Hello RockPointe!

I pray that you are experiencing the presence of Jesus as we begin our journey through the Lenten season and prepare our hearts for celebrating our resurrected Lord and the hope of our salvation. As a reminder, we’re inviting you to join us in fasting and prayer each Wednesday over lunch. One of the pastoral staff will host a short devotional on Instagram and YouTube Live, so make sure that you are following RockPointe Church on those platforms so you don’t miss it. And don't worry! If you can't take a lunch break right at noon, it will be posted to Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube afterwards. — Stafford

EVERYTHING OLD IS NEW AGAIN

Stafford Greer, Bearspaw Lead Site Pastor

I’ve noticed a strange thing happening in life these days. While it most definitely is not a new phenomenon, it is new for me to experience it: the cyclical nature of trends in society. While I would like to think it is because I have amazing perception skills and pick up on cultural trends quickly, the reality is, I’m now middle age and simply have a perspective of decades that I haven’t had before.

I think I first really noticed it when my teenage daughter came down from her room, excited to model for us her latest fashion finds; it could have been an outfit taken straight from my high school years in the 90s. Sure, the fit was updated and modernized, but it looked a LOT like 1997.

A couple years ago, Joe and I bought a new living room set; couches, coffee table, end tables, and with a mid-century modern style, it sure looked a lot like furniture taken from living rooms of the 1960s - only it was updated to reflect the current trends and manufacturing techniques and materials.

Current music trends rely heavily on 80s synth sounds, the retro video games resale market continues to thrive, and for the first time since 1987, vinyl records outsold CDs in the US in 2022, again in 2023, and doubled the revenue of CD sales in 2024. As the writer of Ecclesiastes wrote almost 3000 years ago: “What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.” (Ecclesasties 1:9 NIV)

This week, Sunday March 16, we at RockPointe Church are trying something new: live streaming our teaching. Video as a delivery method for sermons is FAR from new in the history of RockPointe Church. As I’ve been told by interns of years gone by, there was season where video tapes of the recorded sermon were driven between our sites on a Sunday morning. For a season, Saturday night services were pre-recorded and shown at various locations on Sunday morning and even recently during our vision series, This Is Us, we were pre-recording messages so that our services and teaching calendar could be aligned.

Video teaching models have changed significantly with rapid technological advancements: I now take seminary courses over video, I learn how to fix my car via YouTube, I FaceTime with friends and family, and regularly meet with colleagues over Zoom. And during a recent trip to Thailand for our denominations Global Gathering, I heard stories of how the gospel is being preached in Northern Pakistan via Zoom and hundreds of people have come to faith in Christ, been baptized, and had physical healing through this video preaching ministry (that also needed a English-Urdu translator)! Our God sure is the God of the impossible!

Video teaching in a multisite church setting has been instrumental to the success of living out a church’s unique kingdom calling of proclaiming the gospel at various locations, and will continue to be a tool in our RockPointe tool belt.

Like the new clothes my daughter was showing off, there are, in fact, some new elements to this: technology has changed significantly. We’ve recently invested in new video cameras and switchers to improve video quality as well as new computers and hardware to handle the technical demands. All of that, along with stable high-speed internet, allows us to stream our videos simultaneously.

Here’s what all of this means for us: We are going to trial using YouTube to live stream the message to our sites this Sunday. This means that the video will not be pre-recorded, but will be simulcast from our Bearspaw location to Bowridge and Westhills. We’ve done a couple tests to ensure we can pull this off and we’re confident that we can, but like all new things we try, there may be a hiccup along the way. Thanks in advance for your grace as we work out any of hiccups (and don’t worry, we do have a backup plan should it fail on an epic level).

You probably have a few questions that I’ll try to answer here:

Q: Does this mean that we’re going to have video teaching every Sunday?

A: No, not at all. Right now we are going to trial this live streaming option 5 times between now and June. We’re going to try to be strategic in how and when we use it. We are also being strategic for when sites will have “site weekends” where special days like Palm Sunday, Easter Sunday, and others will be local and fully contextualized for each site and their community.

Q: Is every site going to utilize video teaching?

A: Yes - every location will have video teaching as we move forward. The Bearspaw location is currently the only location that has the ability to broadcast a live stream, which means that when there is a video teaching at Bearspaw, it will be pre-recorded like we have been doing for the time being.

Q: Will Pastor Stafford still preach occasionally in person at each of the sites?

A: Yes - while I am primarily located at Bearspaw, this format change will still allow me to be present at all the sites. Presently, we don’t have a hard-and-fast rotation of what this will look like, but will be taking time between now and the summer to assess how this trial goes and what, if any, tweaks need to be made to best use this tool in living out our purpose of seeing people near and far encounter and be transformed by Jesus.

Perhaps you’ve noticed that our services have been live streamed on YouTube and Facebook over the past couple weeks/months - during that time, we have seen our service reach double what it was before live streaming!

I know that change can be a challenge and whenever we’re trying something new, there’s always a risk of it blowing up and failing in a very public way. This is one of those moments where it would be easier not to do anything different. However, we think that there is a value in trying and experimenting in new areas like this in order to find the best strategies of living out our purpose.

Thanks for your patience, grace, and willingness to try new things with us as we enter a new ministry season together!