Contact: Jamie Osborne, 843-342-7468, jamie@ywhisper.com
HILTON HEAD ISLAND, S.C., April 22 /Christian Newswire/ -- In advance of Internet Evangelism Day this Sunday, a Baptist group is announcing what it calls the world's first "blended-model" church.
City Church, now in beta, officially launches on October 10 in 100 cities across South Carolina, North Carolina and Virginia -- and on the internet at onebigcity.com.
"There are some outstanding ministries out there doing multi-site ministry and internet campus ministry very well," said the Rev. Jamie Osborne, senior pastor of City Church. "But I am not sure any single church has ever tried to launch in 100 cities at once."
The model, Osborne said, involves a combination of web and face-to-face interaction. "We've tried to create the best of both worlds," he said.
The effort was born almost three years ago after Osborne's ministry had spent several years and hundreds of thousands of dollars sponsoring major Christian music festival outreach events.
"What we found was that we were doing a great job at engaging the culture," Osborne said. "But we were having a terribly difficult time connecting these people to church."
That frustration led Osborne and a group of other young ministers to begin contemplating ways to make the Church more accessible to people. Soon, that process led them to the internet.
"Two hundred fifty years ago, leaders like John Wesley led a revolution by taking the church outside its walls to where the people are," said Osborne. "We're doing the same thing. It just happens that the internet is now where people are."
After months of content development, conducting focus groups, refining the concept and sampling online worship experiences, the group still wasn't satisfied.
"There was something missing," Osborne said.
The group's research indicated that the flexibility, convenience and non-threatening nature of the internet appealed to the un-churched or under-churched segment, but that people still wanted to have some sort of human connection.
"We figured we could spend the rest of our lives building campuses to facilitate this face-to-face interaction or find another way," Osborne said. "We decided to find another way."
After more than a year of working out a funding model, City Church is now in the process of interviewing and hiring its first 100 "community pastors" to serve in local communities. These individuals will be a cross-blend of traditional pastor and church planter, Osborne said.
"Churches spend so much money on maintaining buildings and general overhead," Osborne said. "Our model allows more dollars to flow into actual ministry."
More details about the model will be revealed in the months leading up to the October launch, Osborne added.
City Church is denominationally affiliated with the Baptist General Association of Virginia and the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship. Baptists celebrated 400 years of heritage last year.
"We look forward to seeing how we can contribute to providing leadership for the next 100 years," Osborne said.
Meanwhile, churches worldwide are preparing to focus on internet evangelism this Sunday, known as Internet Evangelism Day.
"The last 15 years have changed our world for ever," claims Tony Whittaker, coordinator of Internet Evangelism Day. "Digital media are transforming the way we communicate, behave and even think. If Facebook was a country, it would have the fourth largest population in the world."
This year's focus day will be the sixth to be used by churches around the world since the initiative's launch in 2005. Over this period, digital media have developed dramatically, with the advent of YouTube, Facebook and Twitter, and the growing use of mobile phones to access online services.
