Regarding connecting with kids and families via recorded video, live video, and live-streaming Sunday School and worship...

 Totally easy and free and you have several options.

Facebook Live lets you broadcast on your Facebook page using your cellphone or tablet. FB Live also saves your broadcast so people can view it after the fact.  Just open your Facebook app and click the "LIVE" link prominently featured on your newsfeed to activate your cellphone or computer's camera and microphone. Save it for future viewing by others.

Most Americans of a younger persuasion are already on Facebook. You have to have a Facebook account to view Facebook video live or recorded. 

YouTube also lets you broadcast live over your cellphone or tablet and saves your broadcast so people can view it later. One advantage of YouTube is that it doesn't require an account to view their videos like Facebook does. You just go to their site on your phone or computer and watch the video (live or saved), The broadcaster does have to have an account (which are free). 

YouTube is my choice for sharing video (live and recorded) with general audiences because you don't need an account to watch live videos on it, and you can "embed" YouTube videos directly into your church website.** People just need the URL of the video and a cellphone or computer or smart TV to watch it on.

**YouTube's video can run right on your website. Most website services, like Wordpress, have special code to allow YouTube to run without issue. You cannot embed (show) Facebook Live recorded videos on your website, people would have to come to your FB page.

Zoom, Microsoft "Team" -- and other "live streaming video conferencing services.  Most offer free versions. Not all of these allow for recording and later viewing  -- which seems to me to be an essential requirement for churches. However, they are good for meetings, and for bringing kids and families in virtual contact with each other! 

Facebook Messenger is the best cross-platform Group Video Chat app available. Mac and iPhone users are familiar with Facetime, and Facebook Messenger is basically the same thing. The reason I recommend using Facebook Messenger for group video chats is that it doesn't matter what kind of smartphone or tablet brand you have, Facebook Messenger will run on all them. Facetime is Apple only. 

 See my suggestions for what you can DO with Group Video Chat and your kids & families in my article about Social Connecting During Social Distancing.

As with all cellphone and internet usage involving children and youth, adult supervision should be required.

UPDATE:

During the Coronavirus outbreak, many denominations are publishing links to online video and streaming services as well as highlighting real church experience/response to streaming services, meetings, and classes. Go to your denomination's website, or search the Methodist, Lutheran, and Presbyterian denomination sites. 

Tom's Guide to Live Streaming Worship also has a number of good suggestions, including tips on equipment. Just keep in mind that a cellphone or tablet computer that can shoot video is all you need for small groups. 

See member Beth Tobin's reply in the Coronavirus topic about how her church is using ZOOM to connect to kids and families at home.

 https://www.rotation.org/topic...5#620708138035550565

A weekly gathering of Church Worship Leaders talking in a Zoom meeting talking about their experiments with Online Worship Using Zoom.

Led by Bruce Reyes-Chow, a Presbyterian minister. He is currently the Pastor and Head of Staff at First Presbyterian Church of Palo Alto (CA). They do communion every week, including ONLINE. Here's his 2 minute opening message about that. https://youtu.be/yMW1D09QotY

It's an hour long, but has lots of great insights and advice... What works, what didn't.

Here's their Week I zoom meeting. It's more about "how to" for newbies. https://youtu.be/XHE9_MJljxE

Terrific and easy-to-understand "how to get started with Zoom" video tutorial on YouTube by Ben Balden. Describes how to sign up and get other people to do the same and join you.

A Review of My Online Worship Surfing Experiences
Sunday morning, 3/22/20

See my follow-up article about my second-week experiences below with more advice.

Much of what I experienced trying to "worship online" also applies to trying to learn online.

In short: Oh boy, have we got a long way to go. Sincerity is no excuse for lack of quality control and attention to details.

My Sunday worship surfing began by trying to log-on to two friends' churches doing online worship on 3/22. Unfortunately, I was immediately met with a number of technical problems on their end trying to find links and connect to their live video. Here are two actual screenshots from my attempts to log-in to two of my friends’ worship services. I was eventually able to solve one problem on my own by digging around but wasn't able to get in to view the second. Pity their poor members.

So I started visiting other online worship services across my denom and others, including some churches I had previously served in. Here are some of the things I encountered under the heading of DON'T LET THIS HAPPEN TO YOU:

• Several church services only available at the appointed time. If you were an hour late, too bad.
• I found one pastor repeatedly staring into a LIVE camera to adjust it.
• Bad sound (almost a universal problem which means they didn't properly equip or care about their quality).
• Another whose microphone wasn't working (needed batteries).
• Several who just sat there and moved their mouths.
• One where the preacher never looked at the camera, even though the pews were empty.
• An organ that was too loud for the microphone and caused buzzing.
• Lighting that was bad or non-existent. (Test, people, test)
• Many speakers who droned on too long -- forgetting I could click away. (Online is not a captive audience. You need to design and sharpen your content for a screen.)
• Videos that included lyrics on the screen which were totally unreadable.
• But the biggest problem I saw was that apparently the Coronavirus has rendered everybody's video camera's immovable and unzoomable, as well as paralyzed most onscreen participants with stiffness.

Is it on? Why am I sideways on the screen? O hello everybody.

Hello down there.... there.... there...
robed in black.... blac....bla...

There's nobody in the pews, so why didn't you look in the camera when preaching? It was odd, and the audio was so bad I sometimes strained to figure out what you were saying. This camera angle made me feel like I was on the outside looking in.

It was a dark and stormy night and the piano was played a floating head.

Oh how we love our church furniture (with organ prelude).
Pointing a camera at the front of the sanctuary
is not where online worship should go in the future.

Best online I saw were:

• Services I could easily find the link to and click once to view.
• Short. Not an hour.
• Not trying to replicate the traditional in-person service.  The better online services seemed to understand that this was a different way of worshipping, not just a "video of the traditional service."
• Understood the importance of lighting and visually interesting scenes.
• Featured guitar music and nice voices (easier to listen to on tiny speakers).
• Closeup shots of the leaders/speakers when they spoke. 
• Visually interesting (animated) speakers.
• Edited with titles and hymn text which you could read.
• Understood I may be on my phone and not viewing on a laptop or big monitor.
• Understood that I wasn't signing on at the stroke of 11, but still wanted to see the whole thing.

I was also  astounded by how many church website homepages completely LACKED or had obscure links to their online services. Really surprised by that. This info should be featured prominently on the church homepage and be available with ONE CLICK.

I know I am being critical, but quality control shouldn't be that hard. Church professionals making professional salaries should be held to a professional standard. 

• It’s not hard to connect online these days.
• It’s not hard to test your output.
• It's not hard to know what looks engaging and what looks boring or amateurish.
• People don’t need another reason to think church is irrelevant and worship is lame. 

Worship deserves our best. I hope and pray that this “great experiment” in online worship will bear fruit long after the current crisis is over. But it will only happen in those churches who take it seriously and take honest feedback (which many worship leaders are unwilling to do).

I also hope TEACHERS will learn from these problems too.

Want to see what other churches are doing online for worship?

(or just want to worship online?)

Go to YouTube and type "Online Worship + YOUR DENOMINATION" in the YouTube search field.

Then click FILTER and "this week" to see what's recently been uploaded.  This is a great way to discover "what's good" and "what's not working."

This helpful information about ZOOM SECURITY was shared with us by our synod office. It could apply to other video conferencing applications as well.

Beth

Update: Zoom has since improved its security. The following post has been edited.

If you or your congregations are hosting Zoom events, some suggestions:

• any open Zoom event is truly open (and listed on your open social media accounts), they can be found and entered with no authentication
• the host needs to be sure that taking over presentation mode by any participant is turned off
• if others are to be able to present, make them specifically co-presenters and be sure they are invited and authenticated
• best to present with all remote mics muted, and perhaps even remote cameras
• especially if the host is presenting during the broadcast, it’s good practice to have someone watching for unacceptable activity, including on camera and in chat
• Only allowing folks to participate by registration lessens the dangers, but is also not as welcoming as we would prefer. Help people register AHEAD of time.

An article on this from TechCrunch provides helpful information regarding some Zoom security settings.

1. Log into your Zoom account.
2. From the "profile" screen, under "Personal", click "Settings" on the left hand menu bar.
3. Under where it says "Meeting" in the main portion of the screen or left of screen, click "In Meeting (Basic)"
4. Turn off "File Transfer" and "Screen Sharing." (toggle switch will be dark)
5. If you think the host may need to share their screen for some reason during meetings especially, you can leave "Screen Sharing" on and under "Who Can Share", click on "Host only".

Note: This advice was current as of 5/2020. These platforms are evolving and improving. 

Online is Not In-Person

That should be a big "duh" but the lesson seems lost on most of the dozens and dozens of online services and lessons I've been surveying during the Coronavirus crisis (see my experiences above about that). 

Fortunately, there's a lot of real and longstanding experience out there, particularly in the area of online worship, and their advice applies to online classes as well.  Here's a great quote from an article in Christianity Today online about online teaching and worship: 

As I've learned from the experts in the field of online education, teaching online isn’t about a direct transference of material from one medium, or modality, to another. It's about a transposition of (adapting) the material to the medium.

If I typically lecture for 40 minutes straight in the classroom, for example, I shouldn’t record a 40-minute video lecture and expect my students to experience the content in the same way.

Christianity Today online

There seem to be two approaches to online teaching and worship:

One looks like this:

The other looks like this:

Which one would you want to be part of?

Thoughts on my Online Worship Experiences, March 29, 2020

3/29/20 was my second Sunday of attending online worship services during the Coronavirus crisis. You can read about my first week observations up above in this thread.

A number of my experiences and suggestions apply to online teaching too.

I began by "attending" a "live" online worship service being held via ZOOM -- the free video-conferencing service. After that, I looked in on several other services that had been recorded live but I was able to watch afterward either on the church's website or FB page. Several of the online worship services I attended this week and last week were led by friends or acquaintances of mine, ...but I'm not identifying any of them 

I apologize if any of you are offended by my criticism of these well-meaning churches trying to engage in worship online in this season of social-distancing. As a former parish pastor, long-time church techie and media provider, I understand the challenges. My intention is to learn something about what it takes to make online worship a good experience and help churches AVOID  easily and inexpensively correctable mistakes.  While content and style of worship is subjective, I think there are many things which should be universal qualities, such as good audio. See my summary advice at the end of this post and in the previous posts in this topic.

BY FAR, the most intriguing service I attended on Sunday was the Zoom-enabled worship service of a Presbyterian Church in Palo Alto CA. It wasn't because they were flashy or hip. 

• I liked it because I could see the other worshippers, and sometimes hear them.
• Because the pastor also appeared with us on the screen -- up close and personal.
• Because it felt like we were something like a community rather than an audience. 
• Because it felt like we were being led, not talked to.

The pastor was relaxed and sitting in front of the camera with an outdoor scene behind him. He walked all of us through the service showing the occasional slide of information, such as the scripture. They even had a passing of the peace moment!  Could it have been better? Yes, but as I reflect on all the other online services I've been part of, what set the Zoom worship apart was that it WASN'T just focused on the pastor and church's furniture.

I left the live Zoom worship toward the end to join an old seminary buddy's first "live" online worship via Facebook Live. As the screenshot shows, the camera was positioned down below and zoomed wide. It stayed like this for the entire service which made it all look like an old photograph on the wall, --over there. The cavernous sound of the nearly empty room didn't help. He's such a great pastor so it really bothered me to see such a lifeless online presentation. 

My next visit was to another Facebook Live worship, this one at a church I used to serve in! Love those people. Getting there about an hour after they had started, I watched their recording after it had been live. Like my seminary friend's service above, this online worship service suffered from a locked-down camera that the operator never zoomed, even when singers could be heard off to the side.  Their audio was not great, but at least the pastor acknowledged it and promised some equipment was coming. The service suffered from being presented like we were in person instead of online.  It was fun to see people's "loves" & "likes" popping onto the Facebook screen during several of these Facebook Live services. However, as you can see below, people's comments can also interrupt a sermon. The service pictured on the left is of another church in my local area that locked their camera on the preacher from a distance. 

Moving on... I returned to a friend's church that I had visited last week, and sadly they had not fixed their annoying lighting and audio problems from the first week. Why didn't they critique their own video and clamp a few lights in the pews? (Faces blurred to protect identity.)

As you can see below, they celebrated Communion with the camera pulled back to show a big and rather dim empty space. It made me feel sad, not connected.

The Struggle to Find Clickable Links Continues

Once again this week, I struggled to quickly find the LINKS to many churches' Live Worship Services. I looked on their homepages and Facebook pages and found bad links, missing links, and hard to find links. Your link to live worship or worship recordings should be prominently displayed and kept UP TO DATE on both your FB page and church website's homepage. This should be true for online lessons as well!  

In summary:

• MOVE THAT CAMERA AROUND.  ZOOM-IN on people when they are speaking (and people, move a little bit).
• ADD LIGHTING !  Grab a couple of clamp lamps please.
• CONNECT the pastor's audio directly to the camera. A simple Bluetooth headset would be a start. Only recording "the audio in the room" makes you sound bad.
• GET SHORTER, pastors. 50 to 70 minutes online watching the same scenery and same person talking/leading is simply too much for a non-captive online audience. And yes, "audience" is pretty much how most of these online worship services feel.  That has to be figured out, and it could start with what you show us and how you talk to us.
• Make your LINKS easy to find in multiple places, starting with the TOP of your Homepage.

Pastor to Pastor Advice:

• This is your chance to only have to write a ten-minute sermon. Take it.
• Make sure you sound good by making sure your microphone is connected directly to your video camera by wire, wifi, or Bluetooth. 
• Move, walk around, walk up to the camera. We are stuck with wherever your camera is pointing us. 
• The organ and warbling choirs don't sound good online. Use the piano or a guitar and fewer but pleasant voices.
• Lose the robes and loosen up your language, and show us more than just you. We need a sense of personal connection right now.
• If possible, make sure what's behind you is visually interesting. You don't want to bore our eyes and ears because our fingers are near buttons and we have choices.

(Rev) Neil 

Unreadable text on the screen is surprisingly
more common than you'd think in online worship services. 
Why aren't they seeing what I see?

The United Methodists have some good resources for online worship, meetings, how-to. Be careful of some of it, as my second example below will demonstrate.

View their archive of videos at https://www.resourceumc.org/en...ll-groups-and-giving

This one about using Zoom for worship is good when you view it full screen. Just wish UMComm had better audio for this tutorial. It's scratchy and a bit muddled. Still, it has "worship specific" info about setting up Zoom, which is REALLY helpful

Oddly enough, they got their "Using Facebook Live" presentation all wrong.  

Play the video and you'll see and hear what I mean. The camera is too far back, never moves, and the audio is poor. See my tips in previous posts about not making these same mistakes!  (In short: zoom the camera to the speakers and make sure the speaker is using a wireless mike, like a Bluetooth headset connected to the camera/phone, so you can clearly hear them. Clear is especially important for people with hearing loss and those listening on devices with poor audio.)    What the guy has to say about how people can interact, however, is worth listening to. 

My friend Bob Kilgore, a retired pastor, recently asked, “What if the pandemic had hit us in the 80’s before cellphones and the internet? What would we in the church have done?”

It was a great question and created some interesting discussion.

Here are our “80’s Tech” answers. What are yours?

(1) We’d call and arrange a masked-up-social-distance-stop-in at your front door or yard Need anything? I’ll bring it. And after our parting prayer — wash your hands.

(2) Organize several families to decorate some pots, plant them and leave them at certain members’ doorsteps (starting with older singles) and a note offering to drop off groceries. Rev Bob added “ring the doorbell and step back.”

(3) Phonecalls and notecards.

(4) Send our Bible Quiz questions and Bible story charades or Pictionary with game instructions. (This one was mine, we have lots of Bible Q’s and charade/pictionary clues on rotation.org.)

We'd be mailing cassette tapes of sermons.

Carol!

We were thinking of  no-tech things we could do now

re: What I learned about Sermon Cassettes (which may apply to online lessons and worship viewing)

As a new minister back in the 80's, I was given the responsibility of bringing Communion to our shut-ins. At the same time, I was asked to pick up the sermon cassettes so our recording Deacons could reuse them. Sadly, we found almost all of them unused. (Yet the Deacons voted to continue taping and delivering them "to have a reason to visit." )

In 2009 at another (small) church, the Elders asked we preachers to record and post our sermons online. To see if anyone was really listening we put a message in the middle of each online sermon audio inviting the Elders to respond that they had heard the sermons. None did.  🤨 Then we offered a free book in the middle of the next two sermon audios to see if anyone who got that far. Nobody ever asked for the book.  (These days: maybe we should offer free toilet paper )  

One very good reason to post all your church videos to YouTube is the analytics. The person posting to their YT "channel" can see how many people viewed each video, how long they viewed, demographics/location, and other stats (cannot see names of viewers). Learn more at https://www.lifewire.com/find-...utube-videos-1616423.  

Here's what YouTube's analytics can show you about a video (one that you uploaded). In this example, a 3:06 minute video averaged just 2:06 minutes of viewing and saw a steady drop from 100% at the beginning to only 40% finishing the video.

Based on the poor quality and stiff worship videos that I’ve seen these past few weeks, I’m guessing a lot of those who do tune-in and get counted as “# of views” probably don’t finish viewing. I hope people want to disagree with that observation!  But the point is that YT analytics will tell the full story — to those who really want to learn and improve. 

There's a difference between "what works"
and "what's just work."

Neil MacQueen posted:

.....

 

One very good reason to post all your church videos to YouTube is the analytics. The person posting to their YT "channel" can see how many people viewed each video, how long they viewed, demographics/location, and other stats (cannot see names of viewers). Learn more at https://www.lifewire.com/find-...utube-videos-1616423.  

Based on the poor quality and stiff worship videos that I’ve seen these past few weeks, I’m guessing a lot of those who do tune-in and get counted as “# of views” probably don’t finish viewing. I hope people want to disagree with that observation!  But the point is that YT analytics will tell the full story — to those who really want to learn and improve.  

There's a difference between "what works" and "what's just work." 

That is really funny about the hidden messages in the recorded sermons!   It is like a newsletter with a hidden note instructing people who read and respond and they will get a gift certificate or something.  

I wonder how the YouTube analytics reflect the fact that I went back and rewatched (quite a few times) the early part of our worship service with video of our children waving palm branches strung together?  I love our pastor and worship leader, but it was SO uplifting to see some of my favorite little people.  It made me realize how very much I miss them. 

I think some people (maybe especially at really large churches?) may be enjoying the convenience of worshiping at home when they feel like it wearing what they feel like, and when things are back to "normal" some of these people may not return to "traditional" in-person worship? But I also know that many more people are learning the importance of the community part of corporate worship, and are hungry to gather again.

Teaching Tips for Using Zoom Video Conferencing with Your Kids

Slate posted tips from school teachers about using Zoom and most apply to us in the church!
https://slate.com/human-intere...m-teaching-tips.html

Excerpts:

This is why the most effective forms of instruction in this era of distance learning are largely self-guided, with frequent contact from the teacher to assist, motivate, and reduce anxiety. 

The meetings I have with my class throughout the week focus much less on instruction and instead on using that time to help my students collaborate with peers, continue to socialize, and find ways to connect while remaining socially distant.

Strategies found effective include:

1. All students should mute microphones during instruction. When a question is asked, the teacher chooses which student should answer, at which point that student’s microphone is unmuted. Teachers can’t teach effectively with multiple microphones on at once.

2. Combine visual elements with the presentation. If students only have a teacher’s face to watch, their attention will quickly waver. When text, images, and the like are made a part of the presentation, attention and engagement will increase.

3. Rather than one 45-minute class, consider doing three 15-minutes classes with a third of the class each time. When instruction is delivered this way, the rate of student participation greatly increases. Plus, groups can be designed to keep certain personalities apart. While there is considerably less time to cover content, the content that is covered is at least taught with a greater degree of efficacy.

4. Invite parents to join the class when possible. The presence of an authoritative adult is sometimes enough to keep students engaged and attentive. This might be exceptionally difficult for many parents given the present circumstances of our country, but sometimes teachers only need to extinguish the behaviors of one or two students in order to regain control.

Related: See Amy's post about using Zoom.

This verse from my Bible study this week in 1 Thessalonians seems so appropriate for this time and pairs well with this picture of my church's sanctuary set up for recording the sermon, so I did a thing.  

Hope you are as encouraged by Paul's sentiment as I am!

Photo credit, Henry Beck, Faith Presbyterian Church

My church is currently closed. I set up a Zoom Sunday school where I plan and lead the lesson.

I send out an email a few days in advance i case they need to have some materials with them for the lesson.

A free Zoom account entitles you to a 40 minute session each time.

Online Viewing Fatigue

and declining numbers for worship (and probably Sunday School)

Thom Rainer the respected church researcher and consultant has posted a must-read article on the subject and reasons for declining online attendance at https://churchanswers.com/blog...ndance-is-declining/

Many of his observations undoubtedly apply to online and at-home Sunday School.

I wonder if usage and viewership will get EVEN LOWER as more people get vaccinated and our families “pause” rather than continue to make an effort as they see the end of their physical “exile” from church getting closer.