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 you have to do? What should you focus on? Are you back to square one about to give in? Remember, you can’t ‘walk away’ in this period of lockdown. Either you find a tremendous sense of boredom, or you find your cycle of days so short, that sooner or later (sooner or later than you think), you’ll pick this up again and you want to try something a bit different, maybe this time it works, or works better.
You need a plan. In the same way liturgy prescribes a sense of structure, and worship plan lays out where the different items are, you need to strongly project the focus of the meeting. This is a topic for later.
I want to focus on tools that enable medium or large size meetings where say 20 to 50 devices are connected in to the same session at any one time. For this, Google Hangout / Meet, Microsoft Teams, Zoom, and WebEx come to mind as possible things to use. I have more experience of using zoom so my examples are drawn from that.
Here are a few starters.
Visual focus
Does your tool allow you to focus in on a particular person throughout a session, until you turn off this focus?
Why is this important. We are used to a worship leader addressing and leading us in prayer, worship, reading, singing, and generally all the “chairing” stuff, so we know what is happening and what comes next. We can see this person, it gives us a focus. We get very restless if we cannot see this person, and it makes us lose focus. That’s why large buildings have TV screens, similar to older buildings where it is not possible to locate where the speaker is, let alone see them.
In Zoom, when you have 3 or more people in the session, you can “Spotlight” any one of them and then he will remain onscreen until the spotlight is turned off.
Spotlight only works on people with video turned on. On host device, spotlight might not show up in the same way as other devices (because you are host, so you can still have access to all controls.) In Gallery view, the speaker's video has a yellow colour frame.
Audio focus
In the mayhem of sound that is social media, you might crave for the sound of silence. However, silence could be your enemy. With people connecting in online, the ownership of the service is best felt through audio. Once audio is lost, unplanned, for just a little too long, what is little distraction around us can quickly envelope our physical realm that we quickly lose focus on the online session, and that in turn can affect the session itself because our webcam is probably still on.
On Zoom, you will find that each person can mute and unmute their own mic (the mic is built in on their device). As host, you can also mute and unmute anyone logged in, whether they have their video turned on. Further, you can mute all and unmute all. Wow, power! You do need to make it clear about this arrangement and how it benefits the service (e.g. at the beginning of the service).
Muting / unmuting and video focus on speaker
I have discovered a little gotcha when using mute/unmute along with spotlight (above) when there are a number of people logged in such that not everyone shows up in your gallery or pop-up thumbnails. The moment after you spotlight a person, that person’s video thumbnail often disappears from the gallery, perhaps it gets moved to the first location of the thumbnails. As you switch to find this person’s thumbnail, you could have lost out one or more seconds of valuable time (e.g. silence). A better way to do this is to turn this person’s mic on, and then spotlight them.
As you move from person to person, spotlight each of them in sequence, the actions would be like so:
- Unmute speaker 1
- Spotlight speaker 1
- Speaker 1 begins speaking
- Speaker 1 ends speaking (or you want to turn them off!)
- Mute speaker 1
- Unmute speaker 2
- Spotlight speaker 2
- Speaker 2 begins speaking
- Speaker 2 ends
- Mute speaker 2
- Unmute speaker 3
- Spotlight speaker 3
