YouTube provides new online audience for Church Army

06 July 2007

Who would have thought that a 125 year old mission agency would be using the world's most popular video sharing website to share stories of faith in words and action? YouTube, with almost 20 million visitors each month* now hosts short stories of Church Army evangelists reaching out to their communities with the gospel through new and exciting fresh expressions of church.

The featured videos focus on the work of a skateboarding evangelist, a former Sikh and others working in urban, inner city and rural settings. The Church Army page on YouTube aims to showcase the good work being done by its 300 or so evangelists all over the UK and Ireland.

Skateboarding evangelist Andy Milne talks about being the only bible the young people he works with will ever read and London based Nick Russell shares something on the difficulties of living and working with his wife and baby daughter on one of south-east London's toughest estates.

Manchester's Ben Edson describes the reasons that led to him setting up Sanctus 1 as a fresh expression of church for the creative and arts community in the inner city and Mandy Wright explores the needs of isolated farming communities based in Devon. Former Sikh, Kinder Kalsi, talks about Chill, a new form of church for young people set up in Langsett, Sheffield.

David Coleman, Church Army's Communications manager comments; "For sometime we have been thinking about how more people could get a glimpse into what it is like to be an evangelists indifferent contexttoday and YouTube gives us a perfect platform to do just that."

Church Army plans to make a further dozen online movies available over the next twelve months and is exploring other online opportunities such as MySpace.

To view Church Army's page on YouTube, visit www.youtube.com/churcharmy

* According to Nielsen/NetRatings, YouTube has almost 20 million visitors each month