Back to Church, Part II: Gateway Church
I’ve driven by Gateway Church in Southlake, Texas many, many, many times. I didn’t know anything about it and didn’t much care, until I was ready to need God again.
The other night, I was online and saw a tweet from Kari Jobe about Christ for the Nations. I didn’t know who she is, but I’ve since learned she is one of the top worship leaders in the country. She’s a rising star and is a Dove awards nominee for Best New Artist. I would LOVE to know how I was following her on Twitter. I can’t see that she has any connection to Cali or GeekBrief.TV. Long story short, she is a worship pastor at Gateway.
I went to Gateway on a Saturday afternoon. The service was at 4PM and it was packed. I felt like I was in a little bit of geek heaven as soon as I got in the auditorium because Gateway has the best collection of cameras and audio gear I’ve ever seen in a church. I had a hard time finding a seat and wound up making my way all the way over to a leftover spot on the edge of the auditorium.
When the music started, I was impressed. It was, without question, the best quality sound mix I’ve ever heard in any church at any time in my life. The music sounded as good as if I had been watching a DVD in our home theater. I was impressed. A guy lead the praise part and Kari lead the worship part. I’ve been to lots of churches with great music, but there is always a sense that the musicians on the stage are talented amateurs. At Gateway, the musicians sounded like professionals.
Within about a minute of worship ending, the stage was cleared of any evidence of musical instruments and mics. Suddenly, it looked like a talk show set. There were three chairs and the screen in the background looked like a graphic from The Oprah Show. It was Valentine’s Day weekend and the pastor wasn’t preaching. He interviewed a pro baseball player and the player’s wife about their marriage and their lives as Christians. It was entertaining, touching and a flawlessly professional production.
A couple of weeks ago Gateway had a worship conference and they streamed some of it online. I’ve seen a lot of streaming video and this was the best streaming quality of anything I’ve ever watched online. Think what you want about Microsoft, but WMV can yield beautiful video when you have the compression setting right. I tweeted that I was watching and that it was the best streaming I had seen. A few minutes later @gatewaypeople replied thanking me and that he or she was glad I was enjoying it. Now, it doesn’t always work on a Mac and that is a major downside to using WMV. Even if a Mac user has his plug-ins all updated and installed, there are times when it just doesn’t stream for us.
I’ve had a couple more experiences where it seemed like Gateway was really paying attention and I really appreciated it. I think if I tweeted this morning I was on may way to Gateway for church, I would get a response. That’s how it should be done. Not a tweet for tweet acknowledgment, but just enough to show you’re paying attention to what people online are saying about you.
Whether you’re doing social media as a church, an individual or a person, if you want people to care about what you’re doing, you have to let them know you care about what they’re doing. The better you are at doing that, the better you’ll do with social media. If your tweets are just about the broadcast, only the people who already really want to know what you’re saying will pay attention. If you attempt to connect personally with someone trying to learn about you, it gives them a reason to come back and learn more about what you’re all about. I’m not always good at doing that personally so if you want to see a good example the person to follow is Chris Brogan.
