"The more I’m seeing this, the more I’m seeing it has to be done," says John Martens, a church planter in Maple Ridge. "This" is The Connection, a new vision for shared leadership and church networking with the Internet at its hub. This has never been tried before, as far as I know. But to hear Martens tell it, it absolutely can be done.

The untapped blessing of the Internet, Martens says, is its potential to remove the greatest roadblock to starting new churches-the need for land and a building. (This is especially acute in the Lower Mainland, where property values have risen to insane heights.)

From medieval cathedrals to small-town churches, the perception has remained the same, he says: "church" equals "building." "We’re saying, ‘No, the local church is no longer a building in one location. The church is a group of people dynamically working within a community to transform that community by being in it.’"

As Martens explains, each church member would be connected at two levels. First, local congregations would join together and become "a network of locations" linked by a common leadership team and a common vision. On Sundays, congregations would gather separately, yet worship as one.

An Internet audio and video hook-up linking the churches would allow for, say, the preacher to be in one location and the praise team to be somewhere else, and yet everyone would see and hear everything in real time.

"It would be as if they’re really in another room and they’re connected by a window," says Martens. Experiments he’s carried out prove the technology exists right now to do this. "But we’ll hopefully be able to do it better and clearer and sharper as things progress."

There would also be an in-the-flesh network of leaders drawn from every church. "You might have specialists," says Martens. "You might have a children’s worker specialist from one church, a music specialist from another church, who would be working in all the churches to make sure everything was the highest quality possible."

Second, within the local church, members would turn to lay leaders for hands-on discipleship and counseling. "We’d be moving much more into a brotherhood concept," he says. Everyone would be strongly encouraged to join a small group "family."

For Martens, the advantages of this model are legion. "It allows for smaller churches with the economic and leadership power of the megachurch, but without the expense of building the big building"-thus creating the potential for more churches on high-priced urban land-"and it forces us to train local lay leadership in a much more dynamic way."

The question, of course, is whether normally conservative churches would be willing to buy into this model. "It won’t be for everybody," Martens admits. "Some people prefer something more traditional. That’s fine. There’s nothing wrong with having a variety of churches for a variety of people."

But while Martens believes it would be "a wonderful thing," especially for churches that are too small to afford quality leadership, he acknowledges that they would likely resist such a radical shift.

Still, Martens is not prepared to write off any church. His plan is to start churches that embrace this new vision-as he is doing in Maple Ridge-and then simply let the established churches watch what they do and come to realize on their own that they would benefit from doing much the same thing.

"Like kids today who know how to use cell phones and palm pilots much better than their parents," he says, "the parents often learn from their kids. It’s the same with church planting."

Over the long-term, Martens’ dream is to encircle the Greater Vancouver area with a network of churches all worshipping together at the same time. "I look at it like building a fence of worship around the city to create a force of spiritual power that will be something that the devil will have to reckon with," he says.

"I think it’ll change the dynamics of spiritual warfare with regard to how we’re going to win the city and win the world."

To find out more about The Connection, go to www.tcjourney.com