Young, whose congregation has about 20,000 members spread across five churches, said his image is so lifelike that some visitors forget he’s not there.
“It’s so real that people have come up after service to see me and [other] people are saying, ‘Dude, he is on video,’ ” he said. Geoff Surratt, author of “The Multi-site Church Revolution,” said at least 3,000 churches nationwide use some variation of high-def video to spread their pastor’s Sunday morning sermons.
Some broadcast hologram images of pastors that float suspended in the air behind the pulpit, while others project images of ministers on large video screens. Some sermons are broadcast live, while others are pre-recorded. A church can spend anywhere from $50,000 to $2 million on the high-def technology, he said. But the cost may be worth it because the technology allows churches to reach more people without constructing new buildings.
“It’s a revolution,” said Surratt, pastor at Seacoast Church in South Carolina, which broadcasts its pastor’s Sunday sermons to 13 locations. “It’s a very different way to spread the gospel. “It may not be a better way, though, said the Rev. Thomas Long, a nationally recognized authority on preaching and author of “Preaching from Memory to Hope.” Preachers who don’t think they need to be physically present in their church should ask how they would feel if they were forced to preach to high-def images of their congregation every Sunday morning, said Long, Bandy Professor of Preaching at Emory University.
“There’s something about embodiment — that the person who delivers the sermon is actually there — that’s important,” Long said. “It’s important in the same way that someone physically visits someone in a hospital or buries a loved one — they don’t fax it in.”
Long said the New Testament accounts of Jesus’ interaction with people show him constantly touching and being physically present with people.
“We don’t think God sent a message to us; God sent a person and the word became flesh,” he said.
