Miami, USA - Every Sunday morning, while hundreds of congregants converge on Flamingo Road Church in Cooper City, Fla., Stephanie Smith boots up her computer and joins the services — from 1,400 miles away.
Instead of attending a bricks-and-mortar church near her home in Fort Worth, Smith hooks her computer up to her big-screen TV and watches a live, Web-based videocast via Flamingo Road's "Internet Campus." Some Sundays, she invites family and friends to join her.
When Stephanie Smith moved from Florida, she didn't want to leave Flamingo Road Church. Thanks to the Web, she's still a part of that congregation.
"I didn't want to leave Flamingo," said Smith, who moved from Davie, Fla., to Fort Worth in July to be closer to family. Thanks to the Internet campus — www.flamingoroad.org, which had about 500 participants on a recent Sunday — "I still attend the services and still feel like I'm a part of everything that's going on with the church."
Smith is one of a growing number of Americans for whom the Internet plays a central role in their spiritual lives.
Among evangelical Christians, and the largest "megachurches" in particular, many pastors are taking their Web sites far beyond an online ad with a schedule of real-world services.
Many pastors are coming to see the Web site as a ministry in itself, not only as a way to bring people to church, but as a way to bring them to God — even if they never set foot in the physical building.
"This is not an attempt to get people to come to church," said Rod Pearcy, who oversees a dozen Web sites for Fort Lauderdale's Calvary Chapel (www.calvaryftl.org). "It's not that Calvary Chapel has all the answers. What Calvary Chapel is about is teaching people the Bible, because the Bible has all the answers."
Though most houses of worship now have Web sites, few use them as aggressively and creatively in seeking new converts as evangelicals, for a variety of reasons.
For Roman Catholics, important sacraments such as Communion are hard or impossible to translate into binary digits. Jews generally don't seek new converts, although the Orthodox Chabad Lubavitch sect, for example, has extensive Web offerings aimed at attracting nonobservant Jews.
But "conservative Christians jump on any new medium they can to find new ways to spread the Gospel," said Scott Thumma, a professor of the sociology of religion at the Hartford Seminary in Connecticut. And megachurches "are doing the most fascinating and interesting stuff on the Web, but they are doing it because they have millions of dollars and thousands of people to draw on."
On a typical Sunday, Calvary's streaming video services attract 4,000 people from across the world, Pearcy said.
Like many Web sites run by large evangelical churches, Calvary's includes a step-by-step guide for nonreligious people seeking to convert, links to request "prayer support" for people going through a difficult time, and a searchable video archive of the Rev. Bob Coy's previous sermons.
Looking for advice on your marriage? Sex? Forgiveness? Just type in the word, and a list of relevant sermons will appear. Want his advice every day? Subscribe to his podcast and listen on your MP3 audio player. Want to get saved right there in front of the computer? Coy will pray with you on a recorded video.
Internet outreach isn't limited to megachurches.
In Central Florida, Covenant Community Church (www.touchandchange.com) has only about 200 members, just a small fraction of the 19,000 who attend Calvary's three South Florida campuses on Sundays.
But Covenant offers many of the same online services as Calvary, albeit with less graphical flair. Unlike Calvary, Covenant relies entirely on volunteers to build its Web sites.
"All the stuff we do is by people who were just called of God to use their gifts," said the Southern Baptist church's pastor, the Rev. Jeff Dixon.
For at least one church, the Internet is so central that the church has a "dot" in its name.
Lifechurch.tv has 11 campuses in six states, including a new congregation that meets at Palm Beach Central High School in Wellington, Fla. Its 12th campus is on the Internet, and the church tries to give online participants the same experience as those worshiping in person.
All the campuses receive a live sermon via satellite from the main campus in Oklahoma. Before and after the sermon, a local minister is on hand to lead services, announce upcoming events and pass the offering plate.
Internet participants — 700 to 900 on a typical weekend — can join in by clicking an icon to raise their hands in response to the pastor's words.
And after the formal service, they can chat — either by typing or using a Web cam and microphone — with the pastor or each other. Several other churches, including Flamingo Road and Calvary, also offer ways for online participants to interact during services.
"It's a legitimate way for people to have community," said the Rev. Brandon Donaldson, pastor of Lifechurch.tv's Internet campus. "Church is not the Internet or a building — it's people."
If the notion that a virtual community can be as real as a physical one seems crazy, you may be showing your age.
Thanks to online shopping, online dating, online social networking and online almost everything else, many young Americans don't distinguish between their friends from school and those from Facebook. These youngsters just see them all as friends, said David Kinnaman, president of the Barna Group, a consulting firm that conducts survey research for churches and other religious groups.
In fact, Kinnaman's firm predicts that by 2010, 10 percent of Americans will rely exclusively on the Internet for their religious experience.
But that doesn't necessarily mean attending church services online, Kinnaman said. Young people define spirituality broadly, to include listening to religious music, discussing religion in an online forum, or watching a video sermon on a topic that interests them at that particular moment.
Software such as Apple's iTunes allows young people to pick and choose songs without buying entire albums, and they want the same flexibility from religion.
"There's a diversity of ways people are wiring and unwiring their spiritual lives," said Kinnaman, 33. "It's not only worshiping online."
But no one is predicting that the Internet church will replace the physical church — at least not yet.
"The big fear, especially in the mid '90s and late '90s, was, 'Would people leave the pews?' " said Heidi Campbell, a professor of communication who studies religion on the Internet at Texas A&M University.
That didn't happen — at least, no faster than it was happening before. In fact, many people Campbell has interviewed say they would prefer to participate in church in person if their life circumstances allowed it.
"They call it the chocolate chip cookie factor," Campbell said. "You can't e-mail a chocolate chip cookie or share a cup of coffee. A lot of people want that."
You'd get no argument from Smith. Though she likes participating in Flamingo Road over the Web and introducing family and friends to the church, her longer-term hope is to have a branch campus in Fort Worth.
It might take some time to get there, but the church also would like to see it happen.
One of the ways the church is helping: an ad on the Web site.