online worship Archives | The FaithX Project

May 06 2020

New Paradigms: Figuring Out What Comes Next

by Mary Frances, FaithX Senior Consultant
What Comes Next

Here and there in the world
and now and then in ourselves is a New Creation,
usually hidden, but sometimes manifest,
and certainly manifest in Jesus who is called the Christ.”

Paul Tillich

Paradigm: a typical example of something or model

The Oxford Dictionary

These are certainly some strange times we are living in. I admit that on some days I wake up and think to myself, “I can’t believe we are living through this.” And it gets worse by the day. Six weeks ago the clergy who I coach were busy trying to figure out how to do online worship. Today those same people are trying to figure out how to lead an online funeral or how to console the weary and grieving in their community from afar. These are awful times, indeed. Yet in the dark there is light, in the storm there is quiet and in crisis, opportunity. So, what comes next?

For decades the Church has been in decline and while there have been many who claimed to know how to reverse that trend, change has come hard for the Church. Since the Church is at its core a gathering of human beings and human beings are inherently resistant to change, righting the ship has been more than difficult. We haven’t known how to connect with our communities, we haven’t known how to innovate and bring people along with us, and we have often been more interested in the days gone by than the days yet to come.

Cue the Covid-19 pandemic.

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Apr 29 2020

Password-Protected Worship: A Missed Opportunity?

by the Rev. Ken Howard
Password-Protected

This blog post is part of a series on strategies and tools for helping congregations survive and thrive in the face of the COVID crisis.
Click here for the previous post

Zoombombing

“Zoombombing” is when an uninvited person joins a Zoom meeting, usually for the purpose of gaining a few cheap laughs at the expense of the participants.

Because Zoombombers sometimes use racial slurs, profanity, pornography, and other offensive imagery, faith communities have begun to password protect their online worship services in order to prevent univited Zoombomers from entering.

I would like to suggest that password-protected online worship services are a huge missed opportunity for evangelism.

Here’s why…

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Mar 29 2020

Keeping Congregations Connected: Spotlight on Jim Papile and Pajama Church

By Ken Howard
(with Jim Papile)

As we continue our “Keeping Congregations Connected” series, faith leaders have begun sharing with the experiments they are undertaking to keep their congregations connected to each other and their communities in the face of the COVID crisis. So in the days and weeks ahead we are refocusing many of our FaithXperimental Spotlight posts on some of their innovative approaches as the crisis continues.

Today we are shining a Spotlight on the Rev. Jim Papile and a his recent COVID-”inspired” worship experiment that he calls Pajama Church.
Last Sunday, two small, local churches Jim serves came online together for the first time to read Morning Prayer.

As you may already know, the service of Morning Prayer is one of the regular forms of corporate worship in the Episcipal Church’s Book of Common Prayer that does not include communion.

“To say that it was a new experience for all of us,” says Jim, “is an accurate, and probably an obvious statement.” On the one hand, some people had trouble negotiating the web platform for the first time, some were not happy having to be in this unfamiliar place.

On the other hand, most people were very grateful. “We had a couple who joined us from the road, driving up 95 from Florida,” Jim reported, “We had several elderly folk who live alone that were especially thankful for the service, as they cannot get out of the house due to COVID 19. Hearing the voices of their friends was a huge help.” At the end of their time together, as they briefly reviewed their pajama church experience, Jim says one member commented that it was kind of nice to worship in my pajamas.”

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Mar 18 2020

What we learned from our experiment with online worship

By the Rev. Ken Howard

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.

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