Nevertheless, Goodmanson says, “Jesus would not have a Facebook page. He wouldn’t be stopping in an Internet café to update his status.”

No matter where you live, you can go to church, so to speak, with Christ Fellowship. The McKinney, Texas,
congregation is on board with almost every high-tech gambit under heaven.

Find the church by going online — the 21st-century version of sighting a steeple on the horizon. Beyond their website, Christ Fellowship has a Facebook page to give it a friendly presence in social media.

You can download the worship program by scanning their customized-with-a-cross QR code. The worship services are streamed online from their Internet campus — with live chat running so you can share spiritual insights in real time.

Afterward, says senior Pastor Bruce Miller, “someone will ask you, ‘How did it go? Did God help you, today? How can we help you?’ Just like we do when people come to our building in McKinney. We are here to help people find and follow Christ, wherever they are starting out from.”

And wherever they are in the digital world.

Sermons by Bruce Miller, senior pastor of Christ Fellowship Church in McKinney, Texas, are part of the streaming worship service offered by the church’s Internet campus.

Christ Fellowship exemplifies most of the latest ways churches dramatically extend their reach of church beyond any one time or local address. Such congregations signal “a willingness to meet new challenges,” says Scott Thumma, of the Hartford Institute for Religion Research. He’s the author of a study by Faith Communities Today (FACT) of how churches, synagogues and mosques use the Internet and other technology.

FACT’s national survey of 11,077 of the nation’s 335,000 congregations, released in March, found seven in 10 U.S. congregations had websites, and four in 10 had Facebook pages by 2010, Thumma says.

The use of QR codes is too new to be measured yet, Thumma says. He recently began tracking churches that stream their worship — about 1% of congregations, Thumma estimates.

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