Beyond Online Worship is a blog series on strategies and tools
for doing and being church in the face of the current pandemic.
Click here for the previous post
In our previous post we talked about how a faithful response to the current pandemic involves more than simply live streaming worship services (congregations do not live by worship alone), but involves finding creative and experimental ways to do and be all the things that churches (and other faith communities) are supposed to be and do, and especially how we exercise our “burden of care” to our neighbors and neighborhoods. And that our responses may ultimately lead to our congregations and the communities they serve surviving and thriving together.
Subsequent posts will deal with each of those things in turn. But let’s start with what we learned from our recent experiment with online worship (last Sunday), in cooperation with Church of the Ascension in Gaithersburg, which reached 51 people on Zoom and 900+ on Facebook Live.
So what did we learn?
Online worship is not enough. Not bad for a first try, but after literally patting ourselves on the back (because COVID kept us from patting each others backs) for a few minutes after the second of the two services ended, what we learned was that, while online worship was necessary, it was not sufficient, and there were so many other things we needed to figure out how to do and be while social distancing. And that realization led to this blog series.
[Read more…]