It’s been a while since I’ve posted a “Friday 5.” My bad. I simply haven’t had the time to sit down and shoot out some requests for more information, which is odd since it’s so easy…

Today’s 5 is with Nick Charalambous, the Online Community Pastor for NewSpring Church. I’ve been able to have a few chats with him as well as hang out with him in some of the BETA tests for their campus.

I’d keep an eye out on Nick, he’s going to be leading NewSpring in some crazy-cool places:

Name?

Nicholas Charalambous

Blog/Website[s]?

Ipiphanist.wordpress.com

Newspring.cc/webcampus

Time Bandits or Favorite Websites?

Twitter, Facebook, Google Reader. ESV Study Bible online=hours of fun. Ditto: Hulu, Last.fm.

Whatcha Working On?

Building a community of radical believers on the NewSpring Web Campus (newspring.cc/webcampus). Even though we were very pleased with the launch of the first phase of the physical campus, the harder work is head. Working with the rest of our communications team, I’m trying to experiment with the best methods to create a true Biblical community that is serving and discipling and evangelizing one another.

How do you see Web Technology impacting The Kingdom?

I’m a techno-evangelist, but a pragmatic one. Technology is only ever a tool, and as far as I can tell, technology always creates as many problems as it solves. I guess that’s what it means to live in a fallen world.

I believe strongly in social media as a tool for kingdom building, but only in so far as it removes so many of our excuses for our weak, ineffective witness, our partial, fragile sense of community and our lazy discipleship.

I am amazed at the amount of talent, vision and passion in the modern church movement. We’ve done a great work in stripping away the crust of dead traditions and unhelpful legalisms that had covered up our vision of Christ, but now that we have gotten to the core of the faith — loving Jesus, loving others — our fruit better prove it.

The thing about our hyper-mediated world is that a huge amount that used to be hidden in the heart is now revealed by our technology. Every word we blurt out; everywhere we go, every work we do potentially is going to be lifestreamed … and people will be able to draw even harsher judgments about whether we are Christians in name only.

We have the power to evangelize the world; we have the tools for every Christian to be without excuse: People can hear about God’s wonderful deeds, they can devote themselves to sound teaching, they can share in fellowship and offer themselves as living sacrifices to the body of Christ.

If they don’t or won’t, the only explanation is that they don’t have the heart of worship. Their knowledge and understanding of God is too small. And that means that our churches or the “priesthood of all believers” that we belong to just isn’t lifting up Christ enough and or consistently so that he can draw us closer to him for our sanctification.