 Matt Temple. Hey everyone, good to have you on the call again. This is this being in front of Zoom, I don't know about you but it's just a different way of life. I find myself after these calls feeling a little bit more drained than a normal conversation. So I think my brain is still adjusting to using technology for us to gather and connect. One of the things we wanted to do in the Center for Church Development is leverage our ability to kind of convene and bring folks together really to create synergy around ideas, sharing best practices, what people are doing that's working, what isn't working, also to be able to share some resources with with each other and some resources that we're developing to try to help support and empower you to minister to your folks during this season that we're in however long it goes and to share some different ideas as well. And I think just to be able to connect with our peers and other folks who are in the trenches that are trying to figure out this new way of being pastors and doing ministry and providing care and support to people. And so we've put out different posts on social media and emails just asking for feedback and a couple of the things that we got a lot of feedback from from our last call as well as on social media and some private messaging is some more information on just some technical support in terms of how to how to live stream and different apps that you can use and different hardware and software that you can use. And so we wanted to bring some of our practitioners on and let them share a little bit about what they're using and how they're doing it and make those resources available to you. And then the other thing was what do we do about Holy Week? How are people sort of being a presence? How do we how are we being the church during such an important season? And so we've kind of gathered some ideas around that as well and Rachel Gilmore from Papuan to South Pacific Ministries is going to share some of what she's hearing from around the country and different ideas. So I'm excited about that. And then also just looking forward to opening up the floor and hearing from you all what your ideas are, what what what creativity is coming out. I've been so impressed as I've sat back in from Sunday to Sunday like watching the quality of the worship experience like just increase each week as well as some of the creative ideas that have been coming out. It's been it's been really it's just been really encouraging to see some of the innovation that's been happening. So kudos to you all. The way that we're going to do this this zoom call this webinar it's similar to the way we did the last one. So you have the chat box if you can open that up and for the most part keep your mic muted that way we don't get a bunch of interference noise. And if you have questions, if you have comments, if you could start with your questions in the chat box and then we can sort of begin to address those. Liliana will be following through as you as you put those in there. So we'll be able to we'll be able to see those questions and and bring them before the different presenters or before the whole group as well. And feel free to if you have answers to some of the questions in the chat room feel free to also respond to those. I'm going to ask each of our presenters to just do like a two minute introduction of themselves. And then we'll circle back around and we'll it will start with Kyle and let him sort of present some some of the the equipment he's using. We've also created a page on the North Texas Conference website that has some resources that you can download for free some YouTube videos that you can watch that goes even more in depth on some of the stuff that we're talking we're going to be talking about this morning so you'll have those you have those as well. So let's just start with a brief introduction with from each of our presenters. So Kyle if you want to if you want to go first tell us who you are and in where you are. Yeah absolutely. My name is Kyle Powell I'm the associate pastor over at First United Methodist Church in Irving. I do a bunch of general associate work there but I'm also the youth director. And when all this kind of kicked off it gave us an excuse to start live streaming because we were kind of resistant to it like a lot of people. And so we've been just trying to get it up that quality up each week and I'll kind of be walking through what we've been using and how we've been doing it. Awesome awesome. Denise are you on the call? Hi can you hear me? Hey yeah introduce introduce yourself you're probably the face that no one will know so you introduce yourself. Hello. Oh are you there? It looks like she froze. Let's uh well let's let's move on um let's see let's let's move on to Justin and then when we get Denise back I'll let her uh I'll let her introduce herself. Justin are you here? I'm here. I'm Justin Miller I'm the pastor at Trinity Methodist Church in Wichita Falls and I'm not sure how exactly I got asked to do this but somebody told somebody that I know about FM transmitters and stuff and and so I'm going to be talking today about FM transmitters and we I know how to use it whether sound system at church and everything else but I use it for my Christmas display every year because I actually send out through the radio music to go with my live show so that's why probably I've been asked to do this so I know a little bit about FM transmitters and that respect and how to use those so I'll let you know about the when I talk. Cool and uh Rachel Gilmore are you on? Oh there you are. Hi Matt um all right so I am a church planter from the Virginia conference who moved in July to Nashville to join the path one church planting united Methodist branch of discipleship ministries um so I have been reaching out to church planters and pastors around our connection to get innovative ideas for holy week out of the box stuff that can work in this context so I'm excited to share some resources with you. Awesome and then Denise are you back? Technology you gotta love it right? Yes right. I'm back. Hi my name is Denise Diaz-Ramos and I'm up in Chicago with New Story Church and I'm a little bit of a jack of all trades and plug me in wherever I'm needed. Awesome awesome thank you so much well thanks for everyone being here and and being present I hope you find this to be valuable and we'll we'll uh just dive right in so Kyle we'll start with you um in our last webinar there's there was a lot of questions coming in about uh how do live stream how do live stream even maybe to multiple platforms how to use open broadcast software so can you share with us um sort of what that is how to use it what some of the options are for people depending on their budget and um equipment? Right yeah so if you are looking to start streaming or to up your game a little bit obviously a lot of us started out using our phones and uh just streaming live via you know your cell phone on a tripod um maybe trying to adjust lighting and microphones and stuff like that uh but if you're wanting to take your streaming game up to the next level one of the things to do would be to use the OBS system or like Matt said the open broadcast software and what this allows you to do is um kind of light pro presenter where you set up different scenes and different inputs and outputs just a way to kind of organize on your computer what information is coming in and then what it's sending out um what this doesn't allow you to do however is it doesn't allow us to broadcast to multiple platforms all at the same time uh OBS is only like a single output uh channel excuse me and they only allow for you to send it to Facebook live or to YouTube or to wherever else you're wanting to send it uh one at a time for that though you can um find other uh subscription based programs that basically rebroadcast uh your signal i'm going to drop some down into the chat really quick there's three different ones uh restream caster and switchboard all three of those are subscription based like i said they come in at a very like varying different price ranges and come with all sorts of different um access to different things depending on which one you get into and those will be able to send so if you wanted to do Facebook live and then send to YouTube or send to Vimeo or whatever you can do those things through that uh as opposed to trying to set up multiple cameras and multiple setups uh another option is if you don't want to spend that uh you could very easily just put your phone up and broadcast your phone to Facebook live uh and then do your camera or whatever else you're going to be using to one of those secondary sources and so you'd have two different looking streams uh but you would be streaming to two different platforms so you could be reaching more people um so as far as uh the technical side of things goes and pricing uh probably the easiest thing to do would be to watch the YouTube video that I made uh it's in that resource page that Matt was talking about it goes really in depth and it goes like pretty technical and I don't really want to do that and go like way over everybody's head right now but what I am happy to do is start asking uh having people ask questions and see if I can help answer uh and while questions are coming in just some quick things that might help uh if you do decide to use OBS uh one thing would be to not use your church's Wi-Fi if your church is anything like mine uh your Wi-Fi is not the best uh in certain locations and ours that it's not the best is our sanctuary and so this is actually a usb to ethernet cable adapter and so we plug this right into my laptop which is what we're running everything off of uh and it allows for us to have a steady uh stream of internet uh there's no dropping out constantly throughout the service it's going to keep things running a lot smoother uh something else you might be interested in picking up would be a usb hub especially if you're running this off of a laptop uh this is a seven port hub so it puts um you know seven usb inputs into this there are a couple other ones that are smaller that allows for uh more inputs to be coming into your computer so you're not having to plug and unplug things throughout the service if you need different things uh it just gives you a lot of space and that also if you wanted to record that way too and you had an external hard drive you can plug that into this and it records great and then one of the major issues that we had uh and that we're still kind of trying to figure out is how to get great audio off of the board i'm actually shooting on a sony mirrorless camera right now i'm using the same setup that i would for us live training at the church uh and plugging our uh audio jack off the board into my camera was giving us all sorts of crazy feedback um it was you know it was peaking and it was like jittery and it was all sorts of gross uh and so we ended up buying uh this little thing and it is a audio interface uh that goes into usb and so over on this side right here you can see that it's an xlr cable so that's the same kind of cable audio cables that come into the board come off of the board uh that are going to give us the high quality sound that we're used to producing uh and it actually comes back into this interface and then plugs into my computer so i'm not getting any interference uh the problem that we had this week actually was that the sound was really clear but the volume was way too low coming out of that so we're gonna have to play with it this week and kind of figure this out because you know we're we're learning just like y'all are um so let me see if there are any questions that i can help answer those are just some helpful things that um might be helpful to pick up before you get on to obs um i would imagine that yes the question was does the audio interface help with playing video over zoom uh if you're plugging xlr cables into that it's going to up your audio quality you can also invest in microphones um i actually have this one that's like five or six years old i actually don't know that now it's a little studio mic uh that my wife got me while we were dating uh and it is great it's just a usb it plugs right in anything that you can use audio wise microphone wise that's better than what's plugged into or i guess built into your laptop or maybe it's built into your desktop is going to help technology for dummies obs is open broadcaster software so one of the great advantages to obs streaming directly over facebook live is you can actually integrate pro presenter into obs uh and so if you are accustomed to putting slides with your worship up or putting up if you want to start doing more uh you know images or pictures um in your in your sermons or whatever throughout the the service uh you can actually seamlessly transition back and forth between the two of them so that you're giving that same thing that you would be giving in your screens in the sanctuary or the chapel or wherever you're worshiping uh to the people on facebook uh it's just a step up another simple simple work around that if you wanted to skip obs altogether is to stream with these things directly through facebook live and then have like a tv or another monitor that the people can see uh that's another easy way to do that um feed from your board yes thank you jeffrey i appreciate that jeffrey was just giving me some help on what our problem was uh trying to solve an issue where we can't play a prerecorded video over zoom they can't hear the audio from your laptop yeah i'm not sure ryan about how to play a prerecorded video over zoom um i too have not spent very much time on zoom so i don't know that answer for you ryan if you check the chat jeffrey's answering that question for you um but yeah if you want more technical um technical information or details on how to set up obs to get ready to stream uh or some suggestions on other devices or things that you can pick up to make your streams better i go through that in detail i also talk about one of the things you're going to need for obs or i think pretty much any other broadcaster is you're going to need a video capture card let me see if i can pull mine up here without no i can't do without i'm plugging it but it's just a simple the one that i have is like a usb stick looking thing uh and on one end it plugs into my uh computer and on the other end it plugs in from my camera and that way the information coming out of the camera is captured and translated to where the computer can understand it and will actually broadcast that signal as opposed to trying to save it to the computer so um hello first umc rock wall too i'm not sure who that is but this is actually the same thing that we're doing right now we are running um the question is they want to run obs with scarlet which is this little thing plugged into the computer um which is near the camera and we're worried about finding a core that would run it back from the middle of the room to the sound board so the way that we set this up is i'm we're not using a big zoom lens we're actually using a shorter lens um on my camera and we have it set up right in front of the um the chancell area uh and so it's set right in the middle and i have i think a 20 foot hdmi cord that's coming out of my camera uh and we have a couple xlr cables connected together coming down to a table which is right up front uh and so the scarlet is on a short usb cord my camera is on a shorter usb cord uh and the one that's running the length of the room is the uh the xlr cable strung together so that was kind of our work around um i don't know if you have a laptop or a desktop that you can move to a different spot in the room because that might be a better way to do it and since there's not a whole bunch of people in the sanctuary it might be a better way to uh kind of work around that awesome thanks cal we're gonna we'll uh we'll have some more open time for some questions too but i want to uh make sure we just keep moving this moving this along also one of the um questions that had come up uh last week was about live streaming to youtube and there was a comment that you need a thousand followers to do it actually i did a little research on that you need a thousand followers only if you're live streaming from a mobile device if you're live streaming from a webcam you actually don't need uh on youtube you don't need a thousand followers so youtube is definitely an option if you're going through like the obs that kyle was talking about so i want to move and let denise share a little bit new story is a church in chicago and they've been really creative in interacting or integrating live stream with some prerecorded and then last week they actually were able to bring in some other voices of people that weren't in the live stream room so they were able to sort of add participation from people from around the country like texas um so uh yeah i just wanted denise to share some of the stuff that they're doing how they've kind of worked together and in particular how they're using um the this particular app that's helping them to do a lot of this um sort of adding uh the prerecorded with the live stream integrating interviews and participation from other folks so denise you're on hi y'all um oh i'm originally from texas so that's where my little y'all came from so i envy all of y'all who are in the warmer side of the country um well mad asked me to come in and talk to y'all a little bit about what we're doing as a church um like all of y'all or most of y'all um we were put into a place that was very unknown um so we've kind of you're muted denise sorry again it's my first time on zoom actually so you're gonna have to okay so um and you'll see the progression of what we've done um our service has actually started as a as a podcast so we've always recorded our services you know our sermons put them on our church's website and so um two our individuals from our church decided that they wanted to do a live podcast um and from there it evolved into bringing in video which we felt that doing it through facebook because you can do it through multiple you know send it directly to your website you can send it directly to youtube but facebook seemed to be where most of the people go and it also allows people to chat just like we are right now um share the image the video to other places um and so it's been kind of you know learning trial by air and also you know working with what we have versus um our our particular situation is that we don't have an church office um so we we don't have a church building so um during the week pretty much everybody you know works from home who does work for the church or does some type of work with the church so with the covid 19 we don't have the um place and equipment to do you know live recording at a you know church per se so um um friends or podcast yeah microphones and whatnot and it's this the first video that is up there was just me with my iphone uh a little disclaimer is that um i i do use all um mac ios and so the software that i use is called um switcher studio and i'm going to show it to you here i'll uh it's an app for for mac um i love it it's been very very easy and it also gives it a very polished look especially for those of you who might not be able to go to you know your sanctuary or don't have the audio and video equipment to record a full you know professional broadcast um with a switcher studio and you'll see in my in the live streams especially the last one i and an ipad and the ipad if you i'll show you real quick um what it looks like so i don't know you see um right here so you when you're recording with switcher studio i've done prerecorded countdowns on iMovie and you can find some of these online and download and um from there you can i've uploaded songs of people at our church and so um our our stay at home um you know laws in chicago are a little bit stricter um so we can't we can't um get more you know than persons in our kind of household that we do leaders record and then i'll go online on iMovie and add the lyrics but you can also do multiple displays and when you do multiple displays you can even write or in screen picture right here so it's um it's it's worked really well with us also just you know making more of a polished branding look using different websites for this such as canva um i don't know some of y'all have used canva it's great website um there's a free version and there's a also like a $10 version that just gives you more flexibility and and um just easy drag on things so for a person like me i'm a mama three um i don't do this professionally um it just helps to have very simple things that people can just kind of drag put in you know and especially if you don't have you know the background of you know working with audio and video equipment um this last podcast that we did do because our one of our friends who jack who does the video and audio or i mean the audio he um actually integrated his equipment into my phone to be able to get a clearer sound um it does sound better you get that you know rich microphone output but if you can't if you don't have that i feel like even just using you know your phones on it sounds well you know two iphones one on one on you one maybe on whatever you're reading and using an ipad to you know switch between um cameras and just gives that little you know seamless flow of it um so those are some of the things that questions or mad you have any questions no well we lost we lost you there on that on that on your last little uh on your last little thing but you're so with with um with switcher studios then like you're able to you get the prerecorded from your um worship leader and then do you go in and put like the words you can scroll the words on it so that it has like different effects you can put on it and is it are you using switcher to do all that or are you using like power no bringing that in no i'm using i movie um again i because i do use mac um apples you know software um i movie is really great i just get their video put it in there and then just put the lyrics as they go but you can um do like a pre another prerecorded video of just the lyrics um you can do slides on the switcher app um and put them like i said um you know picture in in picture uh where you can have the person um be and then have lyrics for me it's just here to just sit down and also when i'm passing out to be warm oh we lost you if uh if you all want to see sort of how that switcher app works and what what it looks like and how it integrates it's a it's it's a really accessible way um not very expensive to if you're using an iphone an ipad especially um to integrate they did interviews so they were able to like live feed me into their live feed um they also did some um like i said with the worship and and having the the words and lyrics right there on the screen so if you go to my facebook page i shared um their live stream from last week on my facebook page otherwise uh i think Denise put the um live stream uh website there for news story chicago.com as well so you can go on and see that there uh as well so it's pretty easy to use so like if if you're a novice and you're you're looking for something that um is is intuitive and in in simple then uh switcher studio is a great place to start um it doesn't require a ton of uh technical expertise um so let's um let's let's shift for now and then if Denise gets back on and anyone has some questions we can uh we can direct those towards her when she gets back but Justin um i've seen online some really fun uh creative actually i have a friend in indianapolis that did a drive-in sort of movie theater style church service last sunday using fm transmitter technology we call it technology it's it's it's kind of a throwback technology i guess but um yeah share with us i think you've used it like at christmas with christmas lights where cars can pull up and and they hear the music with your lights but share with us sort of how that works and how maybe you would envision that sort of integrating into um what what we're doing as churches and how how we could um use that as as a way of reaching our people yeah so definitely um you can there's tons of different fm transmitters out there um there's short range and there's long range uh to for uh according to law we uh you can uh broadcast for free up to 200 feet i not have any problem uh with FCC regulations or anything and so a lot of them are that sell out there long range will do 200 to 300 feet mine can get between that like i can go about probably about five houses down for my house and still pick it up pick up the music and stuff on either side of of my house um so depending on how you have your system set up at church you can easily plug in uh your fm transmitter into whether it be a computer because you can use uh the way you plug it in is just using a regular aux cord so just a three and a half millimeter aux cord um that you plug into the fm transmitter to be able uh to broadcast it so it's really easy to use it's not anything that's complicated um so this is this is uh the transmitter that i have it kind of looks like this uh you can't you can't get this specific brand on amazon i got this one i think on amazon about a hundred dollars what it costs uh they do have another one and i'll post it in just a minute uh what you can look for an amazon but you if you want to look for one just type in long range fm transmitter um and i'll like i said i'll share that but it's pretty easy all you do is turn it on you uh just tune to the station that you want to broadcast to so it's not very strong so you're going to have to pick definitely a station that is uh not uh that doesn't have any uh broadcasting in your area um because it's it these are meant to not interfere with other broadcasting systems in your area so if you have a um if there's one broadcasting pick a station that doesn't have any frequency sent to it um and so you just dial in like here i use uh i think it's uh 90 uh 98.1 or something like that uh and then you just this one let's see yeah so you just plug your audio here and this even allows you to uh plug in a like a mic directly into it using an aux cord um but you can uh plug in uh your just your regular aux cord uh and then this is the volume that you can set and everything uh my suggestion too is is you want the volume to be lower on this and higher on your sound system or whatever you're broadcasting from uh because whenever you have this up louder it's going to be a lot of uh it won't come up very clear i'll just say that so whenever i do my uh thing i make sure that i have my computer up really loud and then i have this turned down so it doesn't uh feedback kind of like some of your speaker systems that have power volume and stuff on them so uh what i'm going to say is there's different ways that you can do this so say that you have a sound system so our sound system allows us to have uh the rca uh jacks the red white uh cables uh that can come out of it and the project sound so that's how we're doing our system right now uh because we use a cam quarter and then bring it in to a converter and then have from the sound system to that converts from the rca down to an aux cord and goes into that and so you could do that into this uh but if your system doesn't allow for that you can uh just bring a computer up that you are broadcasting to on facebook and then hook your aux cord up that way through your headphone jack and into there and so broadcast that way if you want to do that uh so there's a lot of different options that you can use with with this but this one is uh all these are on the back there's a fci fcc id and everything so there are legal to use these even though there's some websites that say no you can't but it's just up to 200 feet that you can use these legally without having any problem but i think with everything going on right now i don't think you're gonna have a problem with that anyway of any sort um but um that uh is uh the really easy to use uh just uh plug in to the jack pick your station and then go and it's not difficult at all um so that's kind of what um it like said i use it every year i've used it for five years now or so uh with my christmas display and stuff and we can easily hook it up we have it uh at our church haven't decided to do a parking lot because we're at shelter in place here anyway um but um if we do that may be something that we think about doing um but i'll post on here um there most of them are around $100 so they're not very expensive and depending on where you order them from about week or so it takes to get it in so do you have any questions about that? yeah there's been some comments about the shelter in place and definitely if your county has a shelter in place um uh stipulation you don't want to be doing drive-in gatherings but there are some other ways that you could utilize the technology still um without doing a large gathering and um once uh once once rachel sort of presents some of the ideas that she's uh hearing about we we can um we'll go to even like stacy pacune in the way they're integrating some of the stations of the cross in uh through yard signs and doing some um some drive by i think you could integrate some prayer and reflection using technology like this where cars drive up much like they're looking at christmas lights but instead they're they're doing you know prayer and reflection as a family or whatever so right yeah any other any other questions uh for justin i have one one quick question um he mentioned about the uh the law is there particular law uh concerning the amount of watts that you can use with these transmitters because i've heard that you know the fines up to $10,000 if you exceed a certain amount of watts on these things right so most of these that you get from if you get one like this or even smaller that goes smaller range the higher the wattage is the further range you're gonna get so if you get ones that just have like an antenna like this you're not gonna you're not gonna have any problem they're the ones that have the higher wattages are the ones that have bigger antennas so the bigger antenna the further range you're gonna have so just to give you a little uh and help you out how can we help churches that may want to use these not know that as knowledge and my understanding is like amazon they're not telling you this information and particular about buying this kind of equipment and not knowing the law and find themselves in a deeper hole because they're breaks of laws yeah so i that's why i was going to share and just a minute i'm gonna share uh just a link of one certain one that is okay to use uh and uh but i i wouldn't just go out and buy any FM transmitter uh but if you stick under $100 you're probably going to be okay uh and not worry about being too high in wattage because the ones that go even higher in wattage they're going you're talking about $250 on up uh depending on the cost okay thank you mm-hmm let's see matt could you please address the difference in audio quality between your feed and justins why is his so much clearer i have no idea yes because i'm using apple uh headphones i don't know maybe my microphone is not as good in them haha hang on just a second guys all right well um rachel gilmore works with discipleship ministries and uh is doing some excellent work and uh has sort of the ability to scan the whole country and what people are doing and sort of her contacts in different places and so rachel um take a little bit of time and just share with us what are some ideas that you're that you're seeing for holy week in how people are engaging their congregation their community and then also we've partnered with you to develop with scott erickson the stations of the cross and some resources there so you can walk us through some of that as well if you would sure um so i i don't know about all of you but i would love to have as many ideas as possible so you can find one that would work for each of the um days of holy week so let me share my screen here can you guys see that with holy week ideas yep i'm just gonna fly through it all so the first main question that you need to think about is your context right what is my context that determines the why the medium that you use for each of your circumstances so if you want to many people as possible then you want to find multiple platforms so people can share it and access it but if you want to engage people on a personal level and help them feel connected a lot of planters and pastors throughout the connection are using zoom rooms because just seeing all the faces and having a few minutes of chaos has been really meaningful um to lots of folks and give or there are times you want to give people the space to worship when they need it the most and just provide at-home resources for them to use you know individually or as a family when they have like the emotional space to handle it depending on the anxiety level of your context okay so for poem sunday ideas i'm hearing around the connection are a poem parade if it can be done safely where you line up cars and you drive through neighborhoods and you have people grab a plant from home and wave it outside their window other churches are offering online cutouts illustrative ministries has a free one that you can download or other people are saying use the palms of your hand and do a poem sunday parade um there's also susan from upper new york talked about how hosanna means um you know save us and so they're doing like a poem protest where they write down on pieces of paper what they need to be saved from if it's unemployment or um illness or anxiety and isolation and they're all going to hold those up online so they can do it virtually or you could have them put all their signs out in front of the church practicing social distancing as a way of showing what people's needs are where they feel they need to be saved on poem sunday you can use virtual choirs or zoom room choirs that you can post up on social media virtual choirs are really time uh they are intensive so make sure that you prepare 80 to 100 hours of editing if that's something you want to do but there is a zoom link that i can send you or a youtube link that with a zoom call that talks you through that process if you're interested um and then palm sunday at home stations where you find some dice and some clocks you can tear and other things uh that you can use i have a template that i can provide that you can adapt for folks to do at home when it comes to monday thursday an idea that's going around is uh not to focus on tenebrae necessarily because it is a heavy hard time but to look at um the new commandment love one another so look at ways that you can love people in your community so i've listed some here i can send this powerpoint on to matt and so you you challenge your church to live out that command to love one another uh and post on social media using your church hashtag maybe the hashtags love one another or buy your love and then compile all of them if you're techno savvy as a church and have um have that be shown on monday thursday how you're reaching out and loving your community or tell the local news station um or others about what you're doing so that we bring hope and inspiration on monday thursday uh if you want to do it at home there's uh rachel wallace who's a church planter in uh kentucky i gave this to matt she's developed an individual and family monday thursday at home with five stations people could always zoom together there's a foot washing liturgy on discipleship ministry's web page that could easily be adapted to use at home buildfaith.org has a stripping the table at home service so that um you know the kids east or sunday can actually see the difference around them as you strip the table together and then worship design studio has a free downloadable comfort food love feast uh that's available via zoom for you to use as well so because i'm sharing my screen i can't see any of the chat stuff come up so i've met if there if i need to pause for a question as i'm going just let me know otherwise i'll keep flying through okay good friday options an audio boltz weber church planter out in colorado lutheran um would every year have people gather at a place where there's been an act of senseless violence or tragedy so folks are reinterpreting that and gathering at a place in the community where there has been pain or loss of innocence and you could just put a cross there and have people stop by throughout good friday to pray you could offer some type of guided meditation on your app or your website but they would do it on their own time um then scott erickson stations in the street i'm going to dive into that in a minute there are some good friday monologues that i gave matt that can be read or and live streamed or used on zoom with people posting their reactions participating at home uh or i was talking with some counselors yesterday who said good friday is really an opportunity to help people name all the things they're grieving in the ways they might feel abandoned or forsaken at this time and that can bring some healing and prepare them for Easter sunday so scott erickson great artist and most of this work is scott's and the response but he has 12 images 12 stations the cross here's one of them so the resource that north texas has that they've contracted with scott for um you get all these images and then for each one there's a verse so this is jesus tempted praying in the garden so there's a verse that goes with it a meditation and then a call to action for each of the 12 stations so it's a free downloadable resource some of the other images are here jesus being betrayed for the 30 pieces of silver jesus condemned by the Pharisees who say you're not my king uh jesus mocked jesus is given his cross to carry so anyways all the scriptures meditations actions you can download and adapt for your context however you want to use them online people doing them in their homes um other versions have said you can hide the stations of the cross around that house in lieu of like an egg hunt um and have people find them and put them in order and then do them together as a family a discipleship ministries is coming up with like an online activity for kids at virtual egg hunt or something as soon as that's released i'll send that to mad as well in terms of Easter Sunday you can consider adjusting the time of worship if you do livestream because we're hearing that uh facebook might be so inundated that there would be glitches with sound quality and whatnot so some churches are already notifying their congregations hey we're going to meet at 6 a.m. or 4 p.m. on Easter Sunday so that they have more bandwidth and can reach more people i don't know if you've heard about it but it's growing by like a thousand people a day it's a facebook group called the quarantined Easter celebration which is a challenge across all denominations all faith groups to sit well not faith groups necessarily but denominations that at 8 a.m. Easter Sunday you all sing christ is risen wherever you are whatever your time zone and post that to social media as a way of becoming one um on Easter Sunday you could have people post family pictures in their Easter best if it's pajamas or dresses as sparkhouse has a flat jesus that you can download for free and have your neighbors put them all around so folks can go out Easter Sunday and try to find jesus in their neighborhood and it's not a blonde haired blue eyed jesus which i personally appreciate you could have people post signs of life or hope using one common hashtag on instagram or come up with your own filter uh or have them post on facebook and combine them all together to say this is where community is seeing life and hope on Easter Sunday or you could have people writing out to god about how they feel this Easter and mail it to the church and then you mail it back to them either when the shelter in place ends when advent begins to think about where they are now and what's happened or uh lent next year just as a time for reflection and going deeper in their faith and then there is a church planter up in the dakotas who was doing Easter Sunday drive-by stations so when i get more information about how he's developing that and what that entails i'll share it with mad as well there we go we're done any questions awesome um stacey pia coon would you can you share with us a little bit about what melissa is doing and how you're using this resource sure i'd be happy to um matt i'm not sure oh i can share the screen all right let's see all right so one of the things we're going to do using scott erickson's picture is i actually went on office depot today and ordered a bunch of yard signs for delivery so we sort of took these pictures and blew them up into an 18 by 24 yard sign and we're going to encourage people we're we're under stay home guidelines not shelter in place in calling county so we're going to encourage people to do a stay in your car stations of the cross where we tell them what streets to go to they do kind of a little hunt and we place these signs in between the sidewalk and the curb so they're not something you could see necessarily if you were walking down the sidewalk so that we're encouraging people to actually stay in their cars we talked today about putting these up we want to put them up actually more throughout the week versus just on friday because this is so new for folks we think it'll take them a little while to get used to what they're doing so we're going to talk about it sunday we're going to put them up on monday and let them stay up monday through friday and then thursday friday saturday and even sunday morning we're going to do really simple facebook live kind of monologue services where we read text out of john we use zoom webinar for that so that people can see and interact with that and we can use other mediums we could even do that and two people in different locations by changing off who's the panelist so we're going to go have a morning watch on easter sunday at sunrise before we do our regular worship services so we're trying to keep things simple but encouraging people to maybe enjoy what might be nicer weather next week with some stay in your car stations or the cross using this artwork excellent any um does anyone have questions for uh stacey or rachel about um any of these ideas i would love to get the powerpoint that rachel did james friday so i'll email it right to you james thank you awesome for those of you that don't know james if you're from north texas james is the developer in south carolina uh rachel and i spent some time with them uh few months ago doing some leadership seminar stuff and uh just really appreciate james's leadership and it's great to have you on the call james anyone else any other uh questions or thoughts um so we're getting some action on the powerpoint rachel if you want to email that to me and then i will uh i will have that put on our website under holy week uh resources so that anyone who wants um anyone who wants that can have it i just emailed it to you perfect um and if you are i'm seeing the question about doing the drive-by stations of the cross and it can that's why there's an instruction sheet i think that goes with the scott erickson images that says this is what you would do at home or if you have a shelter in place and you want to leave the house you can put the images up throughout your apartment building or neighborhood um and have people just walk and see them practice social distancing do a map similar to what stacey said but within everybody's community so i know tennessee is not in shelter in place yet but my husband's already reached out to our neighborhood and we'll be participating in it awesome so i had a question if uh and this may be getting beyond where we are right now but specific ideas that people have of of uh sharing palm sunday um worship ideas and eastern sunday i know we've gotten some example of ideas but i'm wondering if we'll have a dialogue among colleagues of some of the things um for example an idea for palm sunday i think i'm not sure if uh diane deets is on the on the line but she mentioned some creative ways of having kids maybe coloring uh palm branches and and having them in the air or people going out to their garden and picking up something it doesn't have to be a palm but some way of sharing in that is that some dialogue that we can entertain yeah for sure so walley i'll show you what we're doing in melissa we encourage families to make copies of handprints and even to mail those back and forth and we talked about how the body of christ connects us all we talked about glue and staples as the way in which connects that and so we're making palm branches out of actual palm handprints oh that's cool thank you other ideas of what people are doing first paris is having people sending photos or videos of their family members having their own little palm parade and will um piece them together for the beginning of service yeah uh first sacks he's doing something similar to that like having folks do that in their homes and i'm not really exactly sure what our children's director is but all she's gonna do with them but i know that they're gonna be incorporated in some way um into the service yeah first well that is doing that as well the children are making palm branches at home out of construction paper or other things and sending in videos many videos of them parading with their families through the house other ideas on palm sunday if not we'll move to monday thursday well on on monday thursday uh again there was been some shared about doing some shared grieving uh on that and as well as good friday and the bishop tomorrow night at seven p.m is going to be addressing um holy communion or agape meal or love feast and and how that could be done there's a lot of um conversation going on among theologians and and bishops and such about about this practice and so tomorrow night at seven the bishop will be doing will be addressing that and that'll be recorded and posted and so we should have greater clarity on uh on that i've posted a number of articles on the facebook page on the clergy facebook page and um about just how some people are thinking about it to help you and your congregation be thinking about it as we move into that so um is there conversation about uh monday thursday apart from apart from the online holy communion debate at first actually we're planning well we're experimenting with something that we haven't done before and that is uh well we've done everything live so far but there's we're kind of wanting to do a partly pre-recorded and partly live um uh service we want to we want to do stations of the cross but we want to like we're trying to get congregation members each to record sort of the you know scripture and reflection and prayer for each of the stations and their homes to send those in and we want to edit that into uh into like a an experience and we want to and our youth director kindle yorks you had this i think brilliant idea to uh frame frame like do stations but frame it in the context of the last supper you know and so have the sense of like this is what this is what's coming next this is what is on jesus's mind this is what is you know and sort of a flashback flash forward kind of thing so have it have it be sort of about the last supper and what's it wants to come and so what the meaning uh what the kind of meaning that comes into the last supper because of that so we want to make a video doing that and then we want to invite the congregation to a big great big as many as we can get big zoom call uh after they would watch that like we would invite them to watch it at a certain time and then log on at let's say eight o'clock for a holy communion or if this should make key changes his mind and says he doesn't want us to do that then whatever else so some other communal experience together um on zoom so a little bit of pre-recorded stations a little bit of uh of zoom interaction very cool others and there's some in the chat going on the bishop has uh whether the bishop has made a decision or not i do not know but the bishop has not formally announced a decision on online holy communion worship design studio with marsha mcfee also has a free resource out um for monday thursday and it has six reading components and so we're still brainstorming ideas um but that's one of the ideas on the table the resource is out michelle can you put that and find that link and put it in the chat for thanks any others before we move to good friday or we'll just uh monday thursday or good friday at this point the liturgy of washing of the hands rather than the washing of the feet at fellowship you and see you want to share what that is edlin yeah just uh you know we're kind of in a different time um talk with ron about it a little bit this morning but just what wasn't my original idea someone has shared and i was like that would be very neat uh only for this unique time that we're in of course it's not something you'd be doing going on but right now we're planning to do communion and washing up washing them hands so a lot of people have talked about you know you wash your hands and say the lord's prayer and that's the around amount of time so it has not been written yet but we're going to because we take monday our monday thursday service tomorrow so that's something i just wanted to share so will you be washing someone else's hands or just washing your own hands uh the thought would be you know if you got families that they might be you know kind of washing in a common space there or if you're alone you know yeah you wash washing your hands individually edlin if you create a resource that you send out to your church on um on that will you send that to us and i can put it on our holy week page as a research people can download thanks yes thanks for that other ideas that people are hearing or thinking about when it comes to monday thursday or good friday well the lord has risen indeed will be sung at eight a.m and posted online but other resurrection day easter ideas that you have people are talking about uh you know two esters this year both the uh online Easter celebration on the actual date and a in-person resurrection day celebration when we uh when the bands are lifted and we're able to join in together and so i've heard a lot of people talking about uh two esters this year uh because we believe every sunday is Easter sunday resurrection celebration so people are talking about doing a big Easter celebration when when they're able to congregate back as well as online so but we'll start off uh ideas that people are having to make uh Easter sunday special oh and we just have the benefit that we have some footage from last year's Easter and so for palm processional and then also for Easter we're going to do christ the lord has risen today do everything else live and then do the hallelujah chorus at the end about the christ the lord has risen and the hallelujah chorus will be from last year nice others i'd also be interested just to throw another question into that um and how you're engaging children um you know we've we've talked a lot about sort of the live stream and the worship experience but um what what are some ways in in particular for Easter but in others uh other ways as well how you're integrating our our children into the worship experience we're we're doing live or we're gonna do our best to do a drive-in church on Easter sunday um weather permitting FM transmitter permitting and um we're doing drive-in church this week weather permitting as well in our congregation uh we'll receive bags of communion that will take together communion they're sitting in their cars depending on the bishops conversation tomorrow night so the plan is to take those same bags um i ordered enough of them and we will put together an Easter bag for our children that come to our drive-in church i have three i have a family with seven kids in the congregation there's another family with three um so i expect in our small community that will probably have um at least 65 people that gather and they'll bring their kids just like a normal sunday they just have to stay in their car for the drive-in church that's the attempt so we're giving them bags of the empty tomb stuff um little crosses just little things that they would get kind of like some vacation bible school toys and things like that so that's what we're doing um i don't know i hope it all works out we're praying for no rain on sunday and a good easter sunday as well so just my thoughts our children's ministers put together a virtual easter egg hunt where it's going to be like an easter egg hunt but having children find different colors around their communities and take pictures and send those and different words that express joy or happiness and have them take pictures of those and so she's going to have them send those to her throughout the day so that um she's able to sort of engage with them throughout that time period about that we also continue to have children's moment every week where she is a part of the worship experience and talks directly to the children i think in our community a lot goes around the kids being able to parade in their easter vest um so hoping to get some photographs of that again going back to die indeed she had thought the idea of maybe giving a craft for the kids to make their own easter bonnet take their pictures and be able to share that in a way so um that's kind of gotten my creative juices going in that area but some way for the kids to do something and prepare and then be able to show it online would be the best one else for another idea in north georgia there are churches doing uh you've been egged activity where they put a sign on someone's front door saying we hid 12 eggs in your yard have fun finding them they're empty like the tomb as a way of reaching out to families in the church so i know that there are conflicting responses across the connection about offering goodie bags or eggs or anything that is distributed even the little communion packets on Easter Sunday where they can just drive in and get it because again if one person distributing it has coronavirus now your church is known for getting all the families in town six so you've got to just kind of weigh the danger of that i guess uh greenland hills is um they've been having church members read this isn't for Easter Sunday or worship but they've been having various church members read bedtime stories so it's been a great way for them to engage various members of their congregation and connect them with one another as well as minister to the children freddie or asked um is there any um uh asking for some additional resources and thoughts and ideas for smaller churches anyone have any suggestions about that i know many of these ideas have been shared by smaller churches he lifted that question oin can i chime in just a second on that question yeah please it was yours and the reason why i'm asking the question from everything i'm hearing sitting here and the number of calls that i've been on a number of you guys have have young folks who are very talented with this i'm listening at and seeing these young ones who are talking about and stuff it just does not fly with my church i do not have anybody that has that type of expertise and stuff so we're doing good to be able to get an iphone set up and being able to transmit it live and being able to do some of the other things that you're talking about uh i just just the other day finally got a zoom account set up so i'm still waiting in the water on this and and trying to learn how to to extend invitations for people being a zoom meeting so i'm some of our smaller churches need just like some basic stuff just to be able to get things going because that's all i've got right now it's myself and three other people who are coming to the church and helping me get this going so i did i you know i don't i don't have the big sound board and two cameras and all this stuff going so need a little direction thank you yeah well i as i was surfing at various worship services on sunday you know i was touched by a lot of the smaller churches that have smaller crowds they were taking prayer petitions right there on uh live for people to be typing down in the memo and so people hearing their name being being shared in that prayer petition you know if you have hundreds of people watching you know that's much harder to do but these smaller churches they're they're taking personal prayer petitions and so i i put my prayer petition i put in the comment and then i hear it right i heard roya spore say it right back and and so there are ways that the smaller churches are able to to build connection in a way that uh in unique ways so other ideas i know some really small churches are using google voice so that especially if you're not techno savvy and people won't even do zoom you can set up a conference call on google voice and all of your more elderly members without it a laptop can call that number and i'll talk to each other and do worship together with their landline phones so and i'll just some notes i made uh from this past sunday um make sure you're continually encouraging people to register and so register their attendance at the beginning of it and and within it so that way you're able to connect with people they can do that in the comments some churches are having landing pages on their on their website uh so that they're able to follow up and connect especially with first-time guests and me and emily capture those first-time guests hold on a second the other is on comments on facebook uh white rock pinned a comment that would appear first which would be give online uh and so if you're sitting there watching it the number one comment that's pinned is the link to giving online um if you haven't edited your your website so that your online worship is where where it lands so as soon as somebody puts in your church dot org um where your live stream is happening would be an ideal place for the the landing page um and and open up new facebook pages are free and so if you want to do a you know a page for a sunday school class a page for um for your for your church or so forth and invite friends it's just a different form when you connect people and so those are just some things i noticed on on sunday and and picked up on the other things that people want to be sharing before we start um wrapping up are any questions of our presenters our eldest sunday school group said everyone get on your email at this time and they just did a reply all sunday school class which never would have occurred to me and so i applaud their ingenuity in that and that's working for them that's fantastic others questions can you hear me hello yes welcome back hello sorry i think everybody's working at home for the internet so it's real choppy here in chicago um we're talking about the smaller churches and um i think a lot of the big hurdles especially with um older people like my parents um is that they're not on social media and there's also a lot of millennials that are also like steering away from social media so that's been a hurdle with us in um how they can access it so what we're doing is um the live stream i put a link to it to our our facebook our website which allows people who don't and our facebook is open so people can just click into our website it'll take them to our facebook live stream and at least they're able to watch it live but i also then put it there um after we've recorded it and it and also what i've done is then i i send a weekly mail chimp mail chimp is a website that you can do like a newsletter and send out with you know images there's i put images and each image has a link to different things so i do a google doc very simple google doc with a youtube uh video of a lesson for the kids with songs i add you know um children's bulletin printouts and a couple of uh home ideas that the kids that don't have internet or not internet access but uh print at home so i try to implement things that they don't necessarily have to print either but they can watch on on an iphone or they can watch it um on their computer for as a lesson and so i i integrate those into the mail into the newsletter um and it allows people who don't have access to social media to be able to be a part of and also have quick links to access those things so i don't know that helps with that um also some people some churches by my home church in texas and it's smaller church so they will prerecord the service on youtube and also you know send it through mail chimp for those who don't have um or not on social media but also then throw it into facebook on sunday so people can see that prerecorded um message thanks denise that's that's that's all very helpful stuff do you also have a recommendation that people have been asking what's the best way to send a big file like if i wanted to email a big file out to um the church members of a of a message or something like that um do you have a recommendation denise or others we use we transfer dot com at discipleship ministries it's free and you can send a ton of documents if you're using a mail chimp you can upload the document to mail chimp and then include it as a link in your email so that you're not actually emailing the document around but simply a link the uploaded document very good you should always flatten a pdf though especially if it has images in it when you save it uh choose reduce file size helpful helpful others questions ideas suggestions well hearing none it's been great to see all of y'all i think our our presenters i'm scrolling through and seeing a number of you and just thankful for this i'm thankful for uh for matt temple for curating this for for getting us our guest the work of lily anna and she's been working behind the scenes and and for all our presenters and all of you for joining just appreciate what you're doing and i've as y'all know i've gotten around to a lot of the churches physically and since since starting this job but i am loving being able to go to so many churches on a sunday online and being being connected with you and you know i've loved the mean and like that we were all televangelists and and the way that the nord texas conference our pastors are adapting i've just been highly impressed and just and and just thankful for the way that y'all are continuing to ministering to your congregation and the way you're reaching new people that are that are tuning in and connecting i can you know as the lord works in all things doesn't cause all things but works in all things i can see the lord working in this and working in and through y'all and so i know you're in our prayers and we're going to continue to have connection one question i wanted to raise before we before we get off so we've the nord texas conference we've tried to just stack a lot of information this week with lots of zoom meetings and so forth but we're kind of the mindset that next week is holy week we would back off now but i don't want to assume that would would you like us to continue having zoom meetings during holy week and of course these are all optional meetings but i guess i can just get some head nods up or down whether to do zoom meetings next week or not i'm getting a variety of responses all right well we may do on and and there's a lot of questions on giving and fundraising and financing and so forth so we may look at doing one of those next week if you have also specific questions or ideas please send them our way i'm gonna ask reverend s diana masters to close this in worship but before i do i'll give one last chance if somebody wants to ask something or say something or share something well when i was i was thinking probably not next week but maybe the week after maybe doing a zoom where we can get some conversation around what discipleship looks like outside of sunday mornings in a faith community sort of in a digital space as well as evangelism how we might use social media and digital spaces to reach people in our community and what that might look like so we'll we'll have some conversation about that but if that's something y'all would be interested let me know and we can we can put some some resources together for that as well so thanks matt well again thanks to uh rachel uh denise kyle justin and all those who presented and participated all the chats we really did appreciate all of you and so with that reverend masters will you close us you're gonna have to take mute off your the lord will hear you even if you're on mute but the rest of us will mind thanks for that reminder oan yeah that a spring oh god thank you for this precious time that we've had online to see the faces of our brothers and sisters just to be reminded that we're all in this together and supporting each other oh god with you being the head of our lives we thank you for all of our speakers who so willingly have given of their time we ask you to pour back into them all that they have poured into us bless them with a special blessing because of their service to us today continue to use us oh god and let us continue to think out of the box and reach out to those that may not even come into the four walls of our church let us go out and be your disciple and share the love of christ everywhere that we go even virtually and we ask it in jesus name amen amen amen make for what you're doing god bless thanks y'all have a great afternoon