We first heard about The Church at Brook Hills (www.brookhills.org) through an initiative called The Radical Experiment (www.radicalexperiment.org). The site explains, “The Radical Experiment is a one-year commitment that The Church at Brook Hills is undertaking during 2010. The goal of the Radical Experiment is for individuals, families, and our faith family to spend our lives together for the sake of the church, the lost, and the poor around the world to the glory of God.” That mission sounded great to us and we loved that The Church at Brook Hills dedicated a site to coordinate the effort, so we decided to ask some of the Brook Hills staff a few questions about their use of media and technology.
Angelia Stewart — Media Director
COLLIDE: What is the extent of your role at The Church of Brook Hills?
Angelia Stewart: Currently, I oversee all of our websites, on-campus promotion, graphics and artwork for message series, video production, etc., and I handle all communication with the public at large.
COLLIDE: Tell us about your media team.
Stewart: Our media team consists of myself; my Communications Associate, Daniel Phillips; our intern, Sam Torres; and my Ministry Assistant, Ann Coe. Sam and Daniel work together to create and produce video content, graphics, web support, and more. Our website was created and maintained, in part, by The A Group (www.agroup.com) in Tennessee. They do the major stuff, and we edit the content. We have a small but efficient and talented team. The A Group also assists us with design concepts.
COLLIDE: Is there a media & technology philosophy that guides the way you do things at your church?
Stewart: Everything we do, we do under our mission, vision, and goal: “We glorify Christ by making disciples of all nations.” Everything about us relays this message. Our strategy in carrying this out is to make sure that what we do is biblical, intentional, reproducible, cross-cultural, simple, and radical. (For more detail on this, go to brookhills.org/new/mission.)
COLLIDE: What does the creative process look like at Brook Hills?
Stewart: We work very closely with the pastor and our worship team. We will take the outline and Scripture passages from an upcoming message series and meet together to talk through the best way to support what the pastor is going to bring through the Word.
We want to make the Word primary in our worship gatherings. Everything we do is to support the Word. Even with the songs we choose, we make sure they are Scripturally based and theologically sound. In everything that we do, we keep our aforementioned strategy in mind. This can present some challenges and has really pushed us into creating a lot of original songs and artistic elements.
Jim Watkins — Director of Worship
COLLIDE: In what ways are media and technology a part of a weekend service at The Church at Brook Hills?
Jim Watkins: The most obvious way technology factors into our weekend services is through projected video and song lyrics. We have experimented with various video configurations and technologies. But at the end of the day, we realize a church can spend a lot of resources on technology, and it might not be the best stewardship in light of the overwhelming spiritual and physical needs around the world. We want what we are doing in worship gatherings to be reproducible and simple enough to be used in other contexts around the world. We try to be creative, dynamic and frugal. For example, we just filmed our pastor in India this past weekend using a handheld Flip video camera that cost $189.
One of the biggest media changes for us this year has been using the Web to tie together corporate and personal worship. Our faith family has committed to read through the entire Word, pray for the entire world, join a multiplying community through small groups, sacrifice our money for a specific purpose, and to spend time in another context on missions (The Radical Experiment). Through our website, our church has access to a Bible-reading plan and weekly Bible-reading guides. Although we have only just begun, we are already seeing a huge impact on our faith family as well as a 50 percent increase in our web traffic as we have provided these tools.
We are also blessed with volunteers who have film and photography backgrounds and assist us in shooting and editing various projects, whether it’s for sharing testimonies, highlighting various physical and spiritual needs across the globe, or retelling a biblical story in a visual way. This helps us continue to push the envelope creatively while maintaining a God-centered approach to managing our budget.
Lastly, by capturing audio and video recordings of our messages each week and uploading them to the web, we are able to reach a far greater audience than that which attends our worship gatherings each week. That one-time sermon has become a teaching tool that can be downloaded to share God’s Word. We are also translating our teaching weekly into seven core languages for distribution around the world. By year’s end, we should have multiple websites in multiple languages providing resources to those who may not have them otherwise.
The underlying goal in all of these areas is to equip others here and abroad so that they can then begin to pour Christ into others and take the gospel to the nations.
Chris Nichols — Executive Pastor
COLLIDE: Do you see media and technology as important parts of your church’s future?
Nichols: I think the Web is an easy way to display the heart of what God is doing through His Word. The Web can be used to multiply the gospel and to make quality teaching and resources available anywhere you can get an Internet connection. Going forward, our focus will be on what God desires for us to be about in making His glory known. Tools such as the Web and other electronic media are merely effective avenues He has given us in that mission.
For more about The Church at Brook Hills, visit www.brookhills.org.