VIRTUAL CHURCH DEFINED:

Virtual Church is providing a way for those who are sick, traveling, and living in safety concern areas of the globe the ability to gather online to apply 1 Corinthians chapter 12 principles of encouraging, teaching, and building one another up in the knowledge and grace of the Lord Jesus Christ.

PURPOSE OF VIRTUAL CHURCH:

Virtual Church provides a way for those not able attend a local congregation to actively join a church body from anywhere. Additional, Virtual Church allows for new believers to grow in maturity and if a local church body arrives in their area they will have grown in their understanding of Scripture of the value of attending a local church body.

ACTS 2:42-47 MODEL OF THE CHURCH:

PLATFORMS FOR VIRTUAL CHURCH

The early church in the book of Acts modeled what the church was all about. Specifically in Acts 5:52 it says “Day after day, in the temple courts and from house to house, they never stopped teaching and proclaiming the good news that Jesus is the Messiah”.

PROCESS OF VIRTUAL CHURCH

Jesus worked through a process with individuals. In the New Testament Jesus first asked the disciples to “Come and see” and after a few years asked them to “Come and die” to themselves. The approach built peoples’ faith through a crawl, walk, run philosophy. Below are eight steps of Virtual Church to ultimately produce fully devoted followers of Jesus.

FIVE COMPONENTS TO LAUNCHING VIRTUAL CHURCH

1. Online Worship Service:

Needs effective biblical teaching, website designed for engagement with targeted persona in mind, high quality video production, real-time community interactions, and pastoral follow up presences.

2. Social Media Ministry:

Needs content creation, engagement team, and marketing plan to grow presences.

3. Small Group Ministry:

Needs a team focused on building up a large Facebook Group community with real-time Facebook live events and overseeing smaller group of individuals that meet privately for deeper conversations. Small Groups use video and/or texted based curriculum to guide individual meeting times. Additionally, training courses will be needed to help small groups to be well rounded groups focused on being healthy.

4. Classes for Online Learning:

Need multiple well thought out on-demand course tracks breaking down the basics of following Jesus with dynamic video teaching in an interactive way.

5. Pastoral Care Team:

Need oversight to care for specific issues that arise within the community and continually adjusting the vision to better move new believers to become fully devoted followers of Jesus. The Pastor Leadership Team needs to be fast, fluid, and flexible with an always changing world of online.