In 1999 a team of us met with talkcity.com to learn from them. The lady we talked to shared how they were 80% volunteer driven and had 1.2 million people in chat rooms in any given month! What church wouldn’t want an audience of 1.2 million people? But in Chat Rooms? Really? Fast forward to 2011 and social media is dominant force. Back in 1999 I heard stories of community that was happening in chat rooms. Last month I chatted with Scott Heiferman, CEO of meetup.com. They have 7.2 million people in their chat rooms. Again, stories of community echo those that I heard in 1999. Evangelism tells us to go where the people are at. Yet in church circles we seem to turn a blind eye to where millions of people gather. At Saddleback we’ve experimented with ‘Online Small Groups’ for the last two years. Different than our online services, our online groups are targeting the spiritual formation process. Online services are great, but a passion of mine is to take people deeper in the environment they call home. The following is a compilation of our findings.
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