Rick Warren – whose Saddleback Church in Lake Forest,California lays claim to a weekly attendance of 20,000 – skipped the TV distribution channel entirely in favour of online broadcasts.

In their heyday of the 1970s and 80s, televangelists like Jimmy Swaggart and Jim Bakker drew in hundreds of thousands of worshippers and millions of dollars before scandal and corruption gutted individual ministries and then the entire genre.

Now, however, the Internet has made it easy and inexpensive to distribute video sermons around the world, breathing new life into virtual ministries and even providing a second act for a few infamous televangelists, a Canadian researcher says.

“They see the technology as a God-given opportunity to spread the message,” says Denis Bekkering, a PhD candidate in the joint program in religious studies at Wilfrid Laurier University of Waterloo, Ont.

“So when new technology such as radio or television – or in this case, Internet video – arises, these groups are often eager to employ them as tools for that purpose.”

He coined the term “intervangelism” for this new breed of tech-enabled ministry, and his research is published in an upcoming issue of the Journal of Religion and Popular Culture.

Like their televangelist predecessors, online preachers have huge global reach, he says, but now they can integrate video sermons with podcasts, Google map directions to their bricks-and-mortar churches and interactive components that allow worshippers to talk back and to each other.

Bekkering is even studying a handful of ministries that consist of nothing but a lone preacher in his living room with a video camera and basic editing software.

“Televangelists, to become international in the ’70s and ’80s, had to put very heavy investments into cable and satellite technology,” he says. “And now, anybody who has a cheap digital camera and an Internet-ready computer can broadcast around the globe.”

Aside from intervangelists, proselytizing faiths are often on the cutting-edge of using new media to connect with their flocks and reach out to potential followers.

Sherwood Baptist Church in Albany, Georgia has created a filmmaking “ministry” called Sherwood Pictures that’s produced four full-length films, including Courageous, which will open in limited theatres across Canada on Sept. 30.

The budgets are tiny and the cast and crew are volunteers drawn from its congregation, with the exception of Christian actor and former Growing Pains heartthrob Kirk Cameron, who starred in the third film, Fireproof.

The most financially successful of Sherwood’s productions so far, the movie pulled in $33.5 million US at the box office, though it was skewered by critics for being maudlin, facile or even misogynistic.

Even Sherwood’s production process is imbued with Christian values, with Cameron’s real-life wife standing in for his onscreen wife in a kissing scene because of his personal commitment to kiss no one else.

“With hope-filled, heartfelt storytelling, the moviemaking ministry of Sherwood Baptist Church continues to touch the world from Albany, Georgia,” the church says of its mission.

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