Relinquishing Control: Alternatives to Livestreamed Worship During a Pandemic

For those of us used to observing trends and practices of the church, the past few days have been a spectacle of church adaptation and willingness to accept change. The ways churches have turned seemingly on a dime to utilize technology and engage the worshipping community has been miraculous and inspiring to behold. From creative expressions of worship optimized for live-streaming, to unique ways to be in ministry with children, to new means in which to gather together using video conferencing—churches have been forcefully shoved, willingly or not, into the twenty-first century. I am a United Methodist Deacon who is currently serving as a Lead Pastor of a church in Colorado with a degree in Sacred Music. I think a LOT about worship, especially the music and singing within it. And that thinking and training is what led me to make the decision not to livestream a simulation of our worship service onto Facebook Live or Youtube.  I am going to confess a bias of mine—I don’t find Livestreamed worship on Facebook Live or Youtube or any other platform very effective. 

I am NOT saying that I don’t think that incredible and powerful work is being done by churches to move to this method of engaging people in worship, nor that people aren’t experiencing God through these methods. Some incredible people whose work and creativity I respect are doing this really well. We are all doing the best we can and I am not writing this to cast aspersions on anyone’s work because I am amazed at the tenacity and innovative energy coming from clergy in these days. But I profoundly struggle to stay engaged with worship that is livestreamed to a screen where I have no sense that I am connected to anyone else, singing with anyone else, or engaging with anyone else in worship (save whomever might be in the actual room with me). This is not a critique of effort, this is an observation about method.

So when confronted with the prospect of the church needing to close because school districts were closing  down indefinitely due to the developing COVID-19 crisis on March 11, 2020, I began to look at the options in front of me and recognized that Live-streaming wasn’t one of them. We wouldn’t keep our congregation together over the long haul if we didn’t find a way to worship that didn’t involve a means for us to feel like we were together. Hence, Zoom. Zoom is a powerful online videoconferencing tool that allows for the unique experience of seeing the other people who are in the meeting with you.  

From Zoom's Help Center Website - "How Do I Change the Video Layout?"

Instead of worship being something we spectate on a screen as a livestream experience, what if worship could be a place where we arrive before it begins and an engagement with one another and those who are leading worship as we engage with an communal experience of God together? We are into our third week of figuring out worship through an online format, as I am sure other churches are, and I am discovering some powerful truths: that people are HUNGRY to see and interact with one another in this time of social distancing and shelter-in-place orders, that the Word CAN be proclaimed in this medium, that the gathered community can still sing and engage with worship through video conferencing, and that the drawbacks to this platform are worth it. When we decided to do this, I scrapped the entire order of service our congregation is typically used to and had a conversation with the stellar team that works with me at my church (so thankful for Gwen, Jenny and Lori). We organized our worship around the foundational four fold pattern of christian worship: We Gather, We Proclaim, We Respond, We Are Sent Forth. This has worked powerfully for us by creating a worshipful environment that is within, in essence, a virtual “sanctuary” of sorts where we can all see one another, and we can participate more directly than in other mediums. I want to go into some depth in this article, but if you are curious about some things that our worship team and I are learning, it will be at the bottom.

Drawbacks of Livestreaming (Where Ben Pisses Off Most Readers)

I am going to be honest, I don’t think worship via livestream is sustainable over the long term as the only means of providing an alternative to worship in the midst of a crisis. I will also put my stake in the ground and say that pre-recorded services accomplish even less. Livestreaming and prerecording worship turns it into content that is consumed--like an episode of a show we are watching on Netflix. While "Premiering" such a worship service on Facebook or Youtube makes for an experience that is simultaneous for those watching, it doesn't accomplish making it one that is shared. It's flashy and punchy as an upfront effort to continue worship, but I fear that live-streaming won’t save churches from the potential attrition that will occur as people have an even bigger and reasonable excuse not to go to church while cooped up in their homes. One illustration of this might be how live-stream analytics can reveal how little time is actually spent by many viewers in watching the worship service being uploaded or livestreamed by a church.

Livestreaming does acheive a measure of accessibility that is important in normal circumstances (though the church could try much, much harder on that front than it historically has done), but this is also my general critique of online worship more generally. The gift the church offers in worship is something distinctively embodied, distinctively interpersonal, and distinctively engaging. Where live-streaming or, quite frankly, any online form of worship might serve to keep us connected, it will never substitute the real thing. (FWIW, I don’t think most people believe it will, either—nevertheless it must be said.) 

There is another conversation I wish we and the theological/liturgical academy could have more deeply if we weren’t in the midst of a crisis: the realities, ontologies, practices of online communion. But I believe the drawbacks to worshipping online are the same drawbacks that render online communion as something that isn’t Holy Communion at all. (Feel free to throw rocks, I am very aware of how lonely my position is on this. Dr. Mark Stamm, professor at Perkins School of Theology has written brilliantly about this particular matter though and I find his thoughts incredible compelling.) But these concerns I feel about providing an experience of worship to our churches where we can ensure all the levers are pulled in the right way, and distribute a production of quality and excellence exposes a truth worth remembering: no one person should ever have “control” of worship. Sure, we “lead” worship, we conduct, we silence other voices by being the loudest amplified voice, etc. But any control we believe we have of worship, like control in general, is an illusion. To let go of livestreaming a production of worship that we "perform" is to relinquish control over something in which we never had control to begin with. And I really understand how terrifying it is to let go of that control. But, I believe that relinquishing this control in order to gain a more tangible sense of community and location is worth it. And I believe a videoconferencing platform like Zoom accomplishes more the livestreaming does for worship during a pandemic. So far, I am finding this hunch to be bearing some fruit for my congregation.

Why Zoom and Why a Videoconference?

It is a fair observation to raise that trying to utilize a platform mostly known for facilitating business meetings and full of potential distractions that can be frustrating is also deserving of criticism. One of the fears that leads us to try to assert as much (nonexistent) control over worship is the concern over how distractions can interfere with any person’s engagement with worship. Video conferencing also is far more vulnerable to the inconsistencies of the internet, as someone with a poor internet connection will have a completely different experience of a videoconference worship service than someone with 200 Mbps down/25 Mbps up. The latency created when we communicate via the internet also interferes with a sense of things flowing from one act to the next in worship. While worth trying out--I strongly suspect this doesn't scale well for larger congregations and worshipping contexts. These are all drawbacks—and I am learning that all of these drawbacks are worth it, especially for my moderately sized congregation.

What Zoom offers that other livestream or prerecorded forms of worship do not is, quite simply, a better sense of community. A better sense that we are together as a worshipping community. In Zoom (or even another teleconferencing medium like Google Hangouts or Fuze), you are in a “space” with other people who are sharing that “space.” I can’t tell you how many times I have had someone express gratefully the ability to see people they are missing as all of us are stuck at home to mitigate this novel coronavirus outbreak. Zoom also allows worship to be led “in person” by a team of people who might not be in the same room live. In the Sunday before writing this article, Zoom allowed me to lead worship from the state of Virginia as my worship team led music in Colorado and the congregation gathered. We even had at least one other visitor who was able to visit from out of state as well. Zoom also allows a unique function that can enrich the interactivity of worship: breakout rooms. Since we are in this new medium, I have shortened my sermon by half so that one of the things we can do in order to respond to the Word (following that four-fold pattern) is to actually break out into these breakout rooms for about 5-10 minutes to engage in conversation connected to the scripture passage or worship theme. With a few prompting questions, you now have 8-12 groups of 4 to 8 people engaging in spiritual conversation and interacting not only with one another, but also with the scripture and sermon as well.

It’s not perfect. Someone with administrative credentials has to have a quick trigger finger ready to mute the wayward person who arrives late and unmuted with noises in the background. Troubleshooting problems that happen in the middle of worship isn’t something that is gracefully done. The quality of what people see and hear are affected by things outside of our control. But I cannot overstate the power that lies in being able to gather into a space, albeit virtual, and see friends and fellow siblings in Christ “in person” in a way that would be impossible through Facebook Live, Youtube, or other livestreaming formats. And I continue to be surprised at what is possible in this format. With the combined expertise and resources of those who were always on our church’s worship team we have had organ preludes and postludes, a pre-recorded and mixed “virtual” choral anthem that the singers sang from their homes, the ability to have an offertory where people offered support for ministry live, hearing prayer requests and intercessions by encouraging intercessions in the chat box during a time of prayer, expanding the ways even more people can lead in worship, and I don’t believe we are done discovering what else is possible, either.

Nuts and Bolts

I want to talk about how we are doing this and what we have learned in case you might be interested in trying this out. First, the technology:

• Our church purchased a “Zoom Pro” account. It is $15 a month for a single host, and it allows for meetings that last an unlimited amount of time with a limit of 100 computers logging in. (Many of your folks will be families—we had 44 log ins in our last worship service, but our actual count was 80). You can add on to this for more participants or more hosts. It’s worth the money as we are finding a lot of use for it outside of worship as well, namely to meet, but also to do classes, bible study, etc.
• We have found that using good equipment, microphones, cameras, etc. is important. Since the videoconference already does much to compress and distort sound picked by a microphone, we decided to use a podcasting mic to mitigate that to some success. My team and I strongly recommend Blue’s “Yeti” mic. You might also check this article out for other equipment recommendations—a good webinar/podcast setup will go far.

Here are some other lessons we have learned.

• If you have an order of worship when you meet in person Have one for online worship as well. It can be a PDF that you link to in Facebook updates, email updates, even in the chat box for worship. Here is what ours looks like.
• Try not to do this alone. The more we can empower and invite our congregations to participate in worship and LEAD worship, the better. But you also need a worship team because many eyes and creative playful spirits will go a long way in continuing to sharpen and improve what you are doing. We are still tweaking and improving what we are doing, and having a team (staff or otherwise) goes a long way in helping manage anxiety.
• Invite the congregation to make the space sacred with you. This is something I learned from Dr. Marcia McFee: a a very simple accessible way to shift whatever space one might be in to something that feels more holy and more sacred is simply lighting a candle. But there are other ways as well—for instance, be mindful of your backdrop as the preacher and the you are in a place where there is more light in front of you than behind. The last thing you want is for your backdrop to be more interesting than what you are saying or for your face to be a black silhouette against a light filled backdrop.
• Be open to how different it feels. Preaching to a camera is really difficult for many of us because we are used to engaging with and receiving energy from those who are gathered in worship with us. I found this Facebook post helpful.

I hope this was thought-provoking and helpful. And I also hope that you know that, no matter what you are trying to do whether its livestreaming or doing drive-in worship with an FM transmitter, I am grateful to share in this work with you.

I would love to hear your thoughts, criticism, and ideas in the comments below!