MILWAUKEE – Podcasting isn’t passe yet, but the seeds of an even newer electronic world are sprouting around the country.
From unbashful bloggers to proselytizing pastors, people are using inexpensive software and high-speed Internet connections to share video clips of their lives.
With a mouse click, you can now be whisked to the Oconomowoc home of Pete Prodoehl – one of Wisconsin’s first video bloggers – to see “Scary Basement Room,” “Shoes” or “Water Sports.”
Those are some of the “vlogs” – short video vignettes about whatever pops into his mind or life – that Prodoehl, 36, began posting in May on his www.tinkernet.org Web site. They star an empty cellar room and his torn sneakers, all captured doing nothing by a sometimes jerky, hand-held camera. An earlier one showed Prodoehl, a computer programmer for a publishing firm, riding a bicycle into a lake off a pier.
Then ride the technological ripple of what could become a new wave of Christian outreach into Brookfield, Wis., at www.brooksidebaptist.org. You can see kids singing, clapping, jumping or throwing water balloons during vacation Bible school activities at Brookside Baptist Church. Or, you can see and hear Pastor Sam Horn giving his latest sermon.
What’s more, Brookside became in August what may be one of the first churches in the nation to raise its technology to a higher level by videocasting, or vodcasting – automatically sending such videos to subscribers via the Internet.
Nationwide, a growing number of “vloggers,” or “video bloggers,” such as Prodoehl are posting primitive videos online and inviting viewers to respond with text or video reactions. The trend is new enough that it’s difficult to know just how many people are vlogging – even leading research firms such as the Pew Internet & American Life Project have no data on it. But it’s likely that the number of vloggers is still small. One indication: A recent check of the Yahoo video blogging group showed it had about 1,200 members.
As with many other parts of the Internet, the topics for vloggers are as diverse as the people who vlog – from cooking lessons or political protests to a single dad showing how to change a diaper and warning not to watch “if you are easily grossed out.”
This year, Brookside began offering Horn’s sermons through podcasting – the creation and automatic delivery over the Internet of audio programs that can give any institution or individual a regular, worldwide audience for their thoughtful words, rambling rants or musical outbursts.
Podcasting caught fire a year or so ago – ancient history in this era of rapid change.
“This is another way of communicating,” said Horn, who said the church uses the Internet to reach both technology savvy young people and older people who are homebound – all without letting the medium overpower the church’s ministerial philosophy.
Robby Richardson, vice chairman of the Internet Evangelism Coalition and director of Internet ministries for Gospel Communications International, said that many churches have large video screens in their sanctuaries and are now developing short video clips for use at services and online.
The Gospel Web site, www.gospelcom.net, which hosts more than 400 ministries worldwide, is the world’s most popular Christian site, getting more than 100 million page views per month on its network, he said. According to Nielsen’s/NetRatings, they get 3,300,000 individuals in the United States alone each month, he said. In addition to daily devotions and Bible translations, it provides the technical infrastructure and/or Internet consulting services to more than 400 ministries worldwide, he said.
George Barna, an author on contemporary Christian issues and founder of the Barna Group market research firm, has studied the growing numbers of people who are turning to the Internet in their quest for God. His last estimate was that more than 10 percent of the population will rely on the Internet for their entire spiritual experience by the end of the decade.
Too many churches now use Web sites only to present service times, staff biographies and other facts, said Frank Johnson, a licensed Assemblies of God minister and the founder and principal administrator of Strategic Digital Outreach, a new ministry in California that helps churches and other ministries do electronic outreach and evangelism.
“If the church could catch a vision for using video technology to present an authentic presentation of the life of the church – not rehearsed videos, but spontaneous records of conversations, laughing with one another, weeping with one another, people sharing their lives, etc. – the average person might take notice,” Johnson wrote in an e-mail interview.
“I would love to see churches start using their Web sites to present video profiles of people within their congregations so that the average person could get a sense of what the life of the church (not the organization, but the people – the true church) is really like.”
New technologies are removing mediators and putting people in closer contact with one another, said Will Samson, a former business consultant who is a student at Asbury Theological Seminary in Kentucky and spokesman for Emergent Village, a network of postmodern, emerging churches.
“The hope is that it empowers people to live out their life more fully, including creating communities that live out the Christian message,” Samson said.
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Aaron Flores, 29, pastor of Circle Church, a two-year-old Evangelical Covenant Church start-up in Orange, Calif., uses a $250 digital video camera and $100 editing software to share his personal struggles and reflections on faith, culture and anything else at his Web site, www.thevoiz.com.
Some in the blogosphere have dubbed Flores the first Christian video blogger; he has been vlogging only since December. He will teach a session on video blogging at a GodBlogCon convention Oct.13-15 at Biola University, a 97-year-old evangelical Christian university in La Mirada, Calif. In April, he was a presenter at an Internet Evangelism for the 21st Century conference at Liberty University, a Christian institution founded in 1971 by Baptist preacher Jerry Falwell.
For Flores, it is a way of establishing relationships. He doesn’t advertise his Christianity, but he doesn’t hide it, either.
“My video blog is really a media journal of my life,” said Flores, who has 120 subscribers. “I post a lot of things that are really personal. I use it to build friendships and relationships.
“I do get into conversations, both online in video format, as well as a lot of e-mails, from people who want to talk about faith because they know of my convictions and my beliefs. I wrestle a lot with beliefs and things I’m going through online. And people have a sense of safety with me.”
Flores was about the only Christian video blogger whom planners for Liberty University’s conference found, said Daniel Henrich, a Liberty advertising professor and consultant to the Southern Baptist’s mission board for Pacific Rim countries.
Henrich is exploring using catchy, offbeat video ads and viral marketing – getting amused people to transmit the videos to friends – to help evangelists reach non-Christians in Japan and South Korea, where many people use advanced cell phones instead of personal computers to access the Internet.
Flores now knows of two other openly Christian vloggers who regularly post videos, and many who occasionally do so.
Then there are Dennis and Janell Poulette, a missionary couple from the U.S. who are training youth ministers at a Baptist seminary in Mexico City. They post text and video blogs of their daily lives, including their infant son, at www.ymimexico.org to keep in touch with family members and with other people who support them with prayers or donations.
Pastor Trent Redmann of Valley Creek Church, an Assemblies of God congregation in Woodbury, Minn., began a weekly informal video chat in the past three months. He thinks that “just having some sort of connection with a real person there sharing off- the-cuff brings a little more authenticity instead of everything being slick.”
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Into the Blogosphere
GLOSSARY OF TERMS
Podcasting: The creation and automatic delivery over the Internet of audio programs. Podcasting is a term that combines iPod – Apple Computer’s portable digital audio player – and broadcasting.
Video blogging or vlogging: A video Web log – or diary – that is regularly updated and offers users short, video clips.
Vodcasting: Automatically sending videos to subscribers via the Internet.
Weblog or blog: Blogging – the term for informal journaling and chronological posting of diary-like texts – is derived from Web logging, or the keeping of logs on the Internet. Blogs have grown exponentially in the past few years, according to the Pew Internet & American Life Project. A recent Pew study found that 9% of Internet users said they had created blogs and 25 percent said they had read them.
Vlogging Web Links
www.brookside
baptist.org – Brookside Baptist Church
www.god
blogcon.com – God Blog convention
www.gospel
com.net – Resources for churches
www.ryanedit.
blogspot.com – Ryanne Hodson is considered a pioneer in vlogging; her vlog contains links to many others
www.tinker
net.org – Pete Prodoehl’s site
www.vidblogs.com – Resources for would-be vloggers
www.theVoiz.com – Aaron Flores’ site
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PHOTO (from KRT Photo Service, 202-383-6099): CPT-VIDEOBLOGS
AP-NY-08-31-05 0618EDT
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