Church is all about making connections--with God, with ministers, with other churchgoers. A fast-growing northern Indiana church is offering a new kind of worship connection: a wireless broadband Internet link.

Wi-Fi worship takes place at Granger Community Church. Worshipers attending two Saturday-evening services are encouraged to bring along their wireless-enabled laptop computers or PDAs and take part in electronic worship enhancements delivered wirelessly via a special Web portal.

"It's trying to reach today's culture with communication tools that people are using," ex plains Tony Morgan, pastor of administrative services. "We looked at how we could incorporate the tools directly and create a unique feature for Saturday-evening services. It's free wireless access to browse during the service, to do Internet searches while they listen."

The Wi-Fi worship experience is as easy as opening up a laptop and launching a Web browser. The church's wireless "hot spot" is set up to allow instant connection, with no special settings, complex procedures, or log-in routines. Worshipers using the church's special Web portal are guided to notes on the sermon, links to related articles and research, insights on relevant Bible verses, church bulletins, newsletters, details about upcoming church events, and other information.

"It allows people to dig a little deeper," Morgan says, noting that a Wi-Fi service may attract 30 or so wireless-enabled devices. "It's not uncommon to see families huddled around a screen."

Needless to say, it makes planning a worship service a bit more complicated, but those in charge are not short of helping hands. "We have a couple of volunteers helping us pull together the portal page," he says. The church also has a large staff, with some five dozen people on the payroll full-time or part-time, including a director of technology.

It may sound unconventional, but Granger Community Church is not your typical house of worship, even though it has ties to the mainline United Methodist denomination. In addition to broadband, the Wi-Fi services include some café-style seating. "We set up round tables so some people can have their computers on a table in front of them," Morgan says. "Everything we do is anything but traditional," he adds. "technology has always been a part of how we communicate the Gospel." Even in the non-wireless services, there may be videos or

PowerPoint presentations supplementing the message, and there's plenty of drama and special music.

Granger Community Church must be doing something right because it reaches some 4,700 worshipers every week. It also reaches other churches, offering seminars and products to help them make their own unconventional connections with churchgoers.

"It helps us with a tech-savvy crowd that is accustomed to that kind of communications in their workplace and in their personal lives," Morgan says. "We're pushing the edge a little bit here. Churches are asking questions about how they can use today's technology to reach today's culture."

A "hot spot"? Granger Community Church offers worshipers broadband Internet and a Web portal to find notes on the sermon and related links.