To Live Stream or not to Live Stream

advice for the small church in a challenging time

What are we to do in a time when government in its wisdom dictates that we curtail all public meetings for reasons of public health? How can the church function as a body of believers in circumstances like this?

One solution already in place for many churches is live-streaming services. In the current scenario, the pastors and other volunteers are preparing services where they preach, sing, and pray in empty auditoriums, or from their office desk, to maintain the unity of their people. In this way, the last Sunday or two, Christians all over the wired world “gathered” in a sense to carry on in their worship of their Lord. All of this is very good.

What, though, of those churches who aren’t up to speed on live-streaming? What challenges stand in the way of those of us who tend to make up the trailing edge, rather than the cutting edge, of technology? Can we get up to speed fast enough? Should we just give up and point our people to the websites of our friends in the ministry?

Before raising one’s hands in despair, I’d like to suggest that it is possible for smaller churches on small budgets to provide some way of keeping their people connected to the local ministry during this crisis. Some of those things involve “old” technology, like Alexander Graham Bell’s quaint invention, the telephone! Of course, telephones have come a long way since Bell’s time, but the basic communication device still works the same way. We can develop prayer chains, keep people informed, stay up with those who just need someone to talk to, and continue ministry to one another in many ways.

However, modern technology does provide ways for us to help one another stay connected around the word of God, even if we aren’t quite up to live-streaming. The local pastor can continue to teach the local flock, connecting with them through the Word, contributing to the sense of “all of us in this together.”

I’d like to mention two options to help your congregation during this crisis. One is “streaming video” (as opposed to live-streaming) and the other is video conferencing through platforms like Zoom.

Streaming Video

You can spend a lot of money on technology, but you probably already have the equipment you need to create a video recording of an online service. The service may not contain everything you would normally do in a “live” service, but you can pray, you can make announcements, you can sing (well, some of us can sing), and you can preach.

At a very basic level, you can record a video presentation simply with a laptop equipped with a webcam. Windows PCs come with Windows Movie Maker, I assume Apple PCs have something similar.¹ With Windows Movie Maker, you can edit the final product, cutting out the “dead air” that tends to fill the screen when you are setting up, possibly adding in some text overlays and so on. With these tools, you can create a message plus other elements of a normal service so that your church people can gather around in their homes and hear the word with one another at roughly the same time as you normally meet.

Equipment you could add (relatively inexpensively) to enhance your output:

• A digital video camera and tripod
• A separate digital audio recording (to improve audio quality). We record at church, use our church sound board, then mix the audio and video together
• Video editing software

Each of these “extras” can add a little cost for some improvement in quality, all the way up to a lot of cost for some improvement in quality. In other words, you don’t have to break the bank. You can use tools you have, or you can improve them a bit, but you can record a video sermon/service for your people.

When you have your video file, you need to store it somewhere so your people can access it. You could store it on your church website, and create links so people could log in. The downside of this is that many church websites aren’t built for heavy traffic, so you could crash your site if you host it yourself. Fortunately, there are alternatives.

Amazon Web Services. You can create an account with Amazon Web Services for very low costs. They have many services (which are well beyond my ability to understand, much less explain). One of their services is called S3 storage. You create a “bucket” there, make it open to the public, and upload your video file. Then you simply share the link to the file, your people access that link, and the bandwidth burden lies in Amazon’s robust system.

Facebook. If your church has a Facebook page (you should, by the way), you can store your video in your Facebook video section. In storing on Facebook, you can schedule the time that the file becomes visible. For our service last Sunday, I think I set it to 9:00 or 10:00 am.

One caveat: I noticed that our file (a 4.8 gigabyte MPEG-4 video file) took a long time to upload when we did this last week. You need to allow enough time for the upload to avoid disappointment!

Video Conferencing

Several providers offer Video Conferencing. My brother used one called Blue Jeans last Sunday, I heard good reports from him of his use of it. I am not familiar with Blue Jeans, the product I’ve used before is Zoom. Reading a comparison paper on the two, it looks like they both offer similar features, but Zoom has a free option. The free option limits the time for your conference session. Their website says the limit is forty minutes. It is possible to create a follow-up session right away, so you can extend your time that way, but everyone would have to log back in.

Video conferencing involves the host sending an invitation to participants to log in to a video conference room. As participants log in, they will be live on video via webcams (or phones or tablets) from where ever they are located. This kind of session is conducive to a Bible study lesson with all participants able to contribute to the discussion. You can record your sessions and save the video for those who weren’t available at the time of your “live” session so they can watch it later.

My experience with Zoom up till now involves a group of about ten. I am not sure how successful a church wide session will be, but we are hoping to find out this coming Sunday. The setup and use of Zoom may take some time to learn, I recommend that you practice “one on one” even with another computer in your own house logged into the same session so that you can figure out how to work the platform.

 

There likely are other options available that could allow small churches (or technology challenged pastors) provide ways to maintain the local fellowship online. If you have other suggestions, please speak up in our comments section.

These solutions are stopgaps, they don’t replace the real “body life” of the local assembly. Nevertheless, they allow us to maintain a semblance of normalcy in abnormal times.

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Don Johnson is the pastor of Grace Baptist Church of Victoria, Victoria, BC, Canada.

1. Note, let’s not start any computer wars, insecure Apple users! [↩]