FAQ – Best Practises

Interaction is very important when church is forced online only. But making church interactive using this medium is not quite as easy as it sounds. Before I make some practical suggestions, I do want to make a few points to consider. These are not rules, just things to consider.

1. Be careful not to make church so different that it becomes something else entirely. Remember that we will come back to a stage where we will be able to do church again the way we used to.
2. Try to keep church about fellow congregation members fellow shipping together, and not just the parish members watching the staff do church.
3. Interaction is important as it will help to prevent church online from becoming purely entertainment.
4. Try to keep as many elements as possible that are part of your church identity. The character of your church is what it is because of these elements and maintaining them if at all possible will help to maintain a sense of community.
5. There will be some things that you do as church that will be public and some that will be more private. These lines were probably a bit more blurred previously. Now they need to be a bit clearer. Don’t forget that some of the people watching you stream may have never attended your church.

  So back to the topic of how to make your live stream more interactive. Here are some suggestions. If you want to know more then please get in touch.

• Do a live cross to skype or zoom – and interview a congregation member
• Ask members to text in questions about the sermon
• Pre-record testimonials from members and play the recording back as a segment during the livestream
• Have multiple people doing different parts of the service.
• Encourage commenting on the live-streaming platform and spend time responding afterwards.

   

Every church is different and you need to consider what gear you have, what skills you have and also how you want your congregation to experience the new church environment.

What is really important from a ministry perspective is that you members can still engage and interact with the staff and other congregation members.

Live-streaming does lend itself to be interactive, but only if you make it interactive, and whilst pre-recorded services may not sound very interactive, they can be if you do it right.

I will write up “how do I make my pre-recorded service more interactive?” and also “how do I make my livestream more interactive?”

From a “production” perspective, the main difference will be the amount of time spent by all the people involved, and the times at which that work needs to be done.

If you are pre-recording various sections of the service and then stitching them together afterwards, then there will be a lot of “post edit” time spent bringing all of the recorded parts together. However you do have some flexibility as to when you do that work. It does also allow you to re-use common parts of a service.

If you are going down the livestream route, then all of your “production” will be done in real time and you need to do that work at the time you want your livestream to be “live”. You will still need some prep time and you may still use some pre-recorded content.

For example, in my own church we are streaming live. It means that there are 5 or 6 of us at the church each week. We are streaming one weekly service to replace our original 5 congregations. Most of the service elements are done live, but we will play pre-recorded music (that we have permission for) at the end and we have also pre-recorded a baptism that will be “replayed” onto the livestream. To encourage interaction we are continuing our normal tradition of having a question time after the sermon. This allows people to text in questions to a “pre-paid” mobile which are then asked live by one of the staff and the preacher answers them. This was a fairly easy transition of something that was traditional for us, into the online world which helps to keep us true to who we are as a church.

I know others though, that pre-record their whole service, and then they make it available at a specific time each week, the staff are all active on the social media platforms and ready to interact. This concept of pre-recording frees up the staff to make them available to be more interactive.