 So again, welcome to the Tuesday evening at Tech Deacons Roundtable. It was great to see some folks. Seeing that we are a small gathering this evening, that this time space allows us to introduce ourselves and because I'm seeing some new folk here to introduce themselves to the group. E, since you're on the top of my screen at least, would you mind beginning? Sure. I'm the pastor of First Congressional Church in Griswold. We're on the far Eastern side, much closer to Rhode Island than pretty much anywhere else. We, prior to the pandemic, we were streaming the sermon only to a closed church group on Facebook. We didn't have the nerve to go out into the ravages of all of Facebook. So we were doing that just with my phone sitting on the pulpit, but then the pandemic forced us into going live on Facebook Live. We have now, we went in person for a while in the summer and then in December, we stopped and we're still just online for, I'm not sure how long. While we were in person, I did kind of a hybrid. I did Zoom and then I was the only one on Zoom and I streamed it to Facebook Live and everybody in the church, they watched it on Facebook Live. And so I pretty much just sit with my computer in front of me and whatever sits in front of my computer is what they see at home. I do a PowerPoint and that. So we're learning and we would like to branch out. I would really like to end up with a tech person that would do that part of it for me on site, especially whenever that happens that we're back in person and I don't want to give up the streaming online. I don't want to ever give up that presence, but I'd like to not have to keep doing it, doing the service with my computer in front of me. So that's my end goal is to get there. Well, that's my first goal. So to be able to be present with those in the sanctuary but also not look beyond the camera. Well, and also have a camera with the person in their own computer and they could, the organist could be seen. You could see a lot more than just what's sitting in front of my computer. So yeah. Thank you. Yeah. Thank you, Edie. Larry, would you care to introduce yourself and say where your church is from and what your digital ministry is? I believe you're muted. So you want to unmute yourself? Oh, I believe you're still muted, Larry. So you go to the lower left-hand corner and just there you go. I'm Larry Harris from the Wilburham United Church and I'm a retired electronics engineer worked for Digital Equipment Compact and Hewlett Packard for about a little over 20 years. Our church has been mostly doing Zoom and Facebook. So one of our members, Deb Trimble, basically took it upon herself to self-teach herself how to do the streaming for Facebook. And I've helped a little bit with the Zoom transmissions. But right now we're doing the Sunday morning service on Facebook. We're doing a Bible study on Facebook and our pastor, Chip Hurd is doing a Bible study on Zoom. I think that's it. Thank you, Larry. So basically I've been trying to help Deb and Chip asked me to try to spec out and price out a streaming television system. And with Eric's help, we've started doing that. We've pretty much got it priced out and now we're trying to evaluate whether we can afford it. But I believe that we will probably continue to do streaming TV in some form even when we get back into the congregation. Right. Thank you, Larry. Catherine. Well, hello. It's my first time here. So I don't know really what to expect. I'm kind of interested to hear what everybody has to say. I'm from First Congregational on East Long Meadow, Western Mass. We started out on Zoom, did quite well on Zoom. Just sent out the link to all of our congregation and then we ventured out into Facebook Live land. We have a GoPro that's being used to stream our services. And we just recently, I think just in the last week or two, we just purchased a new system to help us expand our technology horizons at our church. And we went to an audio tech company and priced out cameras and audio system and the whole rigmarole. And we are currently waiting to get that installed. They're gonna have cameras from the back be able to zoom in so that we can really get a better picture because that's something that's been a problem. We also do what we call Kendrick groups, which is like small group Bible studies together on Zoom. It's been a great socializing tool for us. Oh, as far as I know, that's like the quick version of what's going on with us. Thank you, Catherine. Sam, did you care to share? I would love to care to share. Pastor Edie and our organist have done an amazing thing that they didn't know hope that they could do it through this. And we've had worship and wonderful services to do that. I am, again, the head deacon with Pastor Edie just started this term. And I would love to learn like we just heard about how to do this without a cell phone because that's how we do everything on a cell phone or drop box or my laptop. And the first time that I had to do a reading, I had no idea what to do and I Googled it, figured out that I had to turn my camera sideways to make a better picture. And the people are very happy that see us online and it's amazing how many more people that are online to watch us that are ever in the sanctuary to do that. It's amazing to hear that and we want to keep that, but we want to make it more exciting. Thank you. You told me the first step was to build a team. Well, here's my first member of my team. There you go. Congratulations. I am so excited. I talked about going to school all day at work. I said I'm going to school all night. Well, I'm feeling blessed. Thank you so much. I am blessed. Thank you. Rich, would you care to introduce yourself in your church? Sure, I'm Rich Harrington. I'm with the center congregational church in Manchester. And then there about a year before that, I was about 30 plus years in Massachusetts at the congregational church of Littleton. I moved down here for my kids son to be closer to the kids and we come to this church and pretty shortly the pandemic came in and we were offered, wanted to offer some of our schools. I've been in video transport and manufacturing as a VP of manufacturing engineering for about 15 years there and retired. So I came to bring some of my skills over. The infrastructure at the center is not very good for internet. They only had a DSL line that was capable of three megabits down and only half a megabit up. So that caused us with issues with connections and transports. Our pastor Joyce has actually been the driver to get most of the video going right now. She's running out of her laptop, originally running out of her house and then was able to move back into the church into one of our smaller rooms to make it more feel more reverent or... church intimates in the background and stuff. So that's worked out well for us. But there is no internet distributed through the church. So one of the problems is the sanctuary itself doesn't have access to internet. So we are in the process of upgrading our internet in that today we just installed our Cox business connections. We now start working on building our routers and switches and getting wire distributed and wireless access points put up. And then we're looking at cameras is our next phase. I have some advantage in that the people in Littleton have already gone through that and I've been in contact with them and saw what they were doing. So I have some resources there to see what worked and what didn't work for them. But here I have, I'm part of an ad hoc committee so I have two other members to help me work with that and then working with Pastor Joyce and some others. Right now they're doing Zoom with feed out to Facebook. And then they also do a book study before they were doing Get Together on Tuesdays but book study is what they're doing now. So that's been working out pretty well for us at this point. And we definitely wanna try and figure out how we can make this happen when we get to come back and when it's they connected because it appears that that's what we need to do. And one of the problems that Central has is it's a huge church, popular, one time must have had at least 500 members. It now sits considerably less than that at worship. That probably before the pandemic was probably sitting right around 110 that massive sanctuary. But one of the things is it's sort of landlocked in that it doesn't have a lot of parking available they're in the middle of downtown. So they have an arrangement they're sitting right next to the town hall so they share that parking lot with them. So we're anticipating to expand our ministry we should do this through Vivian because we're not gonna be able to bring really a lot more into the building at this point. Thank you, Rich. Philomena, welcome. Welcome. Would you mind sharing who you are and where your church is located? Yeah, I'm Reverend Philomena. I'm the pastor at First Corrigational Church in Wareham. And this is my first time. So I wanted to do a look see before I bring my people on and know what it is that I'm inviting them to. Sure thing. What else? Nope. Are you currently, what type of digital ministry are you connected with? Are you, does your church meet and gather on Zoom or do you broadcast out on or offer a worship on Facebook? Okay, so we're basically a Zoom church and on the first Sundays of the month we're just starting that now we are a drive-in church. So at Christmas Eve, we'd been doing Zoom but I thought, oh, it's Christmas Eve. Maybe I could give my people something a little bit more than Hollywood squares for Christmas Eve. So I bought the transmitter and all of that. It's not terribly expensive. It's under $200 for what we got. And it was perfect. Radio station was 97.7 FM. And everybody could hear clearly we did an abbreviated lessons and carols. So instead of the nine lessons, we had five lessons and it worked perfectly. So somebody a few weeks ago said, well, why don't we do that on communion Sundays? So that's what we're doing. But we, like Rich who just spoke our sanctuary we don't have internet. So I've been busy searching around for funding and so I did receive a technology grant from a private source outside of the denomination. So that was $1,500. I got 500 from somebody else and we're looking to get cameras and all that kind of stuff. But I think for me it's more than, I think our strategy is a little bit broader than just focusing on worship. And so we're really starting to think about what do we need if we wanted to have an online campus? A digital, yeah. So that's kind of the route we're taking and maybe after Easter or by Pentecost. So maybe, yeah. So that's what we're planning. But so we do have a three-member computer digital committee. And so I'm going to convince them, two of them are in Florida, one's in Maine, but hey, we got what we're doing now, don't matter, you don't need to be here. So this is all very exciting. I'm looking forward to it, seeing how it unfolds and grows. I think you bring up a good point. So often we focus on, how do we get the word out on Sunday and in our minds we can craft what that looks like. But as Filomena said, digital ministry goes beyond that. For example, I'm in my husband's church in a prayer room that they set aside here at his church in Somersville, Connecticut. That was going to be used for a prayer room, for just ad hoc meetings and that sort of thing, and for prayer. And they were still looking to go in the direction of vertical video that would be shared on the mobile platforms, and short and short video, very short, short form video. So yeah, thank you for mentioning that, Filomena. Anita, would you like to share something about your church, your ministry, and where you're all located? Hi, can you hear me? Yep. My name's Anita DePau. I'm a trustee of the First Congregational Church in Rockland, Mass. We have been reopened on August 2nd for indoor service. We remain open, and by God's grace, we haven't had a problem. We have a very large sanctuary and we do have plenty of distance between us. There aren't a whole lot of people that go to service anymore, but the few that do enjoy being there and worshiping God in the sanctuary. So we're just gonna leave it at that. I have created a website for the church, and we have an ability to possibly do streaming service through the GoDaddy website that I used, and I'm looking at that possibility. Haven't even checked into the price yet, but we are looking at other options. We have a wonderful high school that has a broadcast station, and they broadcast through the local station in town, and we're thinking about doing a service through a webcam service. So other people can join in and be blessed. I don't know what else, we're hanging in there, and I hope all of you are well, and we just all need to stay strong. Exactly. So if I can ask Anita, how did you come to know the crew that would be providing your broadcast services from the high school? How did you make that connection? We have a lady that is also one of the trustees, and she actually worked at the high school for many years. So she is the one that's going to be reaching out to them. Oh, good. So that's one of the points that I, if I don't make it, I'm often reminded like how do we build a team? And Anita shares one of the possibilities, and that is to reach out to your local high schools, your local community colleges, to nieces and nephews, to grandchildren, to children, to folks who you know in your congregation who may have a passion and interest in technology and in broadcast. So that is always one of the avenues that I strongly recommend going, you know, pursuing first. In a case of, I'm sorry, go on. I agreed with you, I said right. Yeah, thank you. In the case of my husband's church, no one has served on the streaming, they called a streaming team. Nobody has served on the streaming team here in Somersville who is over the age of 21. And that's because we rely on folks who are high school age and who, as often as we know, age out, they go off to college. So there's a fair amount of overlap with the members of the team. So this is your, I can fill the whole rest of our time together with things, but this is your time to ask questions. We're very laid back. There is no such thing as a wrong question or a question that you should have known the answer to. So we're here to help one another and we're here to build community. So if you had, if you did bring something that's been on your mind and on your heart and you got just dumped or you need some advice, I will be more than, not only myself but folks who are also with us this evening can assist and share their experiences. I do like to give a little nugget each evening or morning depending on when you join us. This pertains to copyright. I know copyright is a whole other conversation that we can have and I encourage you to find on the SNE UCC website there is a video under if you go to the homepage and click on videos, there is a video for copyright and live streaming which is a, which can be a good resource for you. In that video, I mentioned that there is a fair amount of music that we would use through Pilgrim Press. In other words, through the old Pilgrim hymnal or the new century hymnal that is incorporated in a service called One License. Lately, I got a tip from a person in a local church in Enfield, Connecticut, or excuse me, in the Longmeadow, Connecticut, or Longmeadow Mass, I don't even know what state I'm in tonight, that for $45 flat rate, $45 you can, you have permission, you have to, again, you have to go to their website and buy now, but you can, you have permission to live stream the Concordia catalog. Concordia is the publishing company of the Lutheran Church. Most all of the music and pieces are covered and there is no reporting required. So if you're familiar with copyright procedure and best practices, when you sign up for a One License subscription, you are given a streaming license. And again, if you already have a One License subscription that and you're just starting off with live streaming either to Facebook or YouTube or even on Zoom, you should purchase a podcasting component. It's a podcasting component that is added onto your yearly subscription. Just purchasing that license and then going each week, usually they recommend you go six weeks ahead in your liturgical, so go like, take it six weeks ahead from where you're at now, so it would be well into Lent, where you would be preparing what you would be sharing online in terms of worship. So that was something you would be coordinating with your Organist Choir Director. But what you would need to do is you would need to report each week what you use. That reporting makes it possible for the artists to get paid. So for us, at least for myself and for the conference, it's a justice issue that we do properly report what we use and in that so the artists can get paid for their creative works. There is another music publisher, Alfred Music. I don't know exactly what they cover, so you'd have to look it up. But they apparently have an agreement with Facebook that anything in the Alfred Music catalog you are free to stream. So that is a couple of the little tidbits that I offered this evening. And that is from a friend in Long Meadow. So I offer you that. Yes, Edie. Now, we have the CCLI license and the CCLI streaming license. Does that, where, you know... So how is that different? Yeah. Yeah, so CCLI, if you... So CCLI covers more of contemporary music. Okay. Whereas one license would cover more choral. So there's the difference between the two. At one point, I believe you did not have to report for CCLI, but now you do have to do a monthly report as well. My experience has been they give you periods of time that they want you to report and it's not necessarily all the time because I know I've done that. Now what if, for the most part, we just have hymns. We don't have somebody singing, you know, because when you said for the artist to be paid, I would say 99% of what, unless it's something off of YouTube, and then I have written permission from the people that created that, and I have a slide on my PowerPoint that gives them credit for that. Exactly. I don't play anything. So even though you could make an argument that some of the music in our hymnal or in the NCH is public domain, I'm not a music major. I don't even profess to know much of anything about choral ensemble, but I do know that there are different arrangements. So I believe that when you do report each month, you're covered. You cover that possibility of covering something that may be under a different arrangement. Now was there something that covered both the Pilgrim and the New Century hymnal? Yeah, one license. One license does that. One license does. But not all of it is included. I know there's a good percentage of it. Like now as an Episcopalian, I know that our publishing company, church publishing, it's really hit or miss. So I think as a congregational church, and within the UCC, I think you have a better chance of making matches under one license. Yeah, especially out of the Pilgrim hymnal. Anyway, yeah, okay. So Eric, I'm the one license. I thought they had a streaming license. Is that what you're calling a podcast license? Yeah, they have a streaming license and they do call it a pod. At least they used to call it a podcasting license. They still might. Yeah, so streaming and or podcasting. And it's for our local churches, which is St. Mark's and East Longmeadow, I believe it's about $100 additional on top of the regular license. See, the regular license allows you to reprint. So it gives you, so there's different level. And if you watch the video copyright on live streaming, I kind of go through this. The base license gives you the ability to reprint things that would be normally in the hymnal. It gives you the ability to reprint those in a paper bulletin. It also allows you to reprint lyrics. If you're inserting images like lower thirds in your worship service with lyrics, it allows you to do that as well. That's on the base license. So it's kind of funny how that works. You need the live streaming podcasting license to podcast, to the live stream, to those platforms. But the basic license allows you to reprint the lyrics. Online. Any other questions, we must have a snow on our mind today. What's that again? I have a question. I just wanted to ask, as people are buying equipment, are you just buying, you know, off the market or are you using tech soup? Where are people getting their equipment? So I often, so thank you again for bringing that up, Philharmonia. What I generally do is I, and I let other folks answer that, I generally make recommendations. I often refer folks to B&H. I don't get a cut for, you know, I don't have any connection to B&H, but they're one of the larger B&H photo and video in Manhattan in New York City. But can you explain tech soup? Because tech soup is actually a really good resource. Yeah. Well, tech soup is this international company that nonprofits around the world register with and you can buy really inexpensively. The same things you would buy from anybody else. You have your laptops, you have all that kind of stuff. But you need to like, when you need to register your church and upload your tax exempt information and then you can start spending money. And what tech soup mainly covers is computer hardware and software. So licenses of Microsoft Windows. Office, Photoshop. They have a pretty extensive catalog. You won't be getting, you know, camera gear or switchers or things like that. So it's soup, like I'm having my chowda. And then the other thing that we've been looking into is at the top of the COVID season, Facebook started a faith-based initiative. And we just started looking into that to help us with some of the online groups that we wanna start implementing through Facebook. So that might be something else that folks might wanna look into. Can you elaborate on that? Because as you're mentioning and sharing, I'm taking notes, because this is- Oh, the faith-based initiative. I first heard about it through Nona Jones. She's the director of it. And Nona Jones is, she co-pastors a church in Northern Florida with her husband. But yeah, I mean, if you just go to faith-based, Facebook faith-based initiative, you'll get the whole thing. And Nona has, I call it a recipe book on how to do online church. And it's called digital ministry or something like that. I can't remember the exact title there. What I will do is I will, Phil, I mean, if you can send what you have to me, I will distribute- Okay, thank, I will, I will. Maybe not tomorrow, cause my day is full tomorrow, but by Friday. No worries. Okay. No, if I don't put a time on it, not gonna happen. I don't know about other people, but... Yeah, Seedy. So if we, what would it be? Was maybe to, I'd say sit down with you, but probably by Zoom. What, if we wanted to start having something, you know, that someone else ran, what's the basic stuff that you would start with that then you could build upon later as you got a little more. So the basic system that I would, basic components that I would suggest would be getting a camera on a tripod and having the camera, you know, make sure that the camera has an HDMI, you know, video out. And for that, oh, well, I don't make a recommendation for cameras. I can tell you one off the top of my head now, but if you look at Beyond Webcams, the video on our website, sneucc.org forward slash video, you will, you'll see that there is a, you know, the requirements for, you know, for what I'm about to say, but a camera that will allow you to set up a position, you know, in the church where you don't have the laptop right next, right in front of the pulpit. Right. Or wherever you lead worship from, you know. So that way you're not, you're communicating and you're gathering, you're in gathering with folks in the sanctuary, but you're also speaking to the camera. Okay. At the same time. Yeah, yeah. So the camera should have, and I don't know how large your sanctuary is, perhaps we can get together on a, you can email, we can find a time to chat. But the idea of being that the camera would have enough of zoom, enough of a focal length where you could have it, you know, in the back of the church or, you know, somewhere that where it's not obtrusive. Or up on the balcony. You could do it on the balcony. Yeah, you could place the camera on the balcony as well. When you, at least it was, it's been my practice when I shoot video, like for example, I'm on a, I have a Sony camcorder that I'm actually looking at right now with my laptop below. That's where you'll see me, you know, looking at both things. In any event, the camera that's shooting me now is slightly elevated. So, and what that does, it projects a sense of authority and a sense of connection more than anything really. So I would try to avoid, you know, shooting video from the top down, but rather, you know, either straight at or, you know, slightly elevated. Okay. So a good example of this would be if you went to, I'll give you a web address and for some of our folks who are regulars, this will be a review, but the web address is live, live.summersville, that's S-O-M-E-R-S-V-I-L-L-E-U-C-C.org and I'll put that in the chat. Okay, thank you. Yeah, I didn't want to take up our time, but I was just sitting there thinking it might be good to start putting together a plan. So when I find this person either at Three Rivers or wherever, then maybe, because I've had some people say, you know, they'd be willing to help financially, you know, it's been two years since we, you know, right now we just have a TV, not a real big TV, but not little either, but sitting on the chancel. We would really love, you know, our first thing is to get rid of that and get some screens or whatever, or TVs that are up-mounted, you know, but that's where we... That's part of a larger picture. So you're going from, you know, taking your first step to, you know, running a sprint, but so, you know, so that camera that I had mentioned would be, you know, would be brought in, you know, the video that camera would be brought in via a capture device, which is outlined in that video. Okay. Into that same laptop you're using. Yeah. And that, and, you know, the capture device that I'm thinking of is this capture device that I have here. And in fact, you're seeing, you know, if I unplug this, I go away. So this is an AverMedia GC-553. It's also in that Beyond Webcams video. Oh, okay. Okay. So AverMedia is all one word and GC-553, I'll put it in the chat. But it's quite simple. You don't need any drivers. You don't need any configuration. And again, this is not for everybody, you know, a church like Larry's Church, for example, in Wilberhame United, they're kind of beyond what we're talking about here. But the idea here is you're bringing in video signal on this side, and this connects to the computer on the other. Okay, yeah. And you just plug it in. Mac or PC, it'll run. Okay. Yeah, I have a Mac. Yeah. Does that plugged in through a USB or through an HDMI? Yeah, USB. Yeah, USB. Yeah, USB say. So you have to make sure. So it's either USB-C or USB 3.0 or 3.1. And you can always tell which one is which because if you look at the USB port, again, this is on the video, you'll have a blue insert. You know, the inside of the plug will be blue, which tells you it's the next generation of USB. Yeah, mine's got. Oftentimes, if you have Mac or you're running a surface, a Microsoft surface, there's no color coding. It's all whatever the case color is. So you'll have to, the best way to find out is to check your documentation. My USB ports on my computer are the small ones. They're like the USB 2 or whatever. Okay. All right, well, I'll do that and then I'll. Yeah, and just, maybe we can. Yeah, yeah. Okay, thank you. Yeah, no trouble. And that actually takes care of one half of it. Now you have audio, which is the other half of it. Yeah. Yeah, that's kind of the problem we ran into. It's like, we wanted to do the Facebook and we wanted, you know, transition from Zoom to Facebook. And that was the big issue was like, so we ended up buying a like sound system, I guess you would say, like a portable sound system. We ended up using it outside for our outside services during the summer. And that was very useful. And so what we're doing right now is we actually contracted a company ATC in West Springfield. And we got two cameras, two of them for both in the back, I believe. We have kind of a elevated area in the back. And we're gonna put the cameras back there and the audio system. But we contracted out with ATC in West Springfield because I know someone was asking about where you got your equipment from. So I just wanted to chime in with that. The other thing I'm trying to be careful of is every day, you know, you get loads of salespeople calling you, wanting to sell you, you know, the next best thing. And I'm like, no, not today. I'm not interested. I got everything I need because once you start talking to them, yeah, their whole game is just to sell you stuff. So yeah, so if I heard you correctly, Phil, I mean, you said that you would send me a list along. And some of those things in the list would be a container, black magic equipment. That would be fine. Sure. Yeah, yeah. Because we wanna live stream and do some other things. And that's why I'm building this technology, what I call technology grant line item. So if you know anybody who wants to send money to wear him, we take checks. We'll do. And to give some feedback to Catherine, I think that's when my system cut out. So I moved, what I did is I moved the converter. I moved the scan converter and capture device. And if whenever I do that, it does, it's strange things. It just, well, it doesn't do strange things that completely detaches from my computer. So Catherine, you mentioned that you're working with ATC. They're really good. My brother-in-law works there. We had a little connection there. So that's why we went there. Tony is really good to work with. Mine's really good to work with. So yeah. And we have contingent of people already, like three or four people, myself included. I'm also the CE volunteer director at our church. I'm a little involved in what's going on in our church. But this is something I feel passionately about and something that I love to do. Because my regular job, I'm a music teacher, but I'm also the technology coordinator in my building. So I'm in charge of taking care of like 450 kids and staff and everybody. So it's something I feel comfortable with. And it's something that I feel like I can help with. So I try to do my best. But yeah, we're really excited that we're hopefully gonna get it installed before. I almost said Thanksgiving. It's been a long day before Easter. It's called Corona. I don't even know what day it is. I just know it's a work day. Like I've gone from like, okay, it's a weekend versus a work day. Cause I'm a fully remote teacher. So I'm teaching from home five days a week. So it's a little crazy. Anyway, so we're hoping to get it installed before Easter. Maybe not make our first experience live streaming with this new audio system, the actual Easter service. That feels like a little bit of pressure. Cause it's one of the two biggest services of the year. So we're hoping maybe a couple of before, just to kind of get our feet wet and we'll see how it goes. We're excited, but it's, you know, it's a lot too. But when we ordered, we wanted to think about farther than right now. That's why we didn't just go with the bare minimum with what we could have. Like, yes, it may have been a little bit more of an expensive purchase, but we went ahead and went to like a mid grade just to kind of think about the future and say, okay, even when we are back in the church, we are going to keep streaming. We are going to offer these services to people who are out in Facebook land and want to see what we can do to expand that. So we want to make sure we had the equipment available to be able to do that. That's perfect. Yeah, exactly. Thank you. Thank you for sharing, Kevin. Catherine, is it possible to share some of that equipment list that you have? I will, I could. I don't have access to the paperwork right now, but I could ask the person who made the purchase and see what actually we did order. And yeah, how would I get that to you? That's a good question. You could email it to me. Could you put your email in the chat here? Would you feel comfortable doing that? I've not done it before, but... Okay, well, at the bottom of your screen, there should be a little chat bubble. Okay. And it should pull up a little screen and you should be able to type a little message in there. Okay, got it. I teach kindergartners how to use Zoom. You can do this. I have faith in you. You can do it. If you realize what other aspects of technology that Larry was responsible for throughout his career, you could be like, oh, okay. Oh, I'm sure. I heard his resume. I was like, wow, impressive. And that brings me to a good point where I want to stress that we, and let me put a nice statement on, I, we are always learning all the time. So don't feel bad that something is new because there is always something new constantly. So, you know, it's, it's, you know, technology is ever-evolving, ministry is ever-evolving. So, you know, and I think this is, you know, it's a, it's a, it's a, you know, in as much as this is a, this has been a long haul for some of us, for a lot of us, this is a, I think it's a good time to be church because this digital ministry, I believe, activates the, the revisioning of, of what we consider ministry, you know, and provides opportunity for, for new growth, you know. So I'm, I'm happy for that. So is that visible, Catherine? I don't have it yet. Okay. So I've typed it in and how do I get it to you? Oh, just hit enter. Thought I did that. I'm sorry. That's all right. Does anybody else have any questions? I know that Rich, I believe you unmuted for, for a bit. It's odd, I'm sorry to interrupt, but it's odd because I don't even see my name on the list of participants here. So maybe it didn't just come to me. So if someone could read, send that in the message, great. I could just give it to you now. Oh, okay. Pretty easy. Larry underscore or the, the underline, Harris at charter.net. There you go. Got it. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks to Phil. No, no, Catherine, you are on the list. I'm not, cause I didn't see you. Yeah, I see you. Yep. No, you're on there. I was saying- Maybe I can't send messages to myself. I'm not allowed to. I was just gonna ask you, the challenge that we have doing church to church members is trying to teach them how to use Zoom. And unfortunately Zoom is not uniform and it's where the buttons are. So they're on an iPhone or on an iPad or on a computer or on an Android phone. It's all over the place. And we struggle with trying to get people to figure out, how do I unmute? How do I turn my video on? How do I, you know, we've gotten to the point now where we send out a Zoom link that has everything in it so they can just click on it and get there. But it all starts up with all that stuff turned off for them. Well, I will tell you that something that has helped us is I've made like little tutorial videos cause I do a lot of recording for my little ones. I do Zoom recordings all the time. And so I will go into a Zoom meeting and I will share my screen or I will use my webcam and like actually physically turn it around so they can see my iPad or whatever it is and make just like a three minute little screen recorded version of me accessing the meeting. And then we send that link, we make it into a YouTube video and send that link in our group email out to the whole congregation. So if they get email, they definitely could do that. So that seems to be something that worked a little bit for some of our congregants. Now there's some that don't even have email. So that's a whole another set of problems. But we do have a very, a couple of people that are very good about going to the person's house if they feel comfortable doing that and helping them set up their equipment and get it set up. And we had some older equipment that was donated that we took to people's houses like old webcams and old iPads and stuff like that so people could access stuff that they wanted to. So we really have been trying, because we have a 90% of our congregation is of a certain age that is not as technologically savvy is you would like and it makes it very difficult but we're trying our best to reach all of them as best we can. It's easy to sort of walk somebody through one of the things, but when you've got so many other addresses and we don't all have all of those devices to say, all right, what does it look like to you? And sometimes they don't even know what device they have. They just know they're watching you on something. And so it's kind of, and that's been our challenge for people coming on and doing the Zoom meeting with us, getting them to figure out how to connect and stuff because we try at the end of the service to always have what is a coffee time where people can chat, connect. Because we're one of the things we need to figure out how to do in this media is connect with people and having a talking head service isn't really necessarily connecting. Whereas sitting in the sanctuary, you think that's the same result, but it's not. In the sanctuary, it's a much more personal relationship. We're trying to figure out how to overcome that to become more personal connection. That's gonna be a big challenge for us. So figure out how to make that happen. And then as you had mentioned, expand the service or reach out to the community in more options as opposed to just Sunday morning service, figure out how we can do connections, maybe how to do visits, you know, deacons visits, because a lot of people, you can't visit them, you just can't. And so we're trying to work that into the thing. And one of that is to overcome the people who are actually doing that, they're not used to being on Zoom. And a lot of times they don't even want to be on camera. It's part of their training. I said, look, if we want to reach out in the community and be connected, they have to see you to be connected, you know? I think that's a good point, Rich. Your comments remind me of a local pastor in Western Massachusetts that I don't know how I got on their Facebook feed. And this was back in June or July. But somehow I pulled up this church. This was a South Congregational in Springfield. And, you know, I just, you know, there came up on my feed that, you know, the pastor, Pastor Lindsay was live. So I think, and what she was doing is she was doing an impromptu, you know, connection video with her congregation. I don't know how I got onto it. I'm sure I, you know, liked or clicked on something of hers on Facebook in the past, you know, and was, you know, got connected in. But sometimes it's just, you know, again, trying to, you know, reinforce the fact, the thought that, you know, worship goes and connection goes beyond Sunday morning, which is, you know, right on, you know, for her, I think she was, I think she was online on, I think it was a Wednesday or Thursday. And she was, you know, she was on her phone live, you know, on a bike path next to the Connecticut River, you know, outside of Northampton. So, you know, it was, it was pretty cool because it was, you know, it was not rehearsed. It was, you know, this is, you know, hello, I'm, you know, this, you know, welcome to Wednesday or Thursday or whatever it was. And this is what's on my heart and my mind and how are you all doing? And she would accept prayer, but she would accept looking for feedback, you know, on through chat and people were actively doing that, which was kind of cool. You know, so that's the other side of, you know, what we're doing, you know, what we're attempting to do with technology inside the sanctuary. And that's, you know, trying to find our way in the sanctuary with technology is not easy because not every church is the same. You know, every church has different lighting, every church has a different setup. You know, we may have different, you know, we all have a chance, we all have names, you know, we have, you know, we have morgans, but you know, how, where are they positioned? Where are they placed? You know, what's the, what's the personality of the church? You know, so this, these are the things that, you know, that are challenging, you know, just as much as, you know, making, you know, the signal go from, you know, from point A to point B, you know, so. Yeah. The other thing is, you know, we're trying to watch a bunch of videos, you know, or services of other people, you know, and it just seems like a lot of them, they don't get close enough, they don't zoom in close enough to the person who's speaking. Yeah. You know, so you feel very isolated. You need to get people to convince themselves that you need to fill two-third screen with the person. Exactly. Right, right. And that's a good point, Rich. And you'll even see that, you know, if you, like if you click online about Somersville UCC, or even if you go to, if you go to my home church, which is St. Mark's Media on YouTube, you'll see it's the same frame, you know, it's kind of, you know, you know what to expect when, you know, when we fire up the cameras and the V-Mix, you know, and even with the, you know, I know my, I know my husband Graham is always telling his team, okay, zoom in. You know, you got these, you got these, you got this expensive gear, you know, go and go in, you know, and, you know, like you said, Rich, fill the frame. And I think it's part of the training of, you know, saying, look, the whole purpose of this is to make a connection with people that you're talking to. And so think about how you make connections. Well, connections are closer personal. Philomita, did you have something? Oh, I was wondering, because I use speakers view rather than gallery a lot on Sunday morning. Because I haven't been doing church from my home. I started, you know, at my dining room table and I thought, I don't want to get out of the practice of having to drive to church. So in one of the Sunday school classrooms, I built an altar. I started an advent and then I've changed it and I'm going to change it again during Lent. And I have a pulpit and, you know, it's movable. So you scaled it to- Right, exactly. And speakers view allows whoever is talking to be, you know, front and center on the screen and really close up front. Right, right. And speaker view also allows you, if I can get this to work again, let me see if I can try to do this again here to show you what's possible with speaker view as opposed to gallery. So, you know, everything. All right, I promise in the next time we meet together, I will do a run through of what I can do. Because I can, you know, my, everything a little haywire here. So, but next time we meet on next Tuesday night, I will be able to share with you what I can, you know, I do, you know, and how I incorporate speaker view into, you know, into the signal flow so that you can, you know, have different camera angles and go to different sources automatically, you know, in Zoom. So, kind of have a little twist on, you know, on what you're accustomed to seeing in Zoom. The other thing that people should recognize, if you have two monitors, the presenter can see the gallery, which helps in their feedback, you know, even though you're, you know, you're broadcasting or linking to Facebook, only the speaker view, at least the speaker, you know, the person who was presenting gets to see another connection that says, did they understand me when I said something? Right, you're getting, you're getting a, you're getting non-verbal cues back. Right, you know, and I think a lot of you don't recognize, realize that Zoom offers that feature, but you do have to have two monitors to make that happen. That's one thing that I absolutely have to have as a being a teacher, as I have my Zoom on one side, because we use Zoom, we're not a Google school, but then all of my other stuff is actually on my computer. So that's like integral to be able to see my kiddos while they're actually like in the class and responding to what I'm doing. So yeah, that's definitely something I wouldn't advise anybody to have if they're using Zoom. Thank you, Catherine. I had a question. One frustration I have seems to be week to week is the sound. I do the same thing every week. And sometimes they say, oh, it sounded great. Other times it's like, I can hardly hear you. How come it was this way? Or how come it was that way? And I'm like, I don't have a clue because I do the same thing every week. Is it just all internet connections and how I just don't know? Sometimes it can be. I think with Zoom, at least with my experience with Zoom is I like to take all the variables out of sound that I can. And that means having these signal sources close to me as I can. So that means wearing a wireless mic like I was wearing. You know, that may be one solution. Okay. One of the things that we noticed with Zoom is you have this option to control the volume. And sometimes when you're playing music, it doesn't do a great job. You have to make sure you turn that off. So it isn't compressing your sound. Because it really has a long delay from the time it hears a loud noise. It's almost like a second before it will bring the sound back. Everybody who's nodding, their head has been there. Any other questions, any other comments? Thank you all. It has been wonderful to be together again for this evening. It was great to meet some new faces. Thank you so much for joining us. Look forward to seeing you again. So if you have any questions in the interim between the next, you know, so the next opportunity to meet on Zoom, you know, for in the Tech Deacons Roundtable will be next Tuesday morning at 11 a.m. That is a larger crowd. But, you know, if you have something between then and now or, you know, or the next time we meet at our time at 7 p.m., two weeks from now, shoot me an email. I'll be happy to talk with you. Very good, great. Thank you. Thank you so much. Nice to meet everyone. Nice to meet everybody. Okay, thanks.