Moore said 200 people gathered in a smaller room on campus and held a traditional church service, which was broadcast via Facebook to people around the school and all over the world.

Liberty University in Lynchburg, Va., the biggest evangelical Christian university in the world, held a church service on Facebook last week.

Johnnie Moore, the university’s vice president for campus projects, who is also a campus pastor, said the innovation “wasn’t a big stretch” for a school with some 60,000 online students out of a total enrollment of 72,000.

Normally, the university’s Wednesday night service is held in either the 10,000 seat basketball arena or in Lynchburg’s Thomas Road Baptist Church. But due to construction and other issues, both spaces were unavailable Nov. 2. Since between 4,000 and 5,000 people typically come to worship, the temporarily “homeless” congregation decided to embrace technology and broadcast its service via Facebook.

Moore, 28, said he himself never “had an attitude” about Facebook, though some folks in his parents’ generation certainly see it as a waste of time. For him and for his young students, who grew up in the digital world, this innovation made sense and was pretty easy.

And even for the older generation, this wasn’t that odd, he said. “It’s not strange for our parents generation to see a church service on TV.” This, he said, is just the same message via a more newfangled technology. “For our parents, its more about figuring out what Facebook is and what it’s for.”

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