ANOTHER apology...
Dear all,
For the second week running I'm emailing to you all to apologise for leaving you without an online time of prayer/worship yesterday morning. Once again we had technical issues and, this time, I have NO idea why!! We set up and connected to a YouTube Live-Stream broadcast...and lots of people were ready and waiting to watch, listen, and contribute. However, although we as a family were happily recording the start of the service, for everyone watching, the picture was frozen and after five minutes it just cut off.
Since we went into "lockdown" as a church back in March, I know that many people have found it a blessing a be able to "virtually" visit us as a family every Sunday morning and join us in our lounge whilst we spend time being "church at home"...but I don't want to risk another week of the whole thing not working!! All of us have had to learn a lot of new IT skills over the last six months - myself included - and whilst we've tried our very best to bring you a weekly live-stream service, I think we've reached the limit of my technical know-how! As I say, I don't want to risk any more weeks of us not providing any kind of shared worship experience, so we're going to try changing how we produce "Church at Home" - beginning next Sunday.
From this coming weekend, Lisa, myself, and our children will pre-record a shared time of family worship on Friday when the kids have come back from school - a family "sofa service" as Des calls it - as part of which we will also introduce a number of other pre-recorded segments (prayers, readings, etc). Then I'll edit it all together on a Friday evening and upload it to YouTube, scheduling it to stream as a "premier" on Sunday morning at 10.30am. This means that, for those watching live, we can still use the Live-Chat feature to message one another and say "hi"...and to share prayers, scriptures and encouragements with one another. It also means the video will play without interruptions, buffering issues, or the stream "dropping out" mid-service.
I know that lots of churches manage to successfully produce live online content these days - but many of them have dedicated tech-teams with lots of know-how...and, as I said above, we've come to the limit of my expertise (and, I suspect, the hardware we have available to use). What I can do is produce a weekly "virtual service" that's pre-recorded a couple of days in advance. So that's what we'll begin doing from this weekend.
Sunday mornings, of course, are just ONE aspect of how we're able to be church at the moment. Please also remember that some of the Homegroups are still meeting, and that all of us with a laptop/tablet or smartphone can connect for weekly times of fellowship and prayer via Zoom.
Please do watch the video below - these were the pre-recorded church "notices" from yesterday, with news about our new bi-monthly newsletter, info about what we're NOT doing for Halloween this year (as well as what we ARE doing), and another reminder about using Zoom to help us stay relationally connected whilst having to be socially distanced.
With love and prayers from us all to you all,
DAVE, LISA, NOAH, SETH & EDEN.
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