This church has a drone
Just outside of Atlanta, in the city of East Point, Georgia, there’s a church that wants its high praise to be high-tech.
When the Impact Church was first established in 2007, it held its services in a middle school. The church has since converted a former meat-packing warehouse into a technologically-advanced tabernacle that offers three different one-hour-long services every Sunday. The church has 2,000 IRL worshippers plus another 1,000 via the church’s live stream; services are filmed by multiple cameras, one of which is sometimes flying around the building attached to a drone.
Judging from the number of news reports in which it has appeared, one might assume that the church loves media attention almost as much as the holy spirit. Its attempts to stay on the cutting edge of technology and pop culture have led to profiles in CNN, The Atlantic and the Huffington Post, among others. The Atlantic was impressed by lead pastor Olu Brown incorporating themes from the hit TV show Scandal into his sermon. The Huffington Post reported that millennials in the congregation preferred paying their tithes via an electric kiosk in the lobby rather than dropping bills in the offering plate — because who carries cash nowadays?
But it’s 2015, and the church doesn’t have to rely on traditional media for attention; it can create its own. The church has an Instagram, a Twitter account and a Facebook page. Podcast versions of its sermons are available on iTunes. And the church’s Vimeo account has over 600 uploads. The subject matter of the videos varies. There’s a heavy-hitting PSA-style video about gun control in America, which served as a prompt for the church’s scholarship competition, paired with this lighthearted video spoof of a Lincoln Car commercial, used to tell the story of why creating a place that “does church differently” was important.
Andre Barnes, the Impact Church’s technology director, has played a major role in these social media deployments. “Most churches are the last place to get technological advances,” said Barnes. But he believes his church’s deployments have been a great recruiting tool. He speaks highly of the church’s colorful kids zone, where the walls are painted as bright as suits on Easter Sunday, and the café where attendees can get a latte and watch football highlights on a flat-screen prior to Sunday service. Next up, Barnes says that the church is looking forward to taking advantage of the Google Fiber rollout in Atlanta metropolitan area—one of three areas in the South that Google is expanding to this year.