Worship in times of COVID

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People take comfort from ministers. Likely many people want to hear from their personal minister. I expect as th8ngs move along we will see changes. But you can watch any number of religious pod casts
 
A preliminary announcement for our use of social media during the interim isolation can be found at

www.facebook.com

George Street United Church

George Street United Church, St. John's. 333 likes · 21 talking about this · 768 were here. A 150 year old church standing tall over downtown St. John's, we are modern downtown church, serving
www.facebook.com www.facebook.com

Once you like the page you should be able to see the content. For all I know you may be able to see content without linking the page.

The first of weekly pastoral letters has been published on our website and will be emailed through our blast list and hopefully printed and mailed to those still not connected electronically.

The Church website is here:

George Street United Church

George Street United Church is the longest surviving United Church (originally Methodist) building in St. John’s, Newfoundland & Labrador. We are located at 130 George Street, with an office entrance at 25 Buchanan Street.
www.georgestunitedchurch.com www.georgestunitedchurch.com

The pastoral letter can be found under Bulletins.
 
Church worship in "real" life now banned -along with clubs, cinemas, pubs (except for bottle shops) in Australia.....

I attended my last service yesterday -the ban starts from today. Hand gel was available and the service (and christening) was held outside in a big tent with social distancing of chairs. Our minister said, "I've always wanted to have church outside the building." I replied, "I dunno - I love our stain glass windows."

90450334_2952687008086724_3990110315466457088_n.jpg90450334_2952687008086724_3990110315466457088_n.jpg90450334_2952687008086724_3990110315466457088_n.jpg
 
My mom's minister e-mailed a church service to her. So my two sisters and I did church with her....we read scripture, sang hymns, read the sermon, prayed and even took up a collection! The sermon was interesting, thoughtful and hopeful....but certainly had a different slant on how God uses his power. It made me realize that, even in the Christian world, many will approach the why's and how's of the covid-19 differently, seeing God's hand in it in different ways. So, even religion can be as much confusing as it can be a solace.
 
I tried checking out Richard Bott's service in the a.m. and my own minister's service on FB in the p.m. Neither held my attention.

Next week I will try to figure out Zoom and join in that way. I think it might be quite different.

A family member sent me a link to her minister's video. It was very good! 15 minutes long and quite casual. Her minister is blind and it was interesting to see him read scripture in braille. He also played the guitar.

We learn as we go.
 
Carolla said:
It's interesting to me that many churches are scrambling to still put out their OWN worship & study resources etc. It seems to me this would be a really good time to embrace cooperation - to join hands with other churches/congregations who have experience with such things, rather than trying to learn it all on the fly ourselves. Have your congregation tune in to another church's usual livestream of their service etc - maybe follow it up with a zoom room chat of your own folks. Use existing online resources (eg from Prayer Bench) for study, discussion etc. And yet, I sense in some quarters that there is still resistance to this. Interesting to observe.
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At Christ Church Cathedral (Anglican) in Montréal, we had three services of Morning Prayer today at the same time we would normally have held an in-house service. Contrary to the United Church and many other denominations, Anglicans tend to follow set liturgies. So in a sense, we did not totally reinvent the wheel; yet we assembled our own bulletin with a complete liturgical service, some music, etc. We used Zoom (the standard package allows up to 100 people to meet online; our most important services had up to 60 people connected, so there is room for growth). Feedback from participants was interesting:
  • Percentage wise, the francophone congregation was the most present. I think part of it is that we have a closely-knit congregation... and we have an 88-year-old congregant who was quoted in our last newsletter saying, "If I was able to connect via Zomm, anyone can do it!"

  • Spoken word and music work fine with Zoom, at least when taken separately. Singing together with all microphones open doesn't work as the system tends to keep only the loudest voice (typically not the music, but the person that signs the most off key). At our third service, we muted everyone except the musician and solo singer and it was much better (personally I would do the service without any singing, but I'm in a minority).

  • The appointed Gospel for the day was a long one: John 9:1-41. In the francophone group, we decided to do a dialogued version and people loved it.

  • People participated throughout the service.

  • A funny thing is that we had a fair number of former members who joined us: people who had moved to Ottawa, Toronto and Vancouver decided to join us instead. I can't say whether it is because of nostalgia or because their current parish didn't offer anything online. Probably a bit of both.

  • Virtual coffee hour was a blast at two of the services and fell dead at the third one.
    At the second service, with lots of children, the first 5 minutes were literally hellish, but after that we had a good 30 minutes of conversations with most people staying along for at least 20-25 minutes.
    On the other hand, the last service had 60 connections (70 people) but coffee hour lasted barely 5 minutes.

I think that the format we used a Zoom meeting rather than a simple Facebook Live broadcast or a recording on Youtube was better as it allowed actual participation and exchange between parish members, not only at virtual coffee hour but throughout the service.

All in all, I know that Carolla had posted an article Churches should think twice before webcasting their services. Since January, there had been quite a few reactions to the latest statistics about church attendance in the Anglican Journal (see January issue takes in-depth look at state of church – Anglican Journal and Dead by 2040?). Besides that, I was always wondering what's the point of dressing up and going (physically) to church when one can read the Bible online, listen to music online, read theology online, etc. This morning's experience showed us that community is truly what made the difference.

So will we still be alive in 2040? As a Church I mean? I thing that parishes that truly develop their Christian community will continue to thrive because people will see value in meeting eachother. On the other hand, parishes that only offer static services and don't build a community will die quickly.
 
We recorded a service, with some dedicated help from some techies, uploaded it using Vimeo and put it on our webpage and our facebook page. I'm hoping that by next week, we'll have an announcement in our widely broadcast Grace Weekly News, and that many of us will try watching at the usual church starting time, enhancing a feeling of togetherness. Our rev has also encouraged us to say a prayer at 6:15 daily, first for our community of faith, and then for the wider human/non-human Earth, and out to the Universe.
 
mgagnonlv said:
At Christ Church Cathedral (Anglican) in Montréal, we had three services of Morning Prayer today at the same time we would normally have held an in-house service. Contrary to the United Church and many other denominations, Anglicans tend to follow set liturgies. So in a sense, we did not totally reinvent the wheel; yet we assembled our own bulletin with a complete liturgical service, some music, etc. We used Zoom (the standard package allows up to 100 people to meet online; our most important services had up to 60 people connected, so there is room for growth). Feedback from participants was interesting:
  • Percentage wise, the francophone congregation was the most present. I think part of it is that we have a closely-knit congregation... and we have an 88-year-old congregant who was quoted in our last newsletter saying, "If I was able to connect via Zomm, anyone can do it!"

  • Spoken word and music work fine with Zoom, at least when taken separately. Singing together with all microphones open doesn't work as the system tends to keep only the loudest voice (typically not the music, but the person that signs the most off key). At our third service, we muted everyone except the musician and solo singer and it was much better (personally I would do the service without any singing, but I'm in a minority).

  • The appointed Gospel for the day was a long one: John 9:1-41. In the francophone group, we decided to do a dialogued version and people loved it.

  • People participated throughout the service.

  • A funny thing is that we had a fair number of former members who joined us: people who had moved to Ottawa, Toronto and Vancouver decided to join us instead. I can't say whether it is because of nostalgia or because their current parish didn't offer anything online. Probably a bit of both.

  • Virtual coffee hour was a blast at two of the services and fell dead at the third one.
    At the second service, with lots of children, the first 5 minutes were literally hellish, but after that we had a good 30 minutes of conversations with most people staying along for at least 20-25 minutes.
    On the other hand, the last service had 60 connections (70 people) but coffee hour lasted barely 5 minutes.

I think that the format we used a Zoom meeting rather than a simple Facebook Live broadcast or a recording on Youtube was better as it allowed actual participation and exchange between parish members, not only at virtual coffee hour but throughout the service.

All in all, I know that Carolla had posted an article Churches should think twice before webcasting their services. Since January, there had been quite a few reactions to the latest statistics about church attendance in the Anglican Journal (see January issue takes in-depth look at state of church – Anglican Journal and Dead by 2040?). Besides that, I was always wondering what's the point of dressing up and going (physically) to church when one can read the Bible online, listen to music online, read theology online, etc. This morning's experience showed us that community is truly what made the difference.

So will we still be alive in 2040? As a Church I mean? I thing that parishes that truly develop their Christian community will continue to thrive because people will see value in meeting eachother. On the other hand, parishes that only offer static services and don't build a community will die quickly.
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This is seriously cool. I've been in MS Teams (similar to Zoom as far as conferencing but also includes file sharing and other group functionality as well) meetings with maybe 10-20 people but would never have thought of using it this way. Thanks for letting us know about this.
 
Our church congregation might be in danger of exceeding the Zoom max were everyone to get into it (and there would be so many unruly non-muting events/dogs, etc., that I can imagine it was too chaotic. But we are definitely getting into Zoom for small groups, and for Board stuff.
 
Zoom can also allow document sharing, but not to the same extent Microsoft Teams does. But I Think Teams require each person to have an account (not with Microsoft but with the Team "owner"). Zoom allows anyone with the proper meeting code to connect, even by an old fashioned home phone.

Regarding capacity, it is possible to subscribe to a higher level to accommodate, I think, up to 1000 connections at the same time. In our case, I think it will only be a problem for the Easter service; we'll have to decide what to do.

As for an unruly congregation, there is a fine line between a total laissez-faire and being too authoritarian and toning it down too much. the conference owner can mute and unmute all participants at once (or even select ones) if necessary. It's not perfect, but it does the job very well.
 
mgagnonlv said:
But I Think Teams require each person to have an account (not with Microsoft but with the Team "owner").
Click to expand...

You can have anonymous guests in a meeting, just like Zoom, but they need an account to access the document sharing, Wiki (yes, Teams has one), and stuff like that. Which is fine in a corporate environment because those can include private and confidential information.
 
When I look around (virtually), one aspect that strikes me is that most Anglican churches in and around Montréal have developed some kind of alternative liturgy (Zoom, Facebook live, recorded sermon or prayers, phone chain, etc.), but only a few have done so in the Anglican Diocese of Québec. I am aware that some United Church congregations in Québec have done online services, but I have no idea how many it represents, percentage wise.

But what strikes me is that the Roman Catholic Church has done almost nothing! The St Joseph Oratory has a daily office broadcast on "Sel et lumière TV" (a pay channel that may also be watched on the web), and I think one modern parish (Saint-Thomas-d'Aquin) in Québec city offers weekly services via Facebook live. I always found that the Roman Catholic Church was pretty weak with regard to community building, especially compared to other denominations. Now if they don't do anything to support the community, will their members continue to stay away from church once this crisis is over?
 
BetteTheRed said:
And maybe other churches are doing it better and were doing it earlier, but I'd love to invite you all to check it out at Hot Church.ly
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Wow ... during that rendition of It is Well With My Soul ... my mother was so there!
As in the Days of Noah ... excellent metaphor for these times.
Thanks so for sharing this 'broad' cast ... a joy full break from the sorrow full news.
 
We won't be able to do that again. Too many people in one space (minister, two musicians and 4 technicians). Also, we're lucky in that Rev's son is co-isolating with her and hubby, and he works for the NFB.

We (the Board) have a meeting at 7 tonight. Tried to do a Zoom meeting this afternoon, to unsatisfactory results. So conference call.
 
Things seem to have changed a bit now that churches are non-essential workplaces in Ontario.

www.united-church.ca

Closure of Church Buildings in Ontario

In Ontario, church buildings (with some exceptions) have not been named as essential, so Ontario church buildings must be closed. We interpret this as not allowing even a small number of people in the church to provide virtual worship.
www.united-church.ca www.united-church.ca
 
I got to participate in a prayer and meditation that @GordW ran the other day. It was nice to be part of that community again. This will also give me a chance to see what other clergy friends are doing. So far, I haven't heard of my church doing anything.
 
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