Saturday 25th. April, 2020

It has been a busy week and a great deal of it has been experimenting with technology (and not getting it right). A big example of that is our service for tomorow morning, I wanted to do my talk outside, but that just didn’t work, in part because the sun was too bright! So I took it inside the summer house and I’m really not happy with the lighting and the finished product. But, as we keep on saying, we are on a learning curve and won’t make the same mistake again. (I’m sure there is a parable about life in there somewhere.)

We were asked last Sunday in our after-church coffee and chat session to think about having worship on Zoom. It might be more homely, I think was the word used. I’m happy to try that but I have a few reservations which have becomne stronger as I have spoken with colleagues over the course of this week. Let me explain.

The value of Zoom is that we are all there together, we can see each other and we can communicate. But the main parts of the service in which we participate are the singing and responsive prayers and, I’m told, that neither of these work very well on Zoom. It’s because everyone’s bandwidths are different and, as a result, singing gets all out of sync, and it’s the same with responsive prayers. One minister told me that he had initially prepared online services (similar, I suppose, to what I am doing) but he gave that up because he discovered that people weren’t watching. So he adopted Zoom and is continuing with that inspite of the difficulties I have outlined above. The solution he has adopted is to keep most of the folk’s microphones muted so that they can’t speak, but that almost seems to defeat the idea of participation.

Many congregations seem to be using Zoom for coffee and chat meetings and for formal business meetings of their congregations. Another minister told me that after church (he has two congregations) he can get twenty or thirty folk joining for the zoom chat and he uses a facility to divide folk into smaller ‘rooms’ so that everyone gets a chance to participate. We’re not at that stage!

Of course, what most congregations appear to be doing is to live stream their service and then, after the service, make it available on their website. I would like to have a conversation with my folk about whether a live stream would be better than a prerecorded service which we all share in at the same time. I’ve had a lot of experience of this as my service in Luss was streamed live for most of the fifteen years I was minister there. If we were all in our church then I would definitely want to stream our worship live but as it is coming from a room in my house, I don’t see the advantage in streaming it live rather than recording it and all sharing in it at the same time. Prerecording it means that most of the technical hitches are avoided because the service is sitting there on line; it means that the service is tighter and more compact because it has been edited — an analogy which keeps coming into my head, but which I’m not sure is totally relevant, is the difference between the minister or elder praying and making up the words as he or she goes along, compared with having prepared everything and written it down before coming to the service. I’m happy to try both ways.

One thing which you will have noticed is that we are having less of our very modern songs in worship. It isn’t that I have reverted to a previous age, rather that I am trying to be careful of copyright issues. We have bought a streaming licence which augments our existing music licence, but the most modern of songs don’t appear to be covered by that licence.

The other thing to be put into the mix is that up until now our service has been a service for us from Fogo. Later this afternoon I shall be writing to everyone in Greenlaw, Gordon, Legerwood and Westruther, offering to make our service a service for all of our congregations as they will be without their minister. I’m not sure quite what difference this makes — and I’d value advice. Should I just re-label what we do at present and make our service one which is for all of our congregations? Should I prepare a special short introduction for each congregation and make five different versions of our services? (Or one Fogo version and one for the four linked congregations?) I haven’t a clue!

One suggestion made to me is that we shouldn’t try to move our service to Zoom but that we consider an evening prayer (a reading and prayer, no longer than ten minutes ) on say, a Wednesday, at 7 or 7.30 pm. Would this be a good thing? And what time, or even day, would be best? I would conduct this myself but would invite different folk to read the Bible passage. This might enable us to work out just how much Zoom can do for us.

So I’m needing feedback. I look forward to not blogging anymore about technology, but I think we are going to discover that technology becomes increasingly important in church life. But it is strange. It’s strange not to see friends. I miss the hugs and the smiles, and the chat and just being with people who are important to me. I hope those days will return soon.

Saturday 18th. April, 2020

I hope that this last week has been a good one for everyone who is reading this blog. It is certainly beginning to dawn on me that it is quite some time since I have seen any of my friends face to face. Thank goodness for technology — well, almost ‘thank goodness’. My reservation is only that I am not so adept at using it as younger folk and most of my week has been spent trying to find ways of making things work.

I am so grateful to those who have agreed to prepare thoughts and prayers for our web-site. It keeps us in touch and it is better, even although we are only learning the technology, to hear someone speaking and to see their faces rather than be presented with the written word alone.

Everyone who is contributing sends me their contributions in different ways — some come as zoom messages through Drop Box; others come as messages attached to emails; still more are generated by autocue programmes for ipads, and still others are recorded by me as the speaker reads his words into a zoom conference. Actually, all of these work quite well and we shall get better as we go on. Better, I’m sure, in every way; so please do stick with us.

My problems start when the file arrives and I prepare it to put on our web-site, Much of my problem is caused by the fct that the technology I am using is older than the technology that everyone else is using. Modern ‘phones and ipads and computers send me the material in High Definition Video but I have been making my programmes using an old video camera which I bought way back when I was a minister in Glasgow and I left there in 1998! I also have an editing programme which dates from around the same time. So I have been using what is called Digital Video which is a precursor to HDV. The difference is that my pictures are in the ratio of four by three (as television used to be) and everyone elses’ pictures are sixteen by nine (as television is now). Naturally my software won’t cope with modrn pictures as their format hadn’t been invented when it was written.

None of this matters — at least that’s what I thought until John and Kirsten very kindly volunteered to conduct our service for tomorrow. I would do the music and the topping and tailing and they would provide the meat. Of course that meant I had to try to put two different technologies together and mix long pictures with almost square pictures. The result is not as bad as I had feared — and it is saved certainly by the quality of the content of the service. But my big exercise now is trying to move into the 2020s. Just before this moment I have finally managed to complete a programme in sixteen by nine ratio. It’s the song for our children’s worship tomorrow and I am rather pleased with it because the pictures (of our Holy Land pilgrims and folk at Fogo Church) match the words beautifully and speak of our mission priorities. I’m not going to say more than that so that you will have to visit our children’s page! But perhaps after the children have seen it tomorrow I may add the song to the front page for everyone to see when they join our web-site.

Our service last Sunday, Easter, was conducted entirely on old technology. I am so grateful for all of the messages which we have received about how much the service was appreciated. We have deliberately restricted access to our services to those who access them through the church web-site so that we can know how many people visit who already have some connection with us, rather than those who browse the web and constantly explore youtube (on which the servcie is not available). Many more people than attend our services week by week are joining our Sunday services on line and that will inevitably raise questions for us in the future.

I was very grateful also for the comments which I have received about our Easter Communion. There is a debate going on within the Church about whether it is appropriate to provide communion on-line. I understand the worries that some people have: communion is something we do together with our Lord among us. In the normal course of events I would probably not have been so keen to provide commuion in this way. But these are exceptional circumstances and the difference is, it seems to me, that people cannot be together in one place, so we have to be together at the same time each in our own place. So it seemed to me to be the most natural thing to do, although I hoped that most of us would actually be sharing in the service at the same time on Sunday morning.

In the event, I got lots of messages from folk who had really enjoyed the experience and one message from someone (a friend) who didn’t think that it was appropriate. I’d love to hear other peoples’ views.

During the week Tom T, John B, Tom S and Dorothy, Chris, and Kirsten and John A all signed up, volunteered, were press-ganged into agreeing to provide a short worship slot each once a week for the immediate future. I’d love to have other volunteers as we have such a breadth of worship traditions and a great pool of talent and experience within our church family. Do let me know if you can join our team!

Also during this week, John B has agreed to have a serious look at our web-site. He really is a volunteer. He tells me that it’s not just my video technology which is outdated but also my web-site theory! Folk nowadays don’t want to scroll down endless pages. I am absolutely sure that he is correct and I’m grateful that he is loooking into things for us. I would love it if we could have smaller thumbnails of our videos rather than full size pictures (the best that I can do) and if instead of having complete texts below each one, we could have a sentence or two and the a ‘read more’ to click on to get the full story. This is all quite important as more and more folk are now keeping in touch through web-sites and FaceBook. If you have any views and any expertise, John and I would love to hear from you. (We’ve bought a new web-domain which John will be experimenting with over coming weeks.)

So there we are, the sun is shining and, thanks to Kirsten and John, the service for tomorrow is already prepared. I am going to have lunch in the garden. Stay safe and keep well.