Book excerpt: Finally, a complete guide for your church to start live streaming with an included online course on UDEMY.com. Inside this book, you will find insights for ministry leaders who are considering the use of live streaming as an outreach tool for their church. This book will help church leaders understand how they can leverage the power of live streaming as a visual bridge connecting your church to the world. This book will provide perspective on best practices for live streaming church services and helpful reflections on real-life case studies from churches and pastors who are happily filling their pews with new members each week. Learn how to set up a digital donations strategy and enable your social media accounts to accept donations directly through YouTube and Facebook. This book will include actionable checklists for ministry leaders considering live streaming at their organization. It should become clear to you how your church can use live streaming and social media to reach new members and extend your reach to shut-ins. This book is accompanied by an online training course for technology directors and volunteers alike who may become the next “champions” of your live streaming program. Our online training course also includes a PowerPoint presentation template you can use to present the benefits of live streaming to your church leadership.At the end of this book, you will find a glossary of terms that will help you and your team familiarize yourselves with the type of technological vocabulary frequently used in live streaming. For many pastors, learning this type of information is like learning a new language. If you are interested in learning about church media and live streaming this book will be a walk an in the park. Feel free to download the audio version of this book and literally take a walk in the park as you listen. Finally, this book was written to inspire readers to use modern tools to tell their organizations unique story about their faith. At the end of the day, live streaming is a storytelling tool helping organizations reach those who may need guidance, education, or simply a nudge in the right direction. Social media has become a medium for empowering individuals to like and share the things they believe in. We live in a world that is more connected than ever before. Understanding that everyone on earth is connected in some way, within six degrees of separation, will be an important stepping stone in our thinking about social media. Your church now has the power to reach people in large connected networks which include groups of family members and friends. These are the people that are most important and most influential in lives of your church’s current members and their extended online network.One of the main reasons why western religion has succeeded so greatly to this day is because it has always taken advantage of emerging technologies… The medium isn’t the message; it’s the medium that you use to communicate the message. In the 1500s, we saw the printing press emerge, and bibles were being printed for the first time in history. We saw an explosion of what was being made available in written form, with new translations that were suddenly available all over the world… Over the past one hundred years, we have churches moving on to the radio with the early evangelical churches that have now moved into TV and televangelism… and now today we are moving into a new form of communication, where you can distribute your message on digital platforms using social media. The churches that are the most successful and most resonate with people are the ones delivering their message in the places that people are listening. Those who are producing content in a form that is consumable and makes sense in the day and age that we live in, we be to prosper from the fruits of new communication pathways.