Online Church Is Here to Stay

 

By Robin G. Jordan

The good old days are gone forever. They are not coming back. From the moment one of our distant ancestors chipped a sharp edge on a stone and turned it into a hand ax, life on earth for human beings has changed and keeps changing.

We can try to escape change. We can retreat into our own fantasy world and pretend that we are living in a bygone era, but we cannot prevent the world from changing around us.

In my lifetime I have seen a lot of change. As a youngster I listened to church services broadcast on the radio. Now I watch church services livestreamed on the internet. As a youngster I talked to my friends on a party line. You picked up the handset, listened to make sure no one was on the line, and then dialed your friend’s phone number. If you heard breathing while you were talking to your friend or a click after your friend hung up, you knew that the nosy lady who shared your party line had been listening to your phone conversations again. Now I can carry a phone in my pocket and see my friends when I talk to them on the phone.

Calamitous events can slow down change or they can speed it up. The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated declining church attendance. It also forced some churches that were dragging their feet about livestreaming their services on the internet to change their minds.

A livestreamed service in which the church’s sanctuary is sparsely filled, the congregation scattered around the sanctuary, the choir stalls empty, the music group reduced to one or two instrumentalists and a vocalist, and only the pastor and may be one assistant minister on the chancel platform, has a different visual impact upon the viewer from a livestreamed service in which the church’s sanctuary is “full,” the choir or music group is in its usual place, and the pastor and several other liturgical ministers are on the chancel platform. Its visual impact is not the only difference that the online viewer is likely to note.

While the same order of service may be followed in the two services, some elements that serve a function when a service is well attended, are superfluous when a service has few or no people in the congregation. For example, before the COVID-19 pandemic a lengthy instrumental prelude or two shorter instrumental preludes might have been played before the service while the congregation was getting settled in their seats. But with the smaller congregation due to the pandemic, the lengthy prelude or the two shorter preludes are no longer necessary. Online viewers visiting the church’s livestream of the service for the first time will not have the same reaction to this introductory music as longtime attendees of the church’s services. They may quickly become bored with it and move on to the livestream of the service of some other church. They may visit several livestreams before settling on one.

Don’t tell your organist but that beautiful organ prelude that she is playing and into which she put so much practice, most attendees are not listening to it. They are greeting each other and catching up on what happened since they last saw each other. They are looking for friends that they expect to see at church. The socializing that goes on in the sanctuary before a church service is a part of the gathering rite of a congregation. They are coming together as worshiping assembly.  They are making the transition from being a loose aggregate of people to being the Body of Christ. 

There is no point in posting signs on the sanctuary doors, “Please be quiet entering the sanctuary. People are praying.” If you want a time of silence before the service, then the pastor or some other worship leader needs to step up to the mike and say something like this, “Let us observe a moment of silence and focus our hearts and minds on God.” It will be a noisy silence at first, lots of rustling and other people noises and may be a cough or two, but the congregation will eventually grow quiet. Those on the chancel platform should bow their heads in silent prayer to set an example for the congregation.

One of things that COVID-19 has eliminated from our in-person services is the socializing part of the congregation’s gathering rite. We might want to take advantage of the restrictions on socializing before the service to introduce the practice of silent prayer

The different reactions that online viewers will have to what we do in our services raises an important question. For whom are we livestreaming our services? Are we live streaming them for our regular attendees? Or are we endeavoring to reach and engage a larger segment of the population? Ideally our livestreamed services should be targeted at both groups of viewers. On one hand, we want to keep regular attendees. On the other, we want to attract new attendees. We not only want them to view our livestreamed services on a regular basis, but we also want them to join one of our online small groups. We want to involve them in our online discipleship process. If our church does not have an online discipleship process, then we need to put one in place.

Even regular attendees may have a similar reaction as first-time visitors to our livestreamed services when the congregation is a small one and we conduct the service as if we had a much larger congregation. They may become quickly bored too and move on to the livestream of some other church’s service. This may account in part for why we may be losing regular attendees of our in-person services when they become online viewers.

The online viewer’s initial experience is a critical one. It will determine if they are going to hang around to watch the entire service.

Here we might learn a thing or two from the days of religious broadcasts on radio. The broadcast began with the playing of its signature theme music. For example, the Lutheran Hour began with Martin Luther’s hymn, “A Mighty Fortress in Our God.” After a word from the announcer the program would continue with a hymn or sacred song. The signature theme music grabbed the listener’s attention. The services that we stream online need to grab viewers at the very outset or with a click of their mouse they will be gone. 

It is the same thing with our church websites. The experience of a visitor during the first few seconds after they visit the site will determine whether they are going to take a longer look at the site. Their reaction to the site will also determine whether they visit our church either in person or online.

If our aim is for people viewing a live stream of our services to have similar experience to those attending the service in person, then we may have to change how we conduct our services. One of the things that churches learned when they first moved their services online due to the pandemic was that both the service and the sermon needed to be shorter. When these churches regathered, they applied what they had learned to their in-person services. They shortened the service and the sermon.

From watching videos of online services for the last 12 months, I have concluded that we need to do more than shorten the service and the sermon. We need to change our patterns of worship. The patterns of worship that we use for our in-person services do not transfer well online. We need to use different patterns of worship.

When a service is moved online, it should be pared down to its most essential components. This may require doing away with some rituals and ceremonies that have been a part of our worship for a long time and to which some church members may be attached. These rituals and ceremonies are superfluous when there is a small or no congregation, the choir is not present, and only two or three people may be on the chancel platform, such as the pastor, an assistant minister, and a cantor or other vocalist.

For example, if we are no longer taking a collection during the service, we no longer need special music during the collection, a procession with the collection to the chancel step accompanied by the singing of a doxology, or an offertory prayer. Our aim should be a shorter, simpler, and tighter service, which holds the attention of the online viewer. They will not reach for their mouse but keep their eyes glued to the screen.

Online services, livestreamed or recorded on video and then streamed, offer a real challenge for churches that use The Book of Common Prayer or some other service book. The patterns of worship in these liturgical books were not designed with online services in mind. 

The patterns of worship in the 1662 Prayer Book, the 1928 Prayer Book, and the 1962 Canadian Prayer Book lack the requisite flexibility for online use. The services of these Prayer Books are long, wordy, and in an archaic and unfamiliar language. Online viewers who have no sentimental attachment to their services are not going to stick around for the sermon, which is often in the service of Morning or Evening Prayer tacked on to the end of what many people of my generation and the younger generations experience as a tedious service. 

The 1979 Book of Common Prayer with An Order for Celebrating the Holy Eucharist, the 1985 Book of Alternative Services with The Divine Service, and Common Worship (2000) with New Patterns of Worship fare better than the 2019 Proposed Book of Common Prayer. They have patterns of worship that are adaptable enough for online use.

As I have written elsewhere the rites and services of 2019 Proposed Book of Common Prayer were not designed for the North American mission field, which includes the internet. Yes, we have a cyberspace mission field. 

A longstanding practice in Prayer Book revision has been to reduce the clutter of superfluous components from the places in rites and services in which they tend to build up and to make rites and services leaner and nimbler, usually by eliminating these elements or giving the minister the discretion to omit them. The Anglican Church in North America took the opposite tack. It not only added to the clutter of superfluous elements in a rite or service but made them fixed elements of the rite or service. Consequently, the rites and services of the 2019 Proposed Book of Common Prayer are not easily modified in response to altered circumstances or conditions. 

The rites and services also assume that a congregation will have more than one member of the clergy, meet in a conventional setting such as cathedral, parish church, or college chapel, and have ample musical resources.

The COVID-19 pandemic has not only forced previously hesitant churches to go online but has also revealed that churches using The Book of Common Prayer or some other service book need more flexible and nimbler rites and services. It has pointed to the crying need for rites and services which have built in them “a ready capability to adapt to new, different, or changing requirements,” rites and services which are highly tailorable to wide variety of situations.

Visuals are extremely important online. They can make or break an online service. Churches need to fire the video camera operator who takes panorama shots of the sanctuary and chancel platform and lingers the video camera on empty or sparsely filled pews. A bird’s eye view of the sanctuary and the chancel platform are not a typical attendee’s view of a service. 

While a typical attendee may occasionally look around them  before the service, their attention is focused on what they are hearing and seeing in front of them during the service. When the choir, small ensemble, or soloist sings their attention is focused on the singer or singers. When an instrumentalist plays an instrument, their attention is focused on the instrumentalist. When someone reads Scripture, their attention is focused upon the reader. When someone says a prayer, their attention is focused upon the prayer. When the pastor or a guess preacher preaches the sermon, their attention is focused on the preacher. And so on. 

If the aim is to replicate for the online viewer the experience of the in-person attendee, then the video camera operator needs to take a series of tight, close-up shots of these individuals, and in the case of the choir, music group, or small ensemble, parts of the choir, music group, or small ensemble. This type of shot draws in online viewers sitting on their couches at home and helps them feel like they are there in the room with the in-person attendees.

During a hymn, sacred song, or service music the attention of the in-person attendee will not be on the choir, music group, small ensemble, or cantor or other vocalist. It will be on the hymnal in their hands or the words on the screen. They may occasionally glance at the choir, music group, small ensemble, or cantor or other vocalist. 

Rather than the lyrics being shown in a small box at the bottom of the screen, they should fill the entire screen. The video camera operator may briefly cut away to a close up of a part of the choir, music group, or small ensemble, or the cantor or other vocalist, but this should not take any longer than a quick glance. 

The font, size, color, and background of the print of the lyrics should be chosen for maximum readability. We are apt to forget that our online viewers may have vision problems and may not be able to read the lyrics in a small box at the bottom of the screen. Visual accessibility should be one of our priorities. If it is not, we should not be surprised if we lose people to churches with more visually accessible services.

Before each service, the video camera operator or operators need to be given specific directions and provided with a script to follow. Nothing should be left to chance. A video of the entire service needs to be taken during the livestream and this video subsequently reviewed with the video team, problem areas identified, and corrective actions agreed upon and followed up. 

Video camera operators with a penchant for lingering the camera on a significant other, members of their household, and other people of interest to them should be advised this practice is not an appropriate one. Their role is to create a gratifying worship experience for all viewers and not just themselves.

The goal for online viewers should be the same as the goal for in-person attenders—to draw them into the presence of God. and to release them into worship. We owe them a top- quality worship experience. We should not treat them as beggar children looking in the window at a family eating their Christmas dinner. Rather we should invite them in and share the feast with them.

During the past 12 months I concluded that we do better to video record our online services beforehand and then stream them. I also concluded that video recording an online service is best done in a studio set up for that purpose rather than in the sanctuary. Videoing an online service in a sanctuary with a small or no congregation present is like shooting a video in a large, empty warehouse. It can be done but unless one of our aims is to capture the emptiness of the warehouse in the video, it is better to partition off one part of the warehouse, add lights, sound equipment, and whatever else we need to make a video and record the video in that impromptu studio.

In future articles I plan to look at adapting the rites and services of liturgical books to online, observing the Church Year online, using testimonials online, celebrating the sacraments online, and other related issues.