28 May 2012
Church on TV
It’s not every day that the nation gets to be a fly-on-the-wall at an evangelical church service.
But that’s exactly what happened over the weekend as BBC One broadcast live from Alliance member church the Church of Christ the King in Brighton to celebrate Pentecost, the birth of the Church.
BBC One only broadcasts church services four times a year: Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, Easter Sunday and Pentecost Sunday, so the Newfrontiers church jumped at the rare opportunity to be featured when they were approached “out of the blue” in January.
Church of Christ the King is a multi-site church with Sunday services in Brighton, Shoreham and at Brighton Racecourse in the east of the city. The service was broadcast from the New England site in central Brighton.
CCK (as it’s often known) regularly gathers 1,200 worshippers across its four Sunday services. The church is part of the Newfrontiers family of churches, which has over 200 churches in the UK and over 800 around the world.
The programme was broadcast at 10am on Sunday (27 May) live from the church’s building.
Lasting just under an hour, it featured worship from Simon Brading, worship leader at the Newday youth event, and senior pastor Joel Virgo.
The live show sparked a lot of conversation on Twitter from both Christians and non-Christians, with the church making a sterling effort to respond in 140 characters or fewer to those joining the conversation at #churchontv.
Joel said: “We’re grateful to God for the opportunity we enjoyed to communicate the gospel to such a very wide audience.
“The church rose to the task with energy and it was a lot of fun. I guess we will never know what fruit may come from this, but we do look forward to learning some of the impact in the coming days.”
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The BBC also recorded an episode of Songs of Praise from the church on the Sunday afternoon and another recording will take place this evening.
They will feature CCK worship leaders and musicians including Stuart Townend and Lou Fellingham & Phatfish and will be broadcast later in 2012 and 2013.
For more infomation visit the CCK website
