Collide Magazine

Church Spotlight: Reality Church

COLLIDE Staff - Originally posted Monday, July 13, 2009 -

Located in Virginia Beach, Virginia, Reality Church gathers together each week in a local high school to worship the Lord and invite people into a relationship with Christ. Reality Church has seen close to 700 people come to know Christ in its 6 years through the use of relevant messages, creative media, and personal ministry. Maybe we could learn a thing or two from them.

Steve Sileo - Lead Pastor

COLLIDE: Tell us about the beginnings of Reality Church.

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Sileo: The concept of what Reality would be and do came as a result of being discontent. With 15-plus years of catering to the already convinced (church for the churched), I became increasingly inspired by God to lay that down. It was a request that could not be ignored: to launch a kind of church that would really connect with those who might want to explore God, but wanted nothing to do with religion. So, against all odds, and with the “We can’t not do this!” support of my wife Julie, we and our three young kids launched Reality in our living room with a couple we had recently won to Christ.

COLLIDE: As a pastor, what do you feel like people are looking for in a church today and how is Reality Church meeting those people and expectations?

Sileo: To me, I really don’t think that people have church on their personal radar. I think they have other things on their mind such as the beach, the movies, the mall, extra sleep, the lawn, the honey-do list, and a million other things. All of this is competing for people’s attention and time. The local church has to market themselves in such a way as to attract the unchurched. We have to compel them to leave their routine to explore a love they’ve never known before. God can use the power of media to do that. And if we learn to take off the masks, to be relevant and practical in our churches, many will come to Christ. We are a smaller church that has proof of this. Beginning with zero resources and a handful of people, Reality has seen close to 700 people come to Christ in the six years we’ve been around. That’s not a lot, and there are many more to reach; but the way that God has used the ministry of media at Reality has totally convinced me that all churches must move toward this…yesterday!

COLLIDE: How would you encourage churches to use media?

Sileo: We’ve really just begun a full-fledged media ministry, and we’re seeing the power of it. It’s my personal belief that if the leadership of any local church really wants to significantly reach numerous people for Jesus and advance the Kingdom of God in their locale, they have to take certain steps in regards to the use of media (website, screen graphics, video, print, etc.).

1. Recognize its power. Go and see what other ministries are doing with media and how they’re doing it. Get someone to speak for you and go or send your leadership to observe—but just do something!
2. When you find a church using media with impact, set up a time to meet and ask questions about how to begin.
3. Look for those in your ministry or community who can run the equipment (usually 16-35 year-olds), and then invest your resources in it.
4. Finally, determine to become better—go from one level to the next within the ministry of media.

Dave Daniels - Media Team Leader

COLLIDE: What kind of background and experience do you have in media production?

Daniels: I've always struggled with that question. I have no formal schooling to be doing what I'm doing. God placed within me an undying passion to help others connect to Him using media. The first time I touched a camera was in May of 2001. My future father-in-law bought us one for our honeymoon. Of course I came home and made the cheesiest video you could imagine!! However, I loved the process. Filming, cutting, transitions, music- it all began to become more than a hobby. As I grew in experience I did want some formal direction from professionals. I found out about Post Production World at NAB in Vegas. From 2005-2008 I attended their training seminars to polish and tighten up my work.

I really began to use media for God solely in 2006 while working with the student ministry at our church. Then I was brought on staff part time as the HS Director to oversee the two student bands and provide videos for our weekly gatherings. From there He blossomed me, which has lead me to Reality Church.

COLLIDE: What does your position at Reality Church consist of?

Daniels: I am in charge of the visual aspect of Sunday mornings including working with the music team to produce on screen lyrics and moving graphics, working with the lighting team so the screen colors and lighting match consistently, and co-writing, filming, editing, and publishing to the Web all of our videos. I also assist the pastor in the creative process for our teaching series. What has really helped me expand my process is working directly with our children’s pastor to create fun and interactive videos for the kids. It has been an amazing adventure creating children’s videos!

I rely heavily on my volunteer media team to help me pull off Sunday's. They are a great group to work with and passionate about reaching people through new media. I would be lost without them.

My wife Kim does all of our print materials and graphics. Her talent and eye smokes anything I can do. So we pass the ball to her, and she blows us away every series!

COLLIDE: How does Reality Church utilize media on Sundays and throughout the week?

Daniels: We create a lot of our own stuff for Sunday mornings but also use some stock media from SermonSpice, WorshipHouse, etc. In February we made the switch to filming Sunday mornings. We film everything in HD and upload all video and audio to our website. Filming in HD adds more time in post-production, but we think the quality is worth it.

Right now we connect a couple of ways during the week. One way is through a video titled “ATM” or “After The Message.” It’s a brief two- to three-minute video of our pastor that recaps the previous Sunday, provides a few questions or thoughts about the message, and offers a quick preview of the upcoming week. It’s simple but adds a connection point between Sundays and pushes people to live out their faith.

We also include our Reality Shout-Outs on our Facebook page. It’s an awesome way to show some love to our volunteers for what they do week in and week out. I just grab the Flip Mino and surprise random people every week. What's even more encouraging is to see the comments that our people leave those volunteers on the videos.

COLLIDE: How do you create your videos and sermon graphics and what tools do you use to do so?

Daniels: It all starts with the Pastor's one idea for a series. In the "war room" we transform that idea into a 4-6 week series that is relevant, God honoring, and creative. From there we script out the videos and film 95% in front of a green screen. The green screen offers so much flexibility providing any set we would need. Our cameras are Canon VIXIA HF10's. They're AVCHD cameras that are less than $600.00 and shoot in full 1920x1080. They use either a built-in HDD or SDHC cards. For post production I cut everything in Final Cut Pro. FCP does have a built in compositor for green screen but is complex to work through. We use a plug-in from www.dvgarage.com called DV Matte Pro Studio 3. It is so intuitive and easy to use. I pulled my first key watching their tutorial in less than 10 minutes and never looked back.

The foundation to most of our videos is the right soundtrack. We use a lot of Digital Juice "Stack Traxx" because of its incredible flexibility and the super affordable price tag. We have also purchased royalty free music from Stock20.com

My wife creates all of our graphics with Adobe Creative Suite Master Collection. However, being a small (budget) church and her full time job outside of Reality, we sometimes use stuff from powerpointsermons.com for in-between fillers like Mothers Day, Fathers Day, etc. That also allows us an extra week push in creating the necessary graphics for an upcoming series.

COLLIDE: We can’t help but notice your quality website (www.realitychurchhome.com). What value do you place on it and who helped design it?

Daniels: We launched our new site in February of this year. We met John from Faith Network (www.faithnetwork.com) at Catalyst in Atlanta last October and were impressed with their work and decided to use them as our designers and hosting company. John and his team hit a home run on the design and layout of the site. It helps convey the setting you can expect at Reality. We target lost people in our culture and wanted to create a site that would reflect a current look and feel.

We place extreme importance on our site. We didn’t want to spend all that money for it to become the information hub. We needed it to become a place people visit as often as Facebook. The site is always changing with inclusions like ATMand our weekly messages. Steve blogs on the site regularly, and we also provide signups for all of our major events.

COLLIDE: How has your church employed social media like Twitter, Facebook, and Vimeo?

Daniels: Facebook is a big connecting point during the week for us. Meeting in a school has its problems and one of them is the lack of a midweek gathering. Facebook allows us to keep up with our people. We let them know when last Sundays message is online using Facebook and Twitter. We are adding uses for Twitter all the time. Right know we use it as a reminder service for upcoming events—“Hope to see you Sunday,” “bring a friend,” that kind of thing. We use Vimeo as an online storehouse for our videos.

COLLIDE: How would you encourage churches to use media?

Daniels: Utilize all the free stuff!! Twitter, Facebook, Vimeo, You Tube are just a few tools that can be used to reach people. It just makes sense to use what your members use and be where your people are. Most importantly, all of those services fitintoevery church budget. If you don't have a production team use what's out there at Worship House and others. Ten to twenty dollars for high end videos that can work with your message topic is more affordable than producing your own. Start small but dream big. Be realistic about your time table. Invest invest invest in promising volunteers. Their passion can take your church to another level.

Russ Van Dine - Children’s Pastor

COLLIDE: How does the children’s ministry utilize media?

Van Dine: We use media in all areas of our ministry. We use the Web to interact with the parents of our children and our volunteer workers. To help the children “carry” home the monthly teaching we use interactive CDs packaged with an activity booklet. We create the interactive program for the CDs in Flash, incorporate our video skits, Flash games, and quizzes to help the kids interact with the monthly virtues we teach. The booklet is designed with games that can be played with two people to help encourage the parents to interact with their kids while they learn or relearn the virtue for that month. All media is chosen specifically to support the learning ability of our children. We pick virtues for the whole year, split them into three groups, and then start to have fun!

COLLIDE: What kind of media would you like to see more of in children’s ministry?

Van Dine: We utilize an interactive teaching method that all kids under¬stand and are comfortable with. We believe children today speak a different language—we call it “digital”—and this is the language we use to teach and engage. We also use object lessons and games. I’d like to see kids have fun while they learn. We need more computer-based interactive CDs for take-home learning. Papers with the verse and some artwork are good but I think we can do better. So why don’t we?

For more information about Reality Church, visit www.realitychurchhome.com.