We are thrilled to announce today the start of live bi-monthly meetings in the northern Chicago area. Starting in the second half of October, we will be meeting on Saturday nights in Antioch, Illinois for a time of worship, teaching, prayer and fellowship. We will be podcasting each meeting here on the Radio Antioch blog.
A local church in Antioch, the Christian Life Fellowship, has graciously agreed to let “borrow” their sanctuary for these meetings. Some of the audio teachings here on our website have been recorded there in the past. If you live in Lake county, Illinois and need a home church, I can heartily recommend this one.
By meeting on Saturday nights, we are practicing one of our ministry’s core values of interacting between churches and ministries. Our hope is that people from a number of churches who have a heart for worship, the prophetic and meaty teaching can come and fellowship in this independent meeting and perhaps get out of the mindset of “our” church and “their” church and instead take the Kingdom view of His church. We also expect to draw some people who can’t attend church on Sundays, as well as some whom presently do not attend church. In addition to ministry by our team, we will also be having guest speakers in from time to time, to help raise the spiritual “water level”, so to speak, in Lake county and the northern Chicago area.
How can you help? First of all, we need prayer. We also need volunteers to help us launch the ministry, in the area of worship team, technical audio and video, intercessors and sanctuary ministry. If you live nearby and would like to volunteer, please send us an email at mail@antiochtabernacle.org.
We also need additional finances. We will be taking offerings at these meetings, but until then we will have several thousand dollars worth of expenses that we will incur before the launch that we are believing God to provide. If God so leads, you can click the donate button at the left to help us out.
Several of you that live in other states have asked if we could broadcast these meetings Live on the Internet, in addition to the podcast. We have been looking into that, and it is workable. The Radio Antioch server in Florida already has significant capability. However, to stream live to more than a handful of users we will probably need to upgrade the systems, which would more than triple our monthly server expenses. We would also need some specialized equipment to get the live video feed from the church to our server. To do a simple feed with the one camera we use for our Africa video, we probably need to spend about a thousand dollars, as we can get all of the software for free courtesy of Apple. We just need a late model Macintosh (or a new Mac Mini) to convert the video and audio stream in real time to upload to our server. Ideally, we would like to pick up a used 3-chip camcorder to improve the video. The sanctuary we have been blessed with seats over 300 people, and a better camera/lens system would improve the quality at these distances. If anyone out there would like to donate one of these cameras or a spare Mac, or would like to sponsor a piece of equipment, please let us know.
We will be putting out updates on these meetings as the time approaches. We have added a new category to our blog, “Local” which will cover local Antioch meeting news. Please keep us in prayer and thanks again.
Dave
Photo courtesy Arbyreed, used with permission.
