I’m always fascinated on how I end up having the same conversation with multiple people over the course of a few weeks. Topics rotate, but when one hits, I end up talking about it a lot.
Recently, I’ve had at least four conversations about live streaming church services. I’ll start by saying I’m not categorically opposed to live streaming church services. I can understand why many of the big churches that live stream do just that.
What I struggle with is smaller churches, especially those with volunteer tech teams, wanting to stream. I always ask the same questions when churches talk to me about streaming. I offer them here for your consideration.
“Why?”
I shouldn’t be, but I’m often surprised that many churches have not even asked why they want to stream. Many heard it’s possible, or saw a big church at a conference doing it, or simply have big church envy.
But let’s really break it down for a minute and back up a step. What is the purpose of the church service?
It seems to me—as a non-theologian who never went to seminary—that the church gathers corporately once or more a week to worship together (usually defined as singing, which may or may not be worship; but that’s another post), teaching, the administering of the sacraments and fellowship. At least two of those is hard to accomplish sitting in front of your computer, and one is a marginal experience. Only the teaching portion really translates well.
So my question is, if we can’t deliver a good experience for 75 percent of why the church comes together to do, why are we doing this again? For a large church that has the infrastructure, it’s not that much of an incremental cost to stream.
But the small church run by volunteers has a harder mountain to climb. Plus, people like to attend small churches (and I’m defining “small” as below about 1,000 on a weekend) because they feel more connected to others there. And watching on the computer makes it hard to be connected.
Often people push back and say, “Well, we want to stream for parents who have sick kids or people on vacation.” I’ll tackle the vacation question first. I would be willing to bet that approximately 2 percent of churchgoers watch a live streamed service of their church while on vacation. And that may be generous. So that’s not really an issue. Now, I understand parents of sick kids might benefit from being able to watch the service at home. But…
