Yeshua Explored
24th January 2020
Going virtual
When virtual Church triumphs!
(This series of articles was written at the beginning of the first lockdown in March/April 2020)
Previous articles are still available on the Premier Christian radio website – https://www.premierchristianradio.com/Blogs2/Yeshua-Explored – (until they finally pull the plug!)
Now moving on to March 2020, with Foundations 13 scheduled for April 24th – 27th at The Hayes conference centre. In early March I was informed by a health professional that this coincided with the expected peak of the Covid-19 pandemic and I would be putting our delegates, many of them vulnerable, in danger, if the conference were to proceed. I made a decision, immediately, to re-imagine F13 as a virtual conference. Most people thought me mad at the time (especially as this was way before the enforced lockdown) including many in my core group. So why did I make this decision? The answer lay in my past.
I have been virtual for most of my career, starting out in the mid-80s as a game designer in the early home computing boom, designing and programming adventure and strategy games for the BBC micro, Dragon 32, Acorn Electron and others. From there I moved into the educational sector, with the use of CDROMs and laserdiscs in Computer Based Training programmes and also continued to design computer games, this time with Christian themes, for Lion Publishing in the UK. Then, in 1996, my ministry partner, Kit Eglinton and I launched the Saltshakers website, one of the first web ministries in the UK. Out of this came a web community that is still with us now, meeting physically at Foundations conferences and virtually, for over three years already, using Zoom (when it was still predominantly a business video conferencing facility). So, when a decision had to be made concerning our residential conference, rather than cancel it as most other ministries did, I eagerly took the challenge of adapting it as an online experience. I honestly believed that we could not only duplicate much of our physical conference, virtually, but make it an enhanced experience!
What actually happened at F13 surpassed even my most optimistic expectations! Here are some comments, afterwards, by some delegates:
… this one did reach a wholenew level of unity and restoration for the Body of Yeshua, and hopefully, for our world.
This was very much a whole experience, very intimate, very personal, sometimes a bit overwhelming so I hid my tears in embarrassment.
… it was totally amazing to see how He knit us all together, His church/His bride in an incredible way and one was aware that even COVID19 was not going to prevent His purposes from being fulfilled.
The zoom medium has I think enabled many to respond away from the camera in ways that they would have felt inhibited to do in the usual meeting situation.
Through use of zoom, a much more intimate environment is possible with God, allowing so many more to hear a message from His servant, yet receive and respond in a very personal way with far fewer distractions than usual, even in a very small fellowship.
I found it an intimate time worshipping the Lord in this new virtual way.
We witnessed an unexpected fusion of technology and authentic Christian spirituality.
Something amazing happened over those three days, those 40 hours of staring at pixels on a screen. This virtual environment had won over our most sceptical of sceptics and, so immersed were people in this strange yet welcoming environment, that we had to prise some of them away on Monday afternoon, so that we could get some rest!
Reading these comments, you will get the gist of what happened. People were taking part in a real conference, including all the sort of things that you get at physical conferences if we ignore three of the basic senses of touch, smell and taste! But there was a significant difference. What was originally feared as a negative … actually became a positive! The fact that we weren’t physically together became less of an issue as we adapted to the environment, but the fact that we were in a safe, familiar, unthreatening place – our homes – became a bigger factor than anyone could have imagined. Somehow this took away our inhibitions and defences and freed up the Holy Spirit to work on us in surprising ways.
We had gone back to worshipping God at home … but with others!
This is an extract from the book, Flockdown: Is the Church out for the count?, available for £5 at https://www.sppublishing.com/flockdown-263-p.asp
