Beyond the Basics: Online Church For Established Ministries
Between home, business and ministry duties, I haven’t had a chance to sit down and write a post for CAPO until now. Like most of you, the COVID19 crisis has dominated my time and energy as I pivot in all areas of life. For my regular subscribers and new readers, my prayer is that you find ways to cope and even thrive in the coming weeks!
I have seen many colleagues offering helpful guides on how to produce online services for the first time. This is so very needed for the thousands of churches that were not already offering live online worship.
However, I haven’t seen as much content for advanced users, those of us that have been streaming for months or years. Since my own ministry, Crossroads Community Church in Ottawa Lake, MI, has been live-streaming for many years now, I believe I can offer ministries in similar circumstances some useful ideas. Listed below are ideas we implemented last Sunday as well as tweaks we are making for this coming week based on our evaluation of last Sunday:
Look Directly at the Camera
Looking side to side feels OK online when your online audience knows there is an in-person audience. But when they know there is nobody in the room, it feels weird online. So, we are asking our speakers to look directly at the camera. Our auditorium seats 1000 people and is wide, so our speakers are used to using the whole stage and looking at the 3 sections of seats. To make this change easier on our speakers, we are moving one of our side positioned camera stations to the center, as we did not have a center camera station in place. We will be encouraging all speakers (and worship leaders when they are talking) to look directly at the center camera.
The worship time is a bit different. We will be using our 5 camera positions during the songs as usual, and singers can adopt more or less regular practices, such as looking up, or at each other. But we will still encourage them to focus attention on the center section and camera, and any worship leader that speaks will look directly at the center camera.
Experiment with Camera Positions
One silver lining of an empty auditorium is the ability to place cameras in any location. We plan to experiment with different camera angles and distances.
Create a Second Broadcast Location
In our evaluation of last week’s service, we felt that an entire hour of online service focused on the stage lacked variety. After discussing the options we decided to create a second broadcast location in the Greenroom (which is currently closed to allow our team to maintain 6 feet of distance between each other at all times). We will be doing the Welcome and our Announcement time from the Greenroom.
In addition to providing variety in locations, we also feel the smaller, more intimate venue of the Greenroom will match more closely the location of our viewers, who will be in a smaller room as well, watching from home. We hope this will help our viewers connect more closely with our service.
We noticed that our speakers use an “auditorium voice” on stage. While that seemed to work alright for the message time, it came off a bit more awkwardly in the Announcement time last week. The smaller size of the Greenroom solves that problem as well, no need for an “auditorium voice” there!
Encourage Participation from Viewers
During our Welcome, we encouraged our audience to sing when we sing, pray when we pray, pay close attention to the speakers as if they were in the same room. Judging by comments we received and my own experience as I watched the service afterward with my family, this admonition seemed to bear fruit as people took it to heart instead of passively watching the service.
Push the Chat Room
If your online platform includes chat, keep pushing people to it throughout the service. We found that participation in the chat dramatically enhanced the community aspect of the online service experience. We were also able to send links to anything we talked about during the service, most importantly our online connection card and online giving! One suggestion we made to our viewers during the Welcome time was to watch on a larger screen with your family, and sign on with your smartphone personally for the chat room.
Leverage the Preservice Countdown Time
Last week we ran 15 minutes of preslides as we usually do. That works great on campus. Online it felt stale. This week we will be going live a couple of times to the Greenroom broadcast location to encourage people to get into the chat room, and to push our online options for children and students by featuring age appropriate videos. We are using a song video from our children’s ministry and a funny 5 minute countdown from our student ministry. We’ll also start asking people to fill out the online connection card and point out the options for online giving. Our hope is to increase the energy level and enthusiasm for the service as people are settling in and signing on.
Staff the Livestream Audio Feed
We have learned that great audio is almost more important than great video for our online services. So we use the Dante protocol to send our input channels to a separate mixing desk (an X32) in order to customize our online mix. However, we had been in the habit of mixing the online audio during rehearsal and pretty much leaving it alone during the services. Now we are mixing it live throughout the service. If you use an AUX send from your main board for your online mix, consider dialing in the room mix during rehearsal for the band and singers to feel comfortable, then switching to the AUX for the live worship time, mixing it through headphones.
I hope these ideas come in handy for you and your ministry, and inspire new and better ideas! God bless you as you navigate the COVID19 crisis. While I usually post twice a month, I will endeavor to post more often if I come across more helpful information.