
I recently acquired The Welcome Wagon’s aptly-titled album Welcome to the Welcome Wagon and I love it. If you like Sufjan Stevens-esque, lo-fi, rustic, indie gospel flaor, then you’ll love The Welcome Wagon, too.
Anyway, I was digging around for a little more info on the band when I came across this interview with The Welcome Wagon’s Thomas Vito Aiuto on Stereogum (a good music blog). It turns out that the band is comprised of Aiuto–a Brooklyn-based pastor and church planter–and his wife Monique. Aiuto does a phenomenal job articulating the Christian faith and the values of his church, Resurrection Presbyterian Church.
Here’s a good snippet about Resurrection’s website from the interview:
STEREOGUM: I went to the church’s website: You have an active community section with classifieds, etc. You also invite people to your home for Home Groups. Is this something unique to your church? It seems like you’re providing a kind of full-time community that moves beyond just the mass, or whatever.
TVA: Home groups are not unique to our church. They simply provide a format for our church to be a community of love for one another, and for the neighborhoods we live in. We hope that our worship of Christ on Sunday spills over in to relationships of care and service, and organizing home groups is one way to do that. Our home groups usually meet once per week in one of our members’ homes, and they end up being a place for people to talk and share a meal, pray, study the Bible and reflect thoughtfully on who God is, and who God is calling them to be.
STEREOGUM: Does a strong web presence — streaming sermons, etc. — help with attracting new members?
TVA: I think that it does. When someone new comes to the church and I ask them how they found us, they often answer that they found info through the web. So we want to let people know that we are here in as many ways as we can.
Read the rest of the interview here.
I’m curious–do you find, like Aiuto, that visitors to your church stop by your website to check you out before they ever darken the doors of your building?
