The speed with which many churches started to use social media and online meeting tools is phenomenal. The common technical annoyance across all these tools is that are not suitable for church use. They are designed more for ‘fun’ use – chatting and taking photos etc. Problems begin when a few of us start down the screen for a long stretch of time – it seems for visual participating we need a prominent ‘presence’ within the screen so that others see us, and we see all of them. This ‘wall of webcams’ phenomenon is a new way of doing church, […]
Worship
13 posts
Use of video might be one thing people have been reluctant to try using online tools for church services. In a ‘normal’ church services where we meet physically, playing video is such a great headache. Getting something played on the computer is already a tough thing to achieve, then getting it projected on the screen, that is a completely different thing only a professional or the very experienced ones know what to do. For those we have tried, getting video to play using online tools might be far easier than you think. This centres around a method probably called ‘shared […]
Using online church, we have managed to ‘see’ some of the people we usually meet as church family, showing concern and care, sharing in sorrow and joy. It’s beginning to feel like it is easier to talk to each other online. We have done that a few times. We know a bit how to get started. Using online ways of communication just does not work in the way normal conversation and mixing with people work. It’s impossible to talk to somebody just between two of you without having everyone ‘listening in’ or even ‘looking in’. Well, there’s the breakout room […]
Series starts here. Music focus – musical instruments and voices Challenging. Think of when you only have a very small amount of ‘information’ to send down the line. Or like a spacecraft going to beyond our galaxy further into space, it could communicate back to earth, but only tiny portion of maybe 10 lines of text, at any one time. And yes, in the case of online meeting software, you will have some delay, though not in light years as with space travel! But the delay is enough to annoy anyone. There is hope, please read on! The following is […]
Series starts here. Congregation focus Showing multiple faces on screen gives a sense of community. Where your application can show faces across people who have logged in, this can greatly create that sense of community – while they are not individually looking or relating to some other individuals, it seems that they are looking to the screen gives their presence their a lot more strongly than we might think. When we are collectively listening e.g. someone sharing, a story, the sermon, or prayer, and each of us can see all the faces doing this, visually that is very powerful. It […]
It might be an alarming sight if you go to your church and find that on the entrance is a notice to say your church is closed but proceed to a certain address to find the same activities taking place there. A change of venue does not happen in some places, because the church building is a centuries-old venue that double as town hall and many other purposes and functions. As we learned from the 2020 lockdown, the effect might be felt in the same magnitude of previous flu pandemic or major wars, closure of such activities do happen, and […]
Series starts here. The cost you pay to run an online church is huge. It might cost you some money, but how long, just how loooooooooong, have you spent doing something to get it suitable for use in online church. It’s far beyond what we have done for a single church service, or a whole term, a whole year! Humble-speak set in, the monks, or the modern-day monks (they might look and live along with the rest of us) might be one of few groups of people who are used to labouring faithfully for a single cause. So, what do […]
All things online don’t work well for churches. Church is about people. Having a church online goes against what you want to do as a church. The whole point about reaching out to people is they come to learn and share about the gospel of Jesus Christ. This is about teaching, caring, praying, sharing, chatting, helping, supporting, and often over a cup of tea, coffee or some other drinks, and often in the midst of family members, the younger ones, the older ones, next to us or close by. Why do this online at all? At the time of writing […]
More than a year had passed since my last blog. Lots of things have changed; the need to come back to the blog became less and less of a need. Lots of things have remained the same. As of today, or this month, this quarter, lots of things become the same for a number of us, that is, the lockdown in relation to the outbreak of an infectious disease yet defined, referred as Covid-19. It’s more than a number of us. Let’s come back to that further down. The fragility of life, in all its insurmountable proportion. That is before […]
At a weekend conference, the digital piano was in fact electronic piano. I don’t know whether people make that difference (digital or electronic) or whether the naming system is consistent across manufacturers. Briefly, digital piano has better sounds (and more effects) than electronic. It sounds like a major difference, but some of it is due to very small margin in design. On small margins, human can only survive in small margins of temperature. I read that scientists discovered a planet a few years ago which they named GJ1214b. They worked out this planet is made much more of water than […]
We can hear the melody of a song we are familiar with, sort of ‘in our head’. We might sing along to it. And for musicians who are familiar with the written music, we can even ‘see’ the music score as we playback the melody in our head. We don’t only experience the melody of a song, it is the whole song – harmonic, rhythm as well as the melody. The melody is one part. Without knowing it, we do also hear the harmony of the particular song, the way the harmony sounds at that particular point for that particular […]
The worship team had met to rehearse and chat about how best to lead and support the congregation in the worship service, see previous blog here. As would musical preparation in many churches on Sunday, we met an hour before the service to run through the songs. An exercise to ‘warm up’ and ‘tune’ ourselves to the theme of the service. This is much easier to do since our worship leader is also sharing the message – various traditions have this as homily, sermon or simply message. More about this later. The worship team seeks to prepare congregation for worship […]
We met yesterday morning for a worship band rehearsal. It’s the line up we had the last time we got together to lead worship, about 3 months ago. This would be for a special service in a week’s time. The three singers sang with a lot of conviction, but it felt apart a little when it turned out they didn’t know one song which I thought they knew. Learning the new song was not a problem. Christ is My Reward has remarkable tune – its melodic inflection sounds like speech; it’s a kind of singing where you tell a story. […]