
11. Plan a “Pay It Forward Day” where all the members of the group find an opportunity to pay for someone’s coffee, food, groceries, gas, or toll of the people behind them. Ask the clerk/cashier to give them an invite card for church-online.
12. Plan an hour where everyone in the group has one hour to go out with a predetermined amount ($5, $10, $25) to find someone at random and do something nice for them with the money.  Share the link for online church with those you meet. Report back online in one hour and share each story.

The great thing about church-online is it’s a collaborative effort! Brainstorm with your own group and share your ideas to get the ball rolling on serving others and reaching new people through sacrificial gifts of time, talents, and money. Use the equity you gain through serving to allow Jesus to work on peoples hearts and invite them to church online.

Service Project Ideas for your Online Group

• Serve in a soup kitchen or homeless shelter.
• Donate clothing and other items to a mission.
• Take warm blankets and/or water bottles to the homeless.
• Put together care packages for shut-ins, college students, military personal.
• Develop a creative canned food drive and donate to a local mission or food pantry.
• Be a secret angel. This can be collectively or as individuals. Find a family that could really use a lift during the holidays, or even through the whole year, and bless them by providing for their needs.
• Find a ministry/charity/mission that you could sponsor as a group to bless financially on the same day. Collect, save, and on the same day: Donate.  This could all be done online.
• Pray that God would open your eyes to opportunities right under your noses. Think of young, old, the disabled and the disenfranchised. As a group ask: “Who are the ‘least of these’ that we can connect with and minister to?” (Mt. 25:40)
• Create and lead your own service project.  I believe you can connect with people who are far from God but have a desire to serve others.  You can connect over a common interest and over time show them how serving others is directly connected to the heart of God.
• Create and lead a group who may not be interested in church (online or off).  Meet together with co-workers, neighbors, around a common interest: books, movies, or a weekly TV show.  Plan a brief discussion each week over a spiritual or ethical theme in the film, chapter, or episode that week. As the leader, introduce them to your beliefs over time and let the Holy Spirit draw those that begin to show a desire to learn more.

The key to this is that everyone is probably spread out, so each person will have to find a way they can serve and then gather each week online and share the stories, prayers, and burdens of each other.  It would be possible to create a Ning or Blog where everyone could write out their experience as they have time.