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.