New Media Easter: Present and Past

It’s Good Friday again [comes every year, doesnt it?] and there are plenty of Easter downloads from sites like The Work of the People [some of them free] and other Easter media available online. In the UK, people are talking about Si Smith’s Easter creation and bloggers Ben Edson and Tractor Girl are rebelling against people downloading Delirious songs as part of an Easter Facebook strategy to help them reach Amazon Number 1.

Ahhhhh . . . Happy New Media Easter 2010

Now, for the fun of it, lets go back a decade, before Twitter, before Facebook, before broadband allowed us to download big files.

Lets go back to Easter 2000

In 2000, our family arrived in UK in time for Easter. It was our first visit to UK and the alternative worship movement had spurned some incredible new media worship resources. I was traveling around the country over Easter. These were some of the highlights.

1. At Springharvest, where I was invited to speak about the postmodern church in USA, I saw Jonny Baker lead a multi-media communion service using 5 different videos at the same time. BLEW ME AWAY! Seriously. I had never seen that many projectors in one room. I was hooked. Jonny later started a blog series of worship tricks.

2. In London, I attended Vaux for their Easter service. Incredible media, thanks to the video geeks at that church, but the highlight for me was a slow animation [flash?] of a rotating crown of thorns with poetry. The video I took at that service was some of the first alt. worship footage that most Americans had ever seen. I think the file was less than 2 Megs, which back in 2000 took a really long time to download.

3. While at Vaux, I met Steve Collins and heard the story of the multi-media labyrinth they had designed for St Paul’s Cathedral. Amazing! The following year I flew Steve to Austin, Texas for our Epicenter event and he brought the labyrinth with him. By then, it was renamed “Prayer Path” and came packaged in a box. A flash experience of the labyrinth was created a few years later.

4. Also in 2000, perhaps the greatest alt. worship book ever, called “The Prodigal Project: Journey into the Emerging Church” came out in time for Easter. The interactive CD in the book gave us a look at what the Kiwi’s and Aussies had been doing at Easter through the 90’s – highly inspirational.

If I get some free time over Easter, I might threw up some of those videos and images here on this post. Until then, I wish you a wonderful Easter weekend.