 using the Zoom application. One of our main objectives here today because of the questions that we're getting at Center for Church Development is how do we do online worship well and the communications department has done a little bit about talking about some of the technical things that you can do to do online worship but we want to talk a little bit about just some best practices, different models, things that people are doing to connect people and build community around a worship service. So to begin I just want to kind of run through what our agenda is so you're kind of aware of what the pieces will be and then and then we'll get started. So the first thing I'm gonna do is I'm gonna ask each of our three presenters Greg, Mania, and Andrew to introduce themselves and after they've given a brief introduction I'll sort of direct a prompt to each of them and let them take about 10 or 15 minutes to share what they've been doing and how how it's worked for them and any other insights that they might have. During their presentation if you have questions feel free to put them in the chat box and we're gonna try to keep a tally of those so that we can during our question and response time direct those questions to them when when that time comes up. After they've each had a chance to share Reverend Masters is going to facilitate our question and response time and I'm gonna kind of take some notes. If you have ideas or resources or websites that you want to link and throw in the chat room we're gonna put together I'm gonna take all the notes of our call and put together a document that I send you afterwards that'll have any websites that are referenced any resources that are referenced and things like that so that you have those in hand to to help you moving forward so without any further ado then I'm gonna initially invite Greg Reverend Gregory Neil to introduce himself and then after he's done Mania and then Andrew so if you if you all could just do a two or three minute brief introduction who you are where you're serving and what what we need to know about you before before you start so Gregory can you go first. Certainly certainly I'm Greg Neil I'm the pastor at first and I'm Methodist in Farmersville I've been in the North Texas Conference since 1991 I have served churches in every district including the district arrangements and the current arrangements and I have an online ministry grace incarnate ministries at revneil.org where I've been supplying audio sermons since 1999 and video sermons since 2010 you can find my video sermons on YouTube and I link them you frequently to Facebook I've been doing online ministry now therefore for you know 20 years and it's something that I find very helpful to my ministry and my local church as well as beyond so that's me. Excellent thanks Mania can you introduce yourself for us. Hello my name is Mania Logan I serve at St. Luke Community United Methodist Church and I've been there since 1991 I serve as the Minister of Worship and Arts. We basically use Facebook live and live stream so we first started with Facebook live and then we added live stream and that's how we're doing our worship experiences right now. Excellent thank you so much and Andrew are you on. Yes good afternoon everybody yeah thank you for having me my name is Andrew Forrest I'm a pastor at Munger Place Church which is an old East Dallas and like you I'm trying to figure this out and so what little I have to share you is worth the cost of admissions today and I'm happy to do so. Awesome appreciate it appreciate it good well Greg let's let's start with you from what I understand you've been doing some online church stuff for quite some time that have quite a following you do a lot of pre-recorded using multiple cameras and editing it before you put it on so take 10 or 15 minutes and just share with us what you're doing equipment you're using anything that might be helpful or useful to the folks on the call. Certainly well I began doing just audio back in 1999 started doing audio and that was about all that the internet can handle at that time using real player format for it. I tried doing stop action video where you take photographs throughout the service and send those up I did a few of those in the early 2000s but I went to video about the middle part of that decade and periodically produced a video sermon using a camera which I would then load in on to the computer and edit. Then in about 2010 with YouTube I decided to start going on regular videos on YouTube with using multiple cameras at first it was two cameras then three now four. This is the kind of camera that I use it's a Canon this is actually a very old camera a very old one I don't think you can even get this one anymore they got much better cameras than this out there and I have four of them I have four of them and I purchased them over a period of time they're HD quality cameras. I record the video sermon on to an internal card in each camera and I set them up in various positions from the balcony in my sanctuary and then I record the entire service and I also do an audio recording through the church's sound system and then I download all of the videos into I use iMovie but you could use Final Cut Pro if you preferred I download all the videos just cut just get the sermon out of each one of them from the four different angles I match up the audio feed from the good quality audio feed from the church's sound system to the video so it's matched perfectly I then post production wise just cut back and forth between the cameras so that you get a more professional feel with multiple cameras and I cut back and forth throughout the duration of the sermon so if I like to move a lot when I preach when I move to stage left stage right I go to the camera that's focused for those areas I use something called the kin burns effect in iMovie to do you know digital shifting around and cropping while I preach but it's a post-production effort more than anything else the cameras are easy to set up I have a staff person that does that for me on Sundays so I don't have to worry about that they set it up they start it up they shut it down they back them away I take the cards home I download them to my laptop and go with it post production over sermon can take about three hours total from download to production and upload to YouTube I do this so that the quality of the video was excellent the sound of the video is excellent and you do cutting back and forth between cameras to help keep people's attention because people's attention can very be very fickle and and so if you don't keep the same static image for more than a couple of minutes people will tune out very quickly so if you are shifting around you're providing post production input from whatever you're displaying on the screen that kind of stuff that also helps to and I often do that as well now you don't have to use four cameras you could have two cameras you can have two people with iPhones or androids and you set them up and you put them on a mount and you can do it that way have a couple of friends who do that kind of thing with a couple of cameras position in a couple of places in their sanctuary and then they take the production of it they download it and then they edit it together you and the only get one video stream of the entire thing using the different camera angles it's best to try to keep the camera quality the same between them or it becomes very obvious that's why I have for the same kind of camera but you know couple of three iPhones would do the trick as well this is not for live streaming this is for delayed or on-demand viewing some of my sermon videos have had 20 plus thousand views if you get one somebody gets some interested in something that you said it gets shared out a lot on Facebook it gets shared out a lot on in various discussion groups all over the world and you can pick up a lot of views that way at least I have on average I'll get about 30 views a week now it's been a lot more because of the people being sequestered but that's to be expected I have about three thousand I think I think it's three thousand maybe two thousand I forget how many is now a subscribers on YouTube but that's over ten years of collecting people who subscribe to my channel on YouTube I produce the video I have opening credits and in credits the sermon is just the sermon I don't know anything else from the service mostly due to copyright issues I own the music that I use at the beginning at the end it was produced for me by a friend who wrote it and performed it and I prepare credits for the beginning in the end to help its professional quality as well as information and I upload it every week I try to have it up every week by Wednesday if I can although I sometimes get behind but that's my objective that's what I do that's what I've been doing now for over ten years it works for me sometimes I do little video clips short you know two minute segments that I'll share up on on YouTube as well as on Facebook so I'll do that as well but I just most most people I talk with prefer to have that whole sermon I can watch whatever portions of it they want so that's what my video sermons have been doing online the last ten or so years it's it's kind of an involved process at first but once you get it down it's easy if you have only one or two if you have only a couple of cameras it makes it simpler to do doesn't take that much time I do recommend that you try to use at least two because that gives you two different cameras you can move back and forth between and that helps and again you can just simply use a phone's camera that's not that difficult to do either so if you have any questions for me I'm always happy to help explain what I do how I do the way I do it and if you have any recommendations for me and how I did I'd also appreciate that as well because I'm always learning new ways to do it this current situation with live streaming has always been a challenge for me but we're slowly surely getting better at that as well and I'm still doing both of those now so anyway that's what I've that's what I'm doing so thanks that's really helpful do you so you're currently because you don't have a public worship gathering are you doing you said you are doing a live stream are you using Facebook or YouTube for that we're using live stream on Facebook right now Facebook live right now for our live streaming we may go over to just using YouTube for that I'm not sure sometimes Facebook can be a little twitchy and I've used a YouTube for live streaming as well for other things and I found it wasn't too much trouble so I'm doing a live stream broadcast this past Sunday we had six people in the sanctuary that's probably all we'll have this coming Sunday to a couple of music folk and we just live stream the whole thing from a sensually located camera and then I still have my four cameras set up and recording the service and I uploaded the sermon Sunday night so that's what I'm doing right now during this emergency and I also do a live stream Bible study on Tuesdays okay cool very cool awesome mania I want to I want to shift to you and you're you're working with st. Luke and you have a bit more of a team approach when you're producing your live worship experience and you guys have been doing that for a while can you tell us about how you've done this and how that sort of practically worked out and in a time of social distancing and less people how many people do you have on your team and how are you sort of navigating all of that during this time yes so with our team approach we have we had maybe three pastors present the first Sunday I had a team before they reduced the number of people in the century I had a team of about ten singers then we have four or five people for the media team and I had four musicians but those were the only people in the sanctuary so there was no congregation and so basically our congregation was our online team well our online congregation and so for us we use the tricaster and so we have two cameras also and then the audio goes into our tricaster and then the tricaster sends it out to live stream and also to the Facebook live we also had a pastor on the live stream as the online pastors so she was interacting with the people were watching the live stream and then we had a lay person who was on the Facebook live interacting with the people who were watching it on Facebook for let me just say of course when we're usually live streaming do Facebook live we are accustomed to having persons in the congregation and so they are always usually responding or giving us energy so for the past two Sundays we have had to bring more energy and bring more life for those persons who are watching us and so but I think we've done well with it because we are aware of that and so that basically is the way we have done it and we plan our worship actually we had worship planning today so how we're going to continue and so each Sunday we are reducing the number of persons there are even actually going to be on the team in the same HR so yeah can you speak a little bit more to the the energy how you're how you're sort of trying to create that and develop that in sort of this strange where you don't have people there feeding it so how are you how are you encouraging your folks to bring that energy well with the musicians I just encourage them to play with a little more energy even with the singers to sing with more energy but if we think about the goodness of God basically we don't need to have an audience so I also said to them our audience we have an audience of one and that one is God and so right there that gives us all the energy that we need that's really good and so right now you're you're looking at what did you say your size of your team that's producing this right now we started out we may have had above 15 18 so we got to come down to under 10 now so that means we reduce the number of singers the number of musicians the number of pastors and the number of people in the media team to get us right under need 10 and you're still doing that though from the sanctuary yes and we're yes Sunday would be the first time when we deal with under 10 yes from the sanctuary yes and then all of your sound like your sound technicians your sound all comes through is it is it right through your camera or is it coming through are you is your camera plugged into your sound system no the tricaster is the others an audio feed from our audio board that goes to our tricaster cool yes yeah very good excellent well Andrew can you share with us I Owen was telling me a little bit that you're you're new to all of this and when you found out you were gonna have to do live stream you kind of went and got the stuff and are figuring out as you go so share with us a little bit about that experience and and what you all are doing and how it's working yeah absolutely again I'm Andrew I'm at Monkey Place Church in Old East Dallas and I'll just say off the bat that just like you I have no idea what I'm doing I'm trying to figure it out and so I want to encourage us to you know none of us were trained for this some of us are real smart like Monya and Greg the rest of us are just praying catch up so we're doing our best so I want to give you permission to say we're figuring it out it's not going to be perfect right now okay if you go to my website right now Andrew for us org there's a handout there if you wanted to see that I can also share it over zoom if you need it but I thought you can download the handout for my blog but also the actual handout is then printed on the blog beyond below that I think it's a post there that's called pastors webinar webinar something like that so if you see that give me a thumbs up if y'all see that if you like but I can just work through some of those details now okay Greg sees it there great okay there's just some simple thoughts so the overview is we made the decision to go ahead and not do broadcast from church for several reasons one is you know I can't stress this enough I decided that for somebody like me who doesn't have these skills simplicity is the key I wanted to have a medium that I knew we could make work over time I also frankly sort of anticipated that we'd have this more restrictive quarantine and so for all those reasons even two Sundays ago I just did it home from my house so very very literally our worship director actually is at her house and she has a beautiful piano she actually plays for about half hour ends the feed and then I start a new feed not the most elegant way to do it but that's how we're doing it okay so I'm in my I'm in the same place I'm going now I use a different thing I'm talking into my computer right now and I'm sitting down I actually use my phone on Sundays using Facebook live Facebook live is not perfect but it is free and a lot of folks know how to use it so our folks interact with our live stream in two ways number one they can if they belong to Facebook if they have a Facebook account they can watch it you know as a live video on Facebook we've also learned how to embed that code on our website so folks can also work watch on our website for those who don't have Facebook for whatever reason I um I did buy went out and bought a bunch of stuff on Amazon about a month ago just thinking that we might be in this situation so I use this thing here it's a little tripod and your phone sits in the tripod like that and this thing plugs into the lightning jack on your phone so I have an iPhone XS something like that okay the first week I was sitting down last week and for other things I've been doing I've actually put a ladder on my desk and I'm like the third step up of the ladder I put this which is about eye level with my thing it's why I stand I figured standing was just a little bit more natural doing it like that on the website on my website and on the handout I linked the links to the lighting so I also have two big lights over here like you see it like a photo shoot it was about 150 bucks for both of them and I use those on Sundays as well the last couple weeks I've literally um printed out because this thing is so uh it's not produced I've actually printed out a couple of key slides they're like I hold up like I had one word on it and I just held it up in front of the camera for the point of my sermon like a key word like that um okay on my hand that I talk about I do think I would pick whatever you feel comfortable with we this thing for me is super stressful and so I'm trying to simplify it as much as possible to do the easiest thing for me that just works our levels are not highly produced it's not like television but for me it's just what I can pull off and what our team can do uh I made the decision to go from home too because for me I decided the intimacy of being this close on facebook live might trump our lack of uh production excellence elsewhere which is also why I decided to go live live is a lot more complicated because you can't produce it well you know it just doesn't look as good and if you screw up it's screwed up but there's just something about um using facebook live particularly I can greet people by name you'll see if you go live their little name scroll up and so I'll say you know hey guys hey Greg hey mania hey Matt so glad to have you guys this morning you know I kind of do that at the beginning and I think that is still worth something I can't do that all alone because obviously once we start going I'm looking at the camera not looking down at the screen but I found that helpful so this is again facebook live there's other a lot more sophisticated ways to broadcast live but that's what we're doing right off my phone I just do it right there um so that's why we decided to go live like that there's pluses and minuses I would say you you decide what your tradeoff is and then you just do what you feel most comfortable with again excellence is less important than clarity and consistency and I think the intimacy um one tip I would give is rehearse everything rehearse everything rehearse everything rehearse everything I'm a big believer not on general worship on Sundays but certainly now can I give you a small example how I didn't follow this so the first week I had us doing the apostles creed you know people are at home and their pj's and their back porch wherever they are and I said okay let's stand to say the apostles creed so the first week we did worship I was sitting for it so I stood which meant the rest of the time my torso was in the camera which I knew would be the case but because I hadn't practiced standing I slid my chair out which grabbed the extension cord from my two lights which fell on me okay I didn't practice it so that was another lesson practice everything I mean every gesture every move you're going to do differently also there's just so many problems can you hear can you not hear am I coming through our worship director has been playing the piano and something about where she holds her phone in the tripod will cover the little mic on the iphone so we're telling her it's muffled it's muffled you just want to kind of practice it and then you do the same thing which is why I would suggest getting a home studio set up studio right where you always do it in the exact same place so that you're not having to recreate it all the time these two stupid big lights I have here are just now around my desk and that's how they're going to be um and then last thing I'd say is that I think small improvements make a big difference so anything you can do to just raise the production quality a little bit will be good so some suggestions I have there is lighting whenever you've seen um the full scene of like a network tv reporter broadcasting they always have those big bright lights shining down at them even though they're outside and it doesn't look like they need it so I think lighting is important however you can set so your face is well lit I think is important you could buy lights you could turn a lamp around sit where the sun comes on you adjust the blind something like that I think sound is important and so I've decided that using some form of a microphone I have this thing again that plugs into my phone I also have some lavalier mics that plug into the phone this thing was relatively expensive the whole kit was about 250 bucks the lavalier mics are about $15 so pick what you use um one more point I had to make anyway I think those small little details may just help a lot and it's not going to be perfect but your people our people are not asking us for perfection they're just asking for um connection with us right now and so that's what we've decided to do I'll go ahead and mute myself there unless you have more questions Matt no that's really helpful I I'm wondering so you say rehearse everything do you um do you like do uh sort of a dry run and put it all you know get on Facebook with your team on a Friday afternoon and like we're going to do a dry run here and see how it goes yeah so um certainly the first weekend what we scheduled a couple of live things and said hey guys we're going live on Facebook at 5 p.m. it's we're going to try to figure this out so help us out you know be kind to us and the 150 people who were ready who are on Facebook got on right away you know I didn't send it to the whole church but whoever was on like that and that was really helpful about somebody said you're too close you're too far away the the lighting is messed up so that's what I mean one last point as far as a handout um we we were posting them online just simple documents most people I assume have more than one device that can access the internet in these days and many people have a home office they can print from but at least the words are up like that you know the apostles creed the prayer that kind of thing so yes sir that's really good that's really good that's helpful um fine turning your camera and let us see those lights yeah I will I'll pick up the thing here um I also post a picture of my blog so I'm plugging here so there's one like that and there's another like that and I'm looking out a window and online on my blog post if you scroll down there's a picture that I took from last weekend about it another thing about rehearsal example it's super hot the air condition doesn't work in this room of the house anyway I get nervous when I'm doing the live worship thing and these lights are warm so I had to learn like to kind of cool myself down ahead of time you know I have a towel for my my TD jakes towel type thing so just prepare for that kind of thing too that's good that's good well um Reverend Masters would you like to lead some of our our question and response time and um we can let people if if you want if you have questions if you have questions for any of our presenters um if you want to just specify in the chat room who your questions for and then um if you just have a general question you want to sort of crowdsource to the group that's here now there's about a hundred folks in here so there's there's plenty of with collective wisdom that we can draw off of so let's just you know we just want to open it up and we'll be here as long as we need to to let some conversation go and and everyone can get their questions answered so that's Diane I'm handing it off to you but you're on mute just so you know um so Matt I'm gonna uh just uh interject just just a second um there uh presenters if you have noticed there's a few questions in the chat area if you guys just go in there and um there's a couple questions about the stuff that you're using just go in and type in um so they asked Andrew uh what type of mic uh you're using you just type in there that information okay so before we go to the questions we have one more person that's going to speak Nuculus is a pastor at Saint Paul and what they did from the first Sunday that we were in quarantine to the second Sunday was vastly different and so as Andrew talked about we're all learning this and so we want to have Nuculus give a chance to make a presentation um about what they did at Saint Paul so Nuculus you're on nuke right thank you thank can you all hear me yes okay awesome thank you um well we we um we didn't we we put on our first um service and like like many of um everybody in here uh we didn't know uh what that was going to look like and so uh one of the things that that we were able to do after after viewing that and just kind of working through it and trying to figure it out was to sit down and look at what we produced and then after looking at what we produced uh and we were able to nick pick and go through it and and you see all of the um what we what i what i would consider mistakes or things that weren't great for uh production and trying to appeal to an audience online one of the things that i i think that we're we're heading toward is not just appealing to um our our um our our members of the of the church but there are a whole group of people uh who are sitting at home now with nothing to do and uh they're they're scrolling online as well so we want to try to appeal to to them and so just like dr dr greg uh neil um we we've kind of taken the same approach uh what happened we've kind of taken the same approach uh as to how we uh conduct our services and we're shooting off of um three or four different cameras uh we're using a uh software called switcher that gives different angles for uh for the videos and uh and and then it's important to make sure like dr dr neil said it's important to make sure that those angles are all of the same uh quality because then you have a uh you don't want to go from a fuzzy shot to a very clear shot uh because you know people will people will talk about that and you know i've i've had the opportunity and pleasure to sit with some folk um as they nitpick at our video so um we want to make sure that we are our producing a a great product so um and just like uh andrew um just like andrew we we have some lighting that we that we purchase to make sure that we're we're lighting up the the uh the area right and so what we do is we record we record our services we have um a team of of people come in and uh we we got people on cameras we've got our praise team uh setting up we've got our our sound text uh making sure the sound is is correct and then um after we after we shoot everything um after after we shoot the record and pastor's got to come in and and one of the things we try to do is get ahead of this thing uh so pastor's coming in with two or three sermons already locked and loaded ready to go and uh and and we're we're recording him in in those and it takes quite a it takes quite a bit of time but we're we're recording him and shooting those uh those messages and then once everything is is completed uh from the praise team to uh uh pastor to our our post uh to our our beginning message as we're talking to to uh the audience before it before everything goes off and then after um pastor's message uh once we get all of that together uh we take those files and we we load them into Final Cut Pro and and then we begin to edit and and splice things together cut it uh and and form a a product one of the things that i did too as well was i went and i watched uh a lot of people who have already been doing this um uh a lot of people who have already been doing this so uh like i looked at the uh i don't know if you guys are familiar with uh Dr. Jamal Bryan and new birth uh in at in Atlanta or uh Ari Vernon in Cleveland Ohio um just just looking at different uh i have some friends who do live streams and and all of that so i looked at what they what they do and then made sure that i was able to replicate in some way um what i what i witnessed from them that looked like pretty good pretty good uh products and so uh and then we try to keep it we try to keep it switched up so that we're not just uh in in one place uh when we're recording uh we will we will change it up and and change backgrounds and scenery so uh one the praise team is singing on the stage another time the praise team is singing in our welcome center another time the praise team is in the in the more intimate space at the uh in pastor's office singing uh with pastor at his desk helping out uh uh getting his Luther on and so that those are some things that we're trying to that we're trying to uh do so we have the the intimate settings we have the um the setting where where pastor is in the sanctuary we have the we have the setting where pastor is in the uh or they're in the welcome center and so those are just just trying to figure it out doing so many different things to uh to to navigate through this uh this new i guess this new norm and i think that's that's pretty much what we are and what we're feeling you're on mute you're on mute uh people that are at home that are um looking at you you know or looking at uh mania with at st lucor some of the other churches uh what we're finding is they're not just looking at one church with people being online you can look at multiple things and one of the things that st paul did that was helpful for me because i do look at different ones is um when that last Sunday sermon i mean worship service was dropped uh when i signed on to st paul it said worship was beginning or connecting to worship it i didn't have to stay there i got a notification when you were starting and it just i could tell it wasn't live i couldn't really tell for sure though i couldn't tell if it was recorded it was really a pretty um polished presentation but how did you put that on and did you put on your website so that when people joined you they knew that it was going to be so they didn't have to go through facebook live and try to find you they just went to your web page and you had the little prompt there to say when they were going to start that was new from the uh sunday before can you speak to that a little bit yeah well we we've got a whole uh team that kind of that kind of works that and uh what they do is they they embedded that on our onto our website um so that you could view it from our website and also with it being a youtube uh our youtube channel if you subscribe to our youtube channel you're going to get the notification um that we are uh that we have a new video coming up that is about to premiere youtube allows you to schedule uh that premiere um where it will it will lock the video once you upload the video to youtube it will lock the video um and it won't play until uh that until the time that you that you put in so that and then and then it provides a uh a countdown and if you are if you are subscribed to it you're going to get that notification that is going to that is getting ready to start okay thank you that was that was helpful that leads me thanks nucleus that leads me to our first question i know that as pastors aesthetics is so important whether if you're at home uh doing your online worship you you're careful about what you have in the background what people see and and don't see you want your welcome your worship space to be a space that's welcome where people feel safe they feel like it's a holy space and so um we're going to just open it up for people to talk about how do you set that space for for people who show up early for people who are just there how do you you set your space for worship on a sunday morning any of our speakers could speak to that but also it's open to all of you that are there so say a little bit about how you do aesthetics because i know that's important to all of us so feel free to unmute yeah i'll speak to that very quickly uh you see behind me it looks a little bit neater on a sunday and the lighting is a little bit different my camera is a little bit higher but somebody from church said you need more color and brought that plant over my shoulder last week and somebody else donated the painting on the wall to bring it out so uh i just decided to keep a nice neat clean room with very limited distractions and then we've added a few little bits of color from there so like the even these pillows over here on the couch i take out on sundays it's very very simple and you can go online and see it i just thought simplicity is what i what i could best do at this point thanks andrew okay so what about some of the others how do you do what how do you make sure that people feel safe in that the place is holy what about the statics okay what we did uh we the speakers any of the speaker want to talk about any of the this is mania can you hear me hello this is mania can you hear me yeah we can hear you yeah okay uh what we did we have um banners that actually outlined the lord's prayer and so we brought those banners into the sanctuary and actually placed them in the quarrel off so it became the backdrop for um the um the aesthetics as opposed to listen looking at an empty quarrel off and so so now what they see they actually see the lord's prayer and um so that was our backdrop for that also for the beginning of 15 minutes this past sunday we actually just scrolled all of our ministry highlights and information that our congregants and anyone who was watching could use that information to access us to talk about the information that came from the mayor's office it talked about uh just how to protect yourself during this time um that's what we did at uh farmers will be broadcasted from the sanctuary uh like like we would normally do in a work the worship service so we decided to pare down the service to slightly simpler format um we had music uh played a pianist played we played traditional a very old style traditional hymns that the congregation would know uh may not be able to sing to them because they may not have a hymnal but they would know the songs and so we were very careful about the hymns that we chose uh we went ahead invested because we felt that that would help to to try to reduce the difference feeling because we we do wear vestments in the traditional service at farmersville so we did that uh i and my youth pastor alternated functions in the service so that it wasn't just the same head up there speaking and our choir director uh and a member of the choir who's his wife they did most of the music singing and so that really worked and we kept the chancel area was pretty much what was there for the live stream broadcast um that was pretty much what we did it was a very simple straightforward service we did not have an affirmation of faith we did have the lord's prayer um pretty much going to do the same thing this coming sunday um what's up for grabs is what we're going to do for palm sunday and of course easter uh was and we'll talk about that possibly a little later on but that's what we did i'll offer something if i may yeah so from a very low tech standpoint um what i tried to create was a sense of intimacy um it was just myself the first sunday we tried this so this was sitting close to the altar and having those worship elements and some stained glass in there trying to frame that in a way that would be familiar and intimate and then this past sunday we invited our a couple of musicians to be there but they weren't comfortable being on camera so i moved the camera a little further back and and i think at the last minute it flipped on its side that's what face the client is all about but one of the things i've done as well is to include an order of worship so i will post that there uh and and seek to to give that and get going with the traditional hymns and having the words they're printed so that if someone was able to pull that up at a time i think that would be helpful okay all right thank you so um let me move on to another question whether you're doing worship online or in person we're going to have unexpected unprepared for challenges so for those of us who are new to this can you give us a heads up on uh as to what some of those might be for those of you that are really in this give us a heads up what what can we expect as some of those uh unexpected unprepared for challenges i really like the way andrew said practice practice practice i think that's that's very important yeah can i speak to that i have one thought yeah i think you need to expect um people texting you or whatever uh saying it's frozen it's messed up it's gone down something like that and of course if you're like me and you just want to pull your hair out at that moment but you can't and so um again we're doing facebook live and embedding that code on our website and it takes there's a slight delay for that to happen but be that as it may what i've started to do so last week i knew i was going to be talking at the camera for like five minutes before like we were ready to begin so the first week i had to just kind of wing it like steven colbert going out to the audience before the late show things last week i brought a little bit of material with me to talk about some books my family had been reading or something like that so i think my advice would be to prepare for there to be some kind of problem and to decide if the problem is such that you're going to just fill a buster for a little bit right there and talk to people or if you're just going to press on knowing there's nothing you can do about at that moment and life will go on i would definitely expect a technical glitch no matter how much you press for sure okay all right yeah if i could if i could also weigh in on the unexpected things hi my i'm charles i uh i worship where the waste is global missions um especially with facebook live what i notice is that it's it's very good to try to get a designated phone i know it's good to use a phone but then not to use your cell phone but to use maybe say a different um a different device just to use a different device other than your phone so maybe an old phone that you that you haven't used in a while or something like that just to use that because then that way you only you only worry about just wi-fi you know just connecting connecting to uh to the wi-fi connecting to facebook via wi-fi so this way when you're doing it during the worship things like phone calls and text messages and all that would not interrupt it because it's not connected to like a phone number you know it's it's it'll just be a designated phone that is solely dedicated to having the the the the live streaming during that time and then and then also just make sure make sure to check your wi-fi to to to see that you have good wi-fi strength because um from experience i've noticed that you know during the during the videoing it'll start to blur out a lot when the when the signal is very weak and then you know that obviously would get viewers frustrated because then they can't see you very well or you know um you know it's like they would see a static image but then the voice is still going on or vice versa or things like that okay one quick other fault sorry that just pinged me about something i actually commented my wife's phone as a backup video recorder so i'm streaming from my phone uh my my family's downstairs i'm upstairs and i just straight up record on her phone and the off chance that everything screws up on my phone at least i've done i have a recording that i can put up later okay so again kind of redundancy building it in i found this helpful and yeah i like the idea i turned it off put on airplane mode put on do not disturb and all that but once or twice i've also even forgotten of course okay any other challenges that you have that you have experienced that we might um expect to experience i would say um make sure you give yourself if you're if you're recording your service and you got to upload and make sure you give yourself uh ample uh upload time because um anything that can go wrong will go wrong when trying to upload a video whether that be uh your your internet starts moving slow and uh something like that and you don't want to have to have to have to have this going or have your your members expecting a certain time to see it and it hadn't uploaded yet so give yourself enough time um at least upload it a day get it uploaded and before uh you think you need to have it uploaded uh because like i said it there are so many different variables that could take place that you two may even have a issue or a challenge and then you've got to try to figure that out so that will be one of my suggestions thank you i'm in real quick yes so my name is Nigel i'm at First United Methodist Church in Plano we don't typically or we hadn't typically live streamed our service but of course with everything that's going on everybody's having to come up with stuff on the fly so the first couple of weeks and we'll change this in the future but the first couple of weeks what we did is uh we used an ipad and we streamed to Vimeo and there is a streaming cost which is i believe $75 a month but that also gives you like seven terabytes a month worth of storage space so you can upload any full services on a regular basis to Vimeo so you have that recorded and you also have that um kind of in storage you have that in queue so people can go ahead and watch um one thing that i had noticed is the audio quality uh the first time that we did it the first week that we did it was very harsh i mean it it was a fee that came directly from the sound board and we've got a very nice sound board came directly from the sound board and two and you can purchase these anywhere but it's an iRig that converts an XLR feed and for sound people you know what that is an XLR feed to plug it straight into your ipad so that's what we did the first week and the second week we immediately changed it what we did is we used that same XLR feed but one of the channels on our sound board we call a room microphone so what we did is we took a microphone and placed it about halfway back in our sanctuary and essentially what you're doing is you're capturing the audio that's coming from the speakers in your sanctuary and you would think why would you do something like that well you start to lack the ambiance and the reverb and the atmosphere of your sanctuary so whenever we added that room microphone about halfway back what it did is it captured more sound of course it also smoothed out the vocals it smoothed out the instruments and we have about five people on our on our contemporary worship team you know electric guitar acoustic guitar bass guitar drums and it smoothed all of that out so it didn't sound so harsh whenever you're listening to it online and that upgraded our quality like crazy so we still use the sound board feed that's going from an XLR cable out to the iRig that you can purchase at guitar center or a walmart and that feeds directly into the ipad and we also on our sound board dedicated a channel for a room microphone that we place halfway back in our sanctuary to capture the ambiance and the atmosphere of course that's not going to work 100 percent for andrew for us if you're doing everything from home and more power to you praise god for what you're doing but you can still in a little bit in a small sense and do that same thing even at home but it works very well if you're trying to capture a worship team in your sanctuary where nobody's at anyways that's all i got all right thanks thanks for sharing so i noticed one of the questions is about having a license greg spoke a little bit about that earlier um so when we're doing worship online can someone talk a little bit about what license we may need to have or use for what we're doing uh can i i think i might be able to speak to this just a little bit um so there's there's different kinds of licenses there's software licenses and then what greg referenced was copyright uh and copyright licenses um if you if you look at the fine print in any of our hymnals uh books of worship it says that none of this is to be captured or rebroadcast in any way and that's kind of a standard thing that gets put in uh in those books as they get published um but there's what things say and then there's how things operate and so um uh what has been the accepted standard and i've even received email from um nashville when i was asking them about this very question is if you are streaming a worship service they consider it to be the same as in the room and so they allow that as an exception uh for for your um uh copyright issues so you can stream a worship service um you can use uh the hymnal you can use anything that you would normally use on a sunday morning and you can broadcast that um as a worship service and not have to worry about the copyright of it good good information thank you so much for sharing it's my pleasure so um i have a question if i may if i may ask a question about the licensing sure yeah i'm my i was told of something called um a ccli um and this is more in terms of the kind of music that we that we play during the service and in this case i'm speaking more in terms of a contemporary service um i'll i'll so there's there's a need to get a ccli but then there's a difference and if and if maybe say once church is an uh and an affiliate of another then it could qualify as under as using it the parent the the ccli for the parents one um but i'm still not sure as to how whether we're supposed to get a ccli or whether it's the parent church that we can use the ccli for and all that and then secondly also i get this a bit of an offshoot but then with um broadcasting on you on youtube live live youtube live i i got this notification saying that you can only use it you can only start using it when you have a thousand followers and more i'm i'm not so sure as to how true that is that's just the notification that i got from trying to set it up but if someone also knows more about that and can educate me i'd really appreciate it thank you okay yeah charles um so the youtube thing streaming with a thousand people uh you have to have a thousand subscribers that's one of their newer things that they've put in to try and um cut down on some other instances of copyright uh issue um it mostly has to do with streaming from your phone uh you can uh do uh streaming through your computer to youtube with less than a thousand uh in most cases but in part it also depends on the age of your youtube account um you a youtube account that was created yesterday is going to have different rules than a youtube account that was created three years ago five years ago ten years ago they're going to have different rules associated with them and and how do you know well when was your google account created if you use gmail um that'll probably be the date that they use the first time you watched videos while signed in on youtube that's going to be the age of your account and and so i hope that answers it as far as uh contemporary music and having a ccli license i recommend to each church having one of those if you're a separate campus of a larger church that's one thing but each of us are individual churches as part of the north texas conference and so i recommend having a ccli license uh per church um i even recommend having a cvl i cvli license which you can get through our conference uh at a discounted rate which allows you to use video clips uh and things from movies as well without worrying about a license okay um i want to interrupt really really quickly i don't mean to jump in but no it's okay as this uh question was asked i emailed quickly uh our the director of media and our uh for the conference and i asked him if we um have any type of license for the conference and uh his email said yes the north texas conference has purchased basic license on ccli and one license through April 15th and then i asked him what that means exactly and he said yes that all of the ntc churches have the basic ccli and the one license um so it's uh it sounds to me like we all of our churches that are in the north texas conference are covered under that uh license he's going to give me more information about exactly what that covers but i did want you to know that if you are part of the north texas conference it sounds to me that we do have that license for you can you back me up on that matt yep that's exactly right okay yeah so mania did you want to speak to that because i know st luke talks about licensing uh with almost everything that you guys do at uh st luke do you have anything else to add to it no like i said the north texas conference has a license but we also have our license too um so that's what i did want to speak to and i forgot in my presentation even though we're doing the live stream there are some people in our congregations who do not have computers or they do not have smartphones so what we have done is we have a prayer line and so we ask them to call into their prayer line and so um we prefer so that means we connect with since we are a multi-generational church and so those persons who don't have computers or smartphones what they do is just call into the prayer line and one of our members is sitting in a room where the audio is going in there and then they just listen from and then we've had about 30 people to call in and worship with us that way okay thanks it's good to know so yes so via my understanding in our research um we have found that the basic license doesn't cover streaming we had to purchase a separate streaming license which is also available on the cc li website um this the basic cc li website from our understanding and research only covers live performance it does not cover streamed performance okay thank you for that information um neil and i'll um make sure and ask our representative exactly what that covers but thank you for letting us know that neggal i i had the same understanding at one point and when then i contacted nashville uh to get uh clarity and a double check um and and they said that that basically means for like somebody sitting down in their living room streaming a performance of something uh is one thing but if you're doing a broadcast of a live event then that's a live event and it should be covered there at least that's how it was explained to me so if you're doing worship on sunday and you're doing live that's the same as if the congregation was sitting there is that what you're saying yeah and and so also let's keep in mind that that uh in this particular period of time uh where our whole society is outside of its norm i would i would not worry too much uh about enforcement of this other than maybe youtube algorithms um which will listen into something if you're streaming to youtube or facebook and they think that something's a copyright violation they'll cut the audio feed uh from your broadcast um and and so that's the only thing to be concerned about but that's like if i'm using my phone to put music through that's um um production quality from a uh a recording label that would have it in uh facebook or youtube's um database if i'm doing a live performance of a song then that would typically fall under what's considered cover cover music which is an artistic license that's separated from the original in a just enough of a way that it shouldn't be an issue for what we're doing so don't don't worry too much about time and energy into copyright uh in this particular uh time and if you're thinking that everything that we've talked about is just overwhelming uh just grab yourself a flex tripod grab your phone and just do it straight from there it doesn't have to be this complicated the more complicated it is the better the quality and maybe the better retention uh but your people want your authentic selves and they want they want to worship with you more than anything right now um and so let's let's uh let's try and keep that as our main focus okay for those of us who are doing it pre-recorded and not live live then a copyright does matter right in this instance um i wouldn't worry about it and it's again i would say that that um because of the particular circumstances that we're in right now i wouldn't worry about that but like um for example uh dr greg used to do a you now show um if he were gonna have a uh if he were gonna be performing ccli music through that you now show that he was doing which was not hit which was not his church's normal sunday morning worship then he would need the the uh broadcast license through ccli uh but given that this is just an attempt at putting worship on for our people i'm guessing that it would fall into the live event license whether it's pre-recorded and then broadcast at that moment uh or or done in the room on sunday morning thank you here's one about i also have a question per the sorry may i yes yeah and then we're going to move to another question thank you this comment yes per the ccli that we have um is it okay to say before the service starts maybe um just as the the live feed comes on playing music in the background you know just so that the whole atmosphere is not and in this case music and that's the it's a music off of youtube which is reduced and all that um is that covered um it's okay to do or is that not no if you were if you were using like a youtube playlist to send that through to your live stream feed that would not be covered understood thank you okay so in the midst of um the season that we're in and doing worship online some are doing live some are doing recorded um or any of you engaging with your congregation during that time i remember mania said they have a pastor that's kind of on call and and monitor the comments and would respond to the comments so they're interacting that way but how how are you able to interact with the congregation during this season of doing online um well on sunday morning i had uh while my youth associate was up uh doing her portion of the service which was a children's portion and announcements and doing the pastoral prayer i was on the phone watching the service and interacting with church members directly when i was preaching she was doing that and so it was kind of a a tandem operation that's how we did it at least okay and another thing that we did when we do prayers of the people in worship we allow a space for people to speak their prayers out loud and so we encourage them to talk the prayer request in the facebook in the comments okay thanks April anybody else anybody else um interacting with your people so what abril said is awesome because what that also does is it um it bumps your your feed like if you're streaming through facebook and we were actually just talking about this in our worship planning meeting and i encouraged you know our worship leaders our pastors who are on the stage you know speaking in front of a camera to encourage people by asking questions that they have to respond to in a comment this is a great time for the church that we're able to stream everyone is everyone is streaming and we're reaching so far and the more times people comment on your stream the more prominent it becomes on facebook and more readily accessible it is to people who may want to view it so ask questions just my opinion ask questions that people have to respond to a simple question would be like hey where are you listening from and type it out in a comment on this feed and that just boosts your streaming post anyways okay so we uh yeah what was it we we also did uh kind of a our normal joys and concerns time uh sort of you know opened it up for people to type in stuff and we had so we're filming in a herb we're streaming from our from our sanctuary and so i can't i'm if i'm leaving that i can't see facebook necessarily but we had our youth director was sitting behind the camera and so then she would read out what people were saying and then i can sort of respond to her and we could do uh you know lord and your mercy hear our prayer sort of thing that way and so having another person to kind of even just in live worship to speak out those things and have more people multiple people sort of voices going on in the sanctuary if that's where you're doing it can really work and that way you don't have to necessarily be right up yourself against the computer and yourself seeing it you can you know just kind of tag team on that okay thanks nick so let's let's compare now uh for those that are recording it and dropping it on sunday and those that are facebook live if you record it um you know you can't really interact with your people then but is there a way for them to leave comments that you can get back with them at another time yes you can do that it's very easy to do that when i uh post up my videos they're after the fact but then you can have a comment stream there and people can make comments um if you put it up on youtube but they can also do it on on facebook if i were to be pre-recording and then dropping it on sunday morning that's precisely what i would do i'd be watching the link on facebook i'd be lot watching the comment stream on youtube and encouraging people to interact with and ask questions and communicate and then i would respond back as quickly as i could um the real challenge of course is um preaching to an empty sanctuary if you're pre-recording that's a real struggle there have been a few cases in the past where due to technology issues i haven't been able to record my sunday morning sermon or i thought i recorded it and it turned out that it didn't record and it's really weird getting in the sanctuary and preaching uh preaching a sermon to an empty sanctuary that takes imagination yeah imagining them there i saw on facebook people taking pictures of church members and putting them on the pews i thought it was a brilliant idea so that that's that's the challenge there is to to preach to an empty sanctuary really tough but imagination and realizing that it may be empty of other people but you're not alone you know the saints is real and god is there and that's what i try to remember at least but interacting with them on youtube and on on facebook is very easy to do and they can leave questions and comments at any time and you can reply at any time okay thanks hi i remember last sunday uh michael buoy at st luc was preaching and the watching the comments people were you know really enjoying the the message he was preaching basically to an empty sanctuary except for the praise team worship leaders and it is very hard but once you're going and you have your your message then people seem to really you know if they're being engaged because of the comments so um any of you want to speak to that what is that like to preach to an empty sanctuary if you're doing it at the church and you only have those 10 persons that are there what have been some of your experiences and how how do you how do you do that well i guess uh revin masters i chime in um as you said you know it's been a interesting time to preach to an empty sanctuary but i told mind you the team that it's amazing when you realize your intention that that we serve an audience of one and it's jesus it makes it easy and once i get to going you know it's like i feel like i'm preaching to thousands which i am you know hundreds of thousands so i just realized after that getting over the empty pew and i'm an extrovert but i realized not everything that i do is for the glory of god and people just chiming in so i've kind of gotten over it so each week i look forward to it so the energy comes in within and i don't look to get energy from people i guess anymore so it's been a life-changing thing for me yeah thank you thank you for sharing that um any other any other comments on what your experience has been like um preaching to that empty pew i'll just speak to it very quickly i'm not doing it at the sanctuary but at home but it's by myself for me it's really it's really really draining it's uh i feel very tired afterwards and i think it's because i don't i don't have any human connection um i i think i'm doing an okay job not great okay job having my energy level up during the thing that i'm doing but after that i feel it's like i've been beaten with a you know a sock full of batteries i just really feel it and so i i i get the incessant sense that other people are that way too it's been it's been hard it's been hard yeah yeah and i mentioned saint uh luke and um pastor um buoy because in the african-american tradition when you're preaching the more amens you know the more you can go right on to the next point but for me as an african-american pastor when i'm preaching if i don't have that interaction it it is really really hard really hard we have another question that came up a lot in the chat that i want to put out there for you is what about holy communion in holy week what are some of your thoughts on um how do you plan on doing holy communion um nashville the board of discipleship put out a post on last night i read and it was by dr synthia wilson and she talked about the love feast i i hope that you've seen it it's in the north texas conference clergy page but so what what are what are your plans for holy communion um a treach and flower man we're actually asking our congregation from home this sunday to uh if they can to get bread and grape juice um of any kind and we will spend time in the context of worship on the the following sunday the first sunday of the month in april to to bless the elements through the screen or phone or whatever um and for families at home or individuals at home to uh to experience the the sacrament uh in in the best way we can to try and you know uh to try and help them get that same experience or if they're with families for the families to serve each other uh in in that way okay thanks who else is uh part of the 2013 consultation on online communion on with bishops mckay and um the discussion and Nashville regarding this was a very much a negative one uh and the principal concern was there were some theological issues and people not understand this idea of at-distance consecration but uh the the actual practical concern had to do with our ecumenical partners the Lutherans the Episcopalians especially with regards to the idea of at-distance consecration but something that they have that we don't have is reserve sacrament the ability to consecrate elements and then hold them for a rather lengthy period of time and and we don't allow that we do allow extending the table pretty quickly after a service but but not a lengthy reserve sacrament process um and they also allow for veneration of the sacrament and uh our our understanding and interpretation or at least the judicial counsel's interpretation of of our articles of religion say that we're not allowed to do that either um so it's a challenge um the concept is at distance not that the people in their homes are consecrating the elements but that as the congregation gathers virtually all over the place and watches the stream the presiding minister consecrates the elements praise the great thanksgiving praise the epicletical prayer over the elements and not just the elements there are consecrated but the elements everywhere there where you're watching are also included in that consecration that's the idea um it to say that it violates our theology of the Eucharist is questionable i don't think it does a lot of people think it does and so it's a matter of being willing to step out in faith and trust in God's grace more than the rules and regulations of people uh the bishop did uh relinquish or loosen the prohibition that the council of bishops issued a prohibition on the practice in 2013 which was extended in 14 and then re-extended in 16 Bishop McKee and several other bishops have temporarily released to that prohibition so that we may do so if you do so make sure that you give good directions ahead of time that you explain what you're doing and why you're doing it but this is for an extraordinary time in an extraordinary circumstance clear about what you're doing and try to include as many as you can in the process um uh in terms of planning and execution if you're celebrating in a congregate in a church setting and you have multiple people there be very careful about maintaining a separation distance so that if you preside over elements that's fine uh then you leave the the mediacy of the table and then someone else comes up and they receive and commune themselves while you're doing that and encourage the people at home to then receive after the consecration um it's it's keep in mind we're kind of on the cutting edge of theology when we do this if we do this if you're uncomfortable doing this don't do it if you have any questions about it don't do it if you feel like you're comfortable to do it and others have you've already done it and that's wonderful then go ahead and try this because it gives a it gives a point of contact an experiential point of contact with people who are trapped in their homes that's that's all i can say right now and i would encourage all of you to look read that article that's there because they have they have changed so many things and um they're really lenient right now and what what we can do but read the article from Dr Cynthia Wilson Felder uh last night it gave me a lot of hope okay so what who else who else wants to speak to holy community and how do you plan to do it or do you plan to do it one point a question was asked in the chat by Liz with regards to consecrating the to-go communion cups and wafers through a facebook live before April 5th and then offering people to come pick them up um that actually there's actually language in the this holy mystery statement of the church that really would exclude that practice as it states very carefully and very clearly that that that's reserve sacrament and the judicial council has already ruled that is invalid um so if it says it specifically don't do it in that published statement then i would argue against doing that um but the but this holy mystery doesn't speak to the practice of online communion so you know that's that's the gray zone that we live we're really in an unknown area right now okay at uh if i may at sacksie we we celebrate communion every week in in all of our services and now two weeks ago we did that the very first week we were doing this we had a skeleton we had kind of a skeleton crew and we did not do communion and uh but then after bishop mckay had sort of said hey go ahead and go ahead and do it for this season of ministry last week we did uh celebrate communion and i just wanted to share just a little bit of our experience just uh to sit spare anyone uh you know some of the maybe little difficulty that i experienced us having and that was i really wish we had had uh or had thought about sort of andrew's advice from earlier of practicing everything i really wish we had practiced uh and had really discussed in detail everything we were going to do because really ended up sort of having to adapt at the you know we had decided we were going to do it but we had not practiced how to do it and sort of really gone over the specific details of what it would look like and so the result of that was sort of a mad dash at the last minute to figure out how do we do this without uh without getting too close to each other uh and our our little quick quick and dirty solution was we found uh we had some small cups you know like little plastic cups that's on little plates we had some uh some wafers uh that we used that are gluten free and so we kind of set those quickly set those out on the table so we could have individual um you know you know people could come up and then really it was after the the liturgy was done each person kind of came up individually um you know it's not ideal it'd be better to be able to hand it to someone but that was the best thing we could do with this space and so we kind of came up one at a time and picked it up and i really wish we'd discussed you know a way of maybe acknowledging each person with uh you know the body of christ the blood of christ and i don't think we'd like like for us to try that this week that had really uh but so it was it was messy but it worked and i think we all us at home and they're experienced it as the means of grace and so um yeah so i just want to say andrew's advice about practicing everything this goes for holy community so please don't don't don't do what we did please practice it beforehand uh and just kind of talk about every little element before you do it and i think it'll i think we'll all be blessed we'll be blessed by dvw but i think it'll be um we'll have fewer weird feelings about it later if we practice so nick did the persons at home for take using whatever they had at home yeah that basically uh just whatever the closest things you could find uh and so for instance my wife was at home quarantined and we didn't have we didn't have any great juice uh we had some wine but we didn't really think of that uh but uh and i know there's other questions about you know using wine in our tradition anyway that's another thing but so she had we had some different fruit juice we had some cran cherry juice sugar-free cran cherry and some uh some like uh low carb protein bread because we're not eating carbs right now so we had protein bread and cran cherry juice um and uh you know it was a blessing so yeah thanks thanks it's great i i mentioned this in the chat uh we've our plan for this next week is to invite people to um uh to gather what they have at their home it's our pantry communion and and so we're we talked about how to do it safely with our worship team and so we're inviting the worship team to bring things from their pantry up to the service with them um just uh both for safety but also for solidarity with the community i'll still break the bread and and lift the cup but then um our team will be taking the things that they brought with them from home in the same way that people in their living rooms will as well okay thank you anyone else want to share um just yeah i was gonna say jd tell us about your cool idea um well i think that's gonna definitely work in my context and other small churches um i think would take some communication to make sure people are comfortable with it because after i posted on the chat i thought about how uh facebook live and youtube are uh public forums but i had mentioned i was thinking about asking our folks to email or text me if they would like to be named specifically and like kind of go through the motions of placing the bread and juice before them as if they were coming forward to the to the to receive communion um and just to make it more uh give a more communal feel and make it more personal for them as well um so i mean i mean like we would do i mean it'd be like first name only so i'm not broadcasting people's first and last name so they can be tracked down after someone worships us watches the service or anything like that but um so it was just that that's what i gave what i was looking to do okay thanks jd okay any other comments that that you're doing okay let's anyone want to anyone able to speak to um anything creative that you're going to try out just for holy week beyond just sunday morning and how to connect the community during holy week and what your ideas are there on monday thursday i'm going to do a broadcast from my study here with the backdrop being my worship center and i'm i'm going to talk about the lord supper its theology our understanding of it do a little bit of teaching on the subject of it and how uh how christ instituted it and i'm gonna talk about that way i had normally we have a monday thursday service and with the eucharist but i don't think i'm gonna do that from my home by myself i have a problem with that uh and so but that's what i'm going to do so i'm just going to do a teaching session on live stream on facebook and discuss what the what we believe about communion and its practice and why we practice it the way we practice it and and that's what i'm going to do okay others we're going to give a virtual choir a try for uh for a good friday um have our choir do a couple of pieces and record themselves singing their parts and then blend them together oh my gosh that is so cool okay so we're we're gonna play with friday night um in our context of doing a fireside chat so take a couple of us that are on staff and gonna sit around a fire pit and remember about what it was like in that on that good friday when people were standing around kind of in that stunned moment after the crucifixion so it'll be intimate it will do it on facebook live but it'll be with just a few people but around an actual fire pit with some of us having a conversation and thinking about that evening just doing some reflection yeah interesting okay great someone else was coming in at the same time i was just going to say that those of us who are going to record it and then upload it that we can take take advantage of the afford the fortages of this system for example we don't have to be in our sanctuary that is we pastors we mentioned about being in homes but we could be at other places um i liked uh his idea for good friday that's that's fantastic this past sunday i did mine on the front steps of our church but you could go out to the lake you could go uh to various places and and show things that you couldn't usually show on a regular sunday morning so that makes it interesting also too uh if you start there that attracts people's attention and they want to stop and might want to if they're scrolling they want to stop and watch and pay attention to the service okay all right yeah okay so let me ask one last question and then we can open it up for anything else we haven't covered the vision of our center the ccd is to gather new faces and new spaces for christian discipleship can you talk about what that means how you may be doing that beyond the sunday morning worship service and share with us some models that you may be seeing someone else do or that you may be doing yourself how are you making disciples during this time of the virus yes i think i think we've all seen uh people utilizing zoom for bible studies and and things like that my mic is up there i think we've seen people using zoom for um doing bible studies and small gatherings um i'm gonna try that myself this evening um but i've also um made it available but if somebody would like to schedule like a past oral visit that we can also do that one-on-one through zoom um and uh just trying to make ourselves available in whatever way we can uh is kind of important so um that's all i can think of okay someone else would like to share yes i know you you guys are working on making disciples out there in this time of isolation still um so what are some of the things you're you're thinking about doing or that you're doing so i'll try to get relevant pastors um what we've decided to do from a congregational care standpoint um our congregational care pastor she's been sending out uh letters electronic letters to the congregation but also uh she's been sending out um heart we've been sending out letters as well a snail mail but what we decided to do as a pastoral team is divide the names of certain members of each pastor is calling people just letting know we're thinking about you we're caring about you do you need anything also what we've done from our spiritual opportunities we are pushing everything via zoom uh our prayer line which is kind of a conference call line so we have tonight midweek worship uh which which would be through our prayer line and also we have our small groups our steady meeting okay via or through our prayer line so still making um so we left the technology as much as we can good good good great okay anybody else so i'm not sure that this falls under new faces and new spaces because i guess that's a kind of a weird question right now uh but um you know and this will fall more i guess on the evangelism side than the than the sort of the discipleship side but one thing i've i've i've been doing and really it's just you know i've just been i've been sharing a lot of stuff i've been sort of making a few videos like recording myself singing and that kind of stuff and putting it on i just put on my personal facebook profile and what and i didn't really have really planned much other than you know the people at church who are my facebook friends could see that but i've actually been getting a good response of people who were not uh members of my church people who are outside i've even gotten you know heard from someone who said hey you know i've been an atheist for a long time but i'm kind of um i don't know i'm kind of finding myself on this on this you know something's happening and and kind of reaching out in that way and so uh and i don't know well i don't know what it will lead to but i think um yeah just sharing uh because doing things i've never done before on my own profile has you know could potentially reach beyond the members of my congregation and and reach out to people uh for you know to at least help them come into that initial um relationship with with christianity and with christ and so i don't know we'll see what happens but that was just kind of i didn't even realize that that was a possibility that someone might be you know that i wasn't expecting might be uh blessed with that stuff so maybe that's the thought just kind of you know whatever you put out for your congregation i mean maybe what if you put it out more broadly than that however you can do that to because people are stuck at home and they're looking and they're worried and they're yeah they're wondering what it's all about so right right right yeah thanks nick for our congregational calls uh we've got we're inviting congregants to be a part of that too um and so we we have a registration form and then kind of screen a little bit um but we'll pair people up with some of our more i potentially isolated or vulnerable members to maintain a weekly relation phone call relationship with them and that's been really encouraging um for our congregation members too because they're looking for ways to help out and to be a part until connected also yeah yeah thanks you know one thing for sure in this time of isolation we have to find a way to reach out can't touch them necessarily but we must reach out reach out okay on social media enough right now you know yes right one thing that i'm going to do here in just a little bit i'm going to jump off of here early is because like i'm hosting a workout online okay i know in the future i've tried to do this in the past and it didn't really work out but now that we have to use social media i'm going to go ahead and use social media to do like cooking stuff i love to cook so being able to engage with individuals with their um um their hobbies their passions you know those things that they may like to do would draw a different response you know then strictly doing worship services online um i've got friends i've got friends who don't go to church i've got friends who are atheists who may not watch me play acoustic guitar and sing some worship but they will get on social media for a brief devotional and a quick workout and you know it doesn't have to be too long mine's going to be less than 30 minutes okay leave your contact information or your site on the chat box so we can get that and put it on our webpage so that people that's on the call might want to join you okay so i'm going to turn back over to matt so we can talk about see if there's anything we missed or anything else that you guys may want to talk about before we end our call yeah i mean i from what i can tell in our chat we've we've covered most most the questions that have come in um like i said when i started we put out there on our on the clergy facebook and on our individual from the ccd facebook if there's any other conversations like this that you would like to see facilitated in our conference or just opportunities for us to connect as clergy encourage each other get some facetime like we we want to use whatever whatever resources we can to to to support that and and to support you all in the same way that you all are supporting the folks in your church so please don't be strangers reach out you have my phone number you can call me you can text me you can email me and we're we're really wanting to leverage our ability to network in this time in in ways that will be a blessing for you all and help share some resources and some of the just great work that you all are doing um just a special shout out to uh andrew and greg and mania for taking the time to uh just share with us all the the work that you all are doing and just really appreciate that um and our center director just jumped on so i am going to let owin speak uh and close us out owin it's yours well thanks yeah the cabinet's now on a 10 minute break and so i was able to hop on here and i was thrilled at the participation that we've had and again i want to echo what matt said appreciate matt's leadership as thiana and lily on us from our center and putting this together uh appreciate what what greg did what andrew did what mania did and again we're going to be following up on this the cabinet is is planning some gatherings and so there's going to be a gathering with the cabinet and then a gathering with the bishop so be uh looking for that in the near future we had some people that were unable to get on because our subscription is just up to a hundred and so today we're upping that to up to five hundred and so that we can have larger zooms and we're also in the process of exploring other alternatives so that um so that the cabinet can interact with more and so um you know be looking for that and but again we're glad we were able to come together today i know that we are entering into just uncharted waters with lots of pressures that are upon you as pastors to be leading your church uh financial pressures that i know your churches um are bound to be filling as well as the family pressures that many of us are are dealing with when kids are supposed to be in schools but yet they're at home and so i thank y'all for gathering together supporting one other in this season and i'm glad i had this opportunity to be on here and at least get to to pray with you so let us pray merciful lord i do thank you for the the way that your church is responding in this season you have a world that's scared a world that is is being pushed into isolation but you're using your church and using technology to to connect people with one another and and and bring hope in a in a in tough times for our world lord i pray for the the pastors that are on here that are being called to lead their communities in this time and even reach new people who are who are searching for answers searching for hope during this season lord i thank you for the leadership of the ccd of the north texas conference i pray your guidance upon them lord i pray for these pastors i pray for their families lord um you keep them safe keep them healthy lord providing for their their every need that they have what i pray for our churches our parishioners lord may they see that that that you're continuing to connect in new ways and may you may you feed them spiritually through these new means in this time and may they be instruments of of your care your love your mercy your grace in this world lord i ask you to watch and care over all of us and guide us in this season and lord may your may your your light just shine in our world that is full of of dark news lord we pray all this in jesus name amen we got bless y'all amen y'all thanks y'all appreciate you thank you so much thank you guys god bless y'all thank you lighter man y'all thank you very much 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