St Mildred’s Church in Addiscombe launched the WOW Church (Without Walls Church) website last May.
It has short talks and, unlike most churches, they are not filmed services but are the preachers talking to viewers at home on their laptop.
Leander Gardner was one of those behind the idea, she told Premier the whole idea started a year ago when they were looking at the St Mildred’s Centre she runs: “we have about 1500 visitors a week but when we really looked at how the visitors’ profile broke down we realised that only 0.7% of our visitors were actually in between the 13-25 age bracket. So we were really missing something important there and those same statistics were mirrored in our church congregation.”
“So the idea of running something like an alpha youth project was really a bit of a pipe dream because where would the people come from?”
The idea came about as Gardner thought about her own children and how they spend time online, so the church applied for funding from the diocese of Southwark. The idea was shaped by a focus group of 13-25 year olds, who helped design the look of the website.
She explained how it worked if you typed a question: “You will connect to one of our specially trained chat hosts. We were supported in this initiative by the Samaritans in Croydon who helped us train our chat hosts, and they will chat to you and they will answer…
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