Online worship is an important form of outreach for members of the Church who cannot worship in person, and a tool for mission that opens up worship to a wider audience. Both live streaming and pre-recording can be of use in many situations – for example large congregations facing restrictions on in-person numbers, linked charges sharing worship between churches, rural and remote congregations where travel is significant, and congregations wanting to pursue dedicated digital outreach.
The benefits of either approach include:
- Bringing people virtually into the building and the worship when they cannot, for various reasons, attend in person.
- Opening up the worship of a congregation to a wider geographic area than travel would permit.
- Allowing potential new congregants to sample the worship offered in a church.
- Engendering interaction with the service via comments or a chat function, allowing a sense of connection with the worship.
Choosing your approach. Live streaming is often seen as the “gold standard”, but it carries higher technical demands – particularly bandwidth and processing power – and usually requires someone other than the worship leader to produce and monitor the stream. It can be frustrating when technical problems occur live, and blending live streamed and in-person worship effectively brings its own challenges. Pre-recording, by contrast, is a robust and relatively simple way to begin, and avoids the pressure of everything working at once; its trade-off is the significant preparation and editing time involved, and the steep (if quickly climbed) learning curve for producing and editing video. In both cases there can be a cost implication – in services, equipment, or employee/office-holder hours.
When deciding whether to begin, and which approach to use, it may help to consider the following questions after reading the rest of this guide:
- What do we hope to achieve by broadcasting our worship?
- Who will take responsibility for managing this project?
- Do we have the necessary skills, or is this something we will need to outsource or undergo training for?
- Do we have a budget for this?
One of the major decisions when embarking on an online worship project is identifying your audience. This affects a range of other matters, such as platform, equipment, camera positions and the type of worship you broadcast. Your worship can be open – in the public domain – or closed, on an invitation-only basis. It has the potential to reach around the world, or it can be kept within the congregation. There is no single correct solution; it depends entirely on your context.
Some issues to consider when identifying your audience include:
- Are we planning to broadcast to our existing congregation, just to those who cannot attend in person, more widely, or to our local area?
- Have we had requests from groups or individuals to create online worship?
- Are there others in our geographic area already broadcasting? If so, could this affect our potential numbers?
- Do we have ecumenical partners who are broadcasting, or nearby Scottish Episcopal Churches?
Once you have a sense of your target audience, consider the numbers you would realistically hope to reach – especially if you are using them to justify purchasing equipment, training or staff hours. It may help to conduct some formal research with a survey (using a tool such as Survey Monkey or Google Forms), or to contact people directly to establish demand. If your congregation has a social media presence, polls can be run there too.
What services?
Different services have different structures and emphases, and the same is true of broadcast worship. The Provincial online worship offering during the COVID-19 pandemic was a Celebration of the Eucharist every Sunday, with mid-week Services of the Word and Evening Prayer at different times. Each service has a distinct structure that shapes how it is streamed or recorded. For example, a short service of Evening Prayer can be broadcast very effectively using one camera in a side chapel – or from home – with no additional microphone and just one person. A full Celebration of the Eucharist, with music from a choir, multiple readers and various camera angles, suggests a more complex setup. This is not to say one form of worship is better suited than another, simply that considering these issues in advance allows you to make informed choices later.
Questions to encourage decision-making:
- What is the regular worship in your congregation, and which services are most well-attended or expected?
- How do you feel theologically about various aspects of online worship?
- Do you have restrictions on equipment, finances or labour capacity that make certain services easier than others?
- Is your church currently able to open, and are you subject to restrictions on numbers?
- How much time and labour does it take to prepare a service? Will you work alone or have assistance, and do you have enough time available to dedicate to this?
Dedicated broadcast, or blended worship? (live streaming)
If you are live streaming, a further decision is whether the regular in-person service will be streamed (blended worship) or whether a separate service will be held exclusively for the streaming congregation. There are challenges and opportunities in both. Blended worship lets the congregation worship as one, separated in space but not time, and requires less preparation because only one service is prepared – but special care is needed so that worshippers at home and in church can both fully engage. A direct address to those in church can leave people at home feeling excluded, and vice versa; time spent adjusting cameras during a service can interrupt the flow of worship. A separate, congregation-free stream allows the leader to interact more fully with those at home, but requires an additional service and, usually, additional people. There are no right answers – much depends on local context.
Recording in sections (pre-recording)
When pre-recording, it may help to list all the different chunks of a service and record them individually, giving you freedom to choose angles or locations for each section and cutting them together later. Leave a couple of seconds of silence at the start and end of each section to allow space for transitions. Pre-recording also opens up the possibility of contributors filming portions of the service (a reading or the intercessions, for example) from different places.
When gathering video files from multiple sources:
- You could use Onedrive, Dropbox, iCloud, Google Drive, WeTransfer or any major file-sharing site.
- Try to avoid sending videos by email – this often compresses the file beyond usability, and some carriers will reject large files.
This section assumes you have decided to broadcast worship and want to make a start with the technology. The options can seem daunting, and many companies claim their products are essential – this is not necessarily the case. This guide is not exhaustive and avoids recommending specific products, but is written with general principles in mind, erring on the side of the simple and inexpensive. We have broken it down into essential and desirable elements.
Essential
At the bare minimum you will need a camera, an audio system, a platform and a stable internet connection; for pre-recording you will instead need a computer with editing software.
1. The camera
One of the simplest and most versatile tools is a smartphone – the camera quality on almost all modern smartphones is more than sufficient, and they are portable, often to hand, and include a built-in microphone. Other options include a dedicated video camera, a digital camera with video capabilities, or an action camera such as a GoPro. If you use a separate camera it must have a digital video output (check the manufacturer’s specification); you will need to connect it to a computer to stream or edit. You can also simply use the webcam on a laptop or desktop, which is best suited to working from home.
Keep the camera as stable as possible using a tripod, which is available inexpensively from photography shops and online. Most have a standard attachment that fits many cameras, and cheap smartphone holders are widely available. More complex setups may use more than one camera, which requires dedicated live video production software or apps – and a reasonably powerful computer – to cut between angles, select audio sources and display images, videos and text.
2. Audio system
Audio is one of the most important aspects to get right. If people can hear you clearly they can still follow the worship even if the video quality is lower; the opposite is rarely true. Built-in microphones are often of reasonable quality close up – sufficient in a small room, a chapel, or with the camera set up directly in front of you at a lectern or altar – but quality deteriorates with distance, a major consideration when choosing camera positions around the building.
Background noise – wind, traffic, or visitors moving around – can become surprisingly intrusive on a broadcast. (Note that live streaming often applies automatic audio compression, which boosts quiet sounds and can give background noise undue prominence; this can sometimes be turned off.) To improve audio you can use lapel (lavalier) or handheld microphones connected to your camera/smartphone, which may require cables, adapters, wireless receivers or audio interfaces. Where a church has an existing sound system, the audio can be captured from it via an audio interface acting as a bridge to your camera, computer or recorder – a more complex option with potential cost implications, but one that puts existing radio or lectern mics to good use throughout the building.
When pre-recording, a dedicated voice recorder is useful for wide shots. To sync separate audio and video, start filming, start the recorder, then clap your hands – this replicates a clapper-board and gives you a reference point to line them up in editing. Worship music is a complex issue (see Section 5 on copyright), but often the built-in microphones on handheld devices are ill-equipped to handle a choir, organ or worship band. If you intend to broadcast music, consult your musicians beforehand about microphone set-ups.
3. Editing (pre-recording) or a stable internet connection (live streaming)
For pre-recording, editing is where much of the work happens. Most modern computers include editing software, and many free or inexpensive packages offer the same features. Bear in mind the pace and flow of worship – leave space for responses and quiet reflection, but remember that a pause that feels short in person can feel much longer on video. Match the volume across sections filmed in different places so the whole service is roughly consistent. Keep transitions simple and quick: fades (to black and back) and crossfades are the least distracting. Titles and subtitles can be used for responses, hymn lyrics and to indicate who is speaking – but remember blind and partially sighted viewers may miss them, so communicate essential information by both audio and visual means. When exporting, keep the video in the highest quality you reasonably can; on a slower connection you may need to reduce quality for a smaller file, but anything below 480p (“Standard Definition”) will look poor on modern screens.
For live streaming, you need a stable, speedy internet connection – streaming video comfortably requires an upload speed of around 5 Mbps, which you can test at speedtest.net. Internet can come from your church broadband or a mobile (4G/5G) connection, but the upload speed you measure may not hold up when others in church are also using the connection. The most stable option is an ethernet cable directly to a router, though the router is often not near where you stream. Always check your upload speed in situ, as the stone walls of many of our buildings are not kind to high-speed wireless internet. If in doubt, consult your provider or a specialist before starting.
4. Platform
Your platform is where you host your worship and where viewers access it. The most common platforms for online worship are Facebook and YouTube, popular because many churches already have a presence on them and because they have high user familiarity. In almost all cases these will be the most appropriate solutions. You can broadcast in several locations simultaneously if you wish; multi streaming services make this straightforward for live streams.
Desirable
The following features are not directly part of streaming or recording, but they add comfort and ease of use for worshippers.
- Signposting. Make sure your congregation know where to go and at what time. Scheduling the broadcast ahead of time gives you a dedicated link to distribute by email or social media. Give it a title that matches the occasion (the specific Sunday, or the date and time) so people know they are in the right place.
- Orders of service. If you expect the congregation to join in from home, provide a digital copy of the order of service – by email, on your church website, or via a hosting platform such as Dropbox or Google Drive. Morning, Evening and Night Prayer for each day of the Church’s year is hosted here, and digital versions of other liturgies can be found here.
- Social elements. Many platforms allow worshippers to leave comments or contribute to a chat feed – a good way to keep in touch, share notices, or communicate if broadcast issues occur. Be aware of the risk of unpleasant or abusive comments; where possible, have someone monitor and moderate the feed, and turn comments off if necessary.
- Text elements. Some live video production software lets you print text on screen during a broadcast – useful for hymn lyrics or bespoke prayers.
- Subtitling. Various packages will transcribe your broadcast and produce subtitles, opening it up to people with a hearing impairment. They can be expensive, and as most developers are US-based their accuracy with Scottish accents varies; having the text of sermons, readings, intercessions and the order of service to hand can speed the process up considerably.
- Donations. A number of platforms allow churches to seek donations online – through distributing bank details, a crowdfunder, or an online “tip jar” service.
- Telephone access. You may wish to offer a number that lets someone with no internet access phone in to hear the service. The method used in Provincial worship relied on Zoom and has a cost implication for the church, and potentially for the person phoning in unless the church absorbs it.
Online worship intersects with two main areas of legislation: data protection (the GDPR) and copyright law. Nothing in this section constitutes legal advice.
GDPR (particularly relevant to live streaming)
All churches should be compliant with the GDPR in general terms, but broadcasting a service where a congregation is present raises specific issues around the protected category of religious or philosophical beliefs. Footage of a person clearly demonstrating their Christian faith – for example receiving communion – may amount to creating a data record identifying them as such. For Church workers and volunteers this is permissible, being in the legitimate interest of the Church and within their assigned duties.
It is best practice to make the congregation aware that the service is being broadcast on entry – for example with a sign at the door – and to remind them at the start. Because SEC worship is open to the public, showing members of the congregation as part of public worship is a legitimate use of personal data, as no assumption about an individual’s beliefs can be made simply from attendance however where possible, you should designate and signpost an area that will not appear on camera. The receiving of communion is a clear demonstration of Christian faith: as obtaining informed consent beforehand is usually impractical, it is best practice not to show the congregation receiving communion on camera.
Copyright: music
Churches wishing to include music, hymns or songs in online worship should make themselves aware of copyright restrictions. Do not assume that easy public availability (e.g. online), or a local recording, means there is no copyright issue. A single piece of music can carry multiple forms of copyright restriction – melody, arrangement, lyrics – and the performances on recorded music may be copyrighted even where the melody and lyrics are in the public domain. One or more streaming licences may also be required, covering both live and pre-recorded broadcasting. Do not assume that holding a single licence covers every piece of music: check that the licence includes the material you wish to use and the circumstances in which you want to use it.
Ascertaining copyright and securing permissions can be complicated and time-consuming, and further guidance is available here.
Copyright: use of photographs
Take great care when selecting photographs for publication, whether as part of a video broadcast, on a website, via social media or in a newsletter. If you publish without permission from the copyright holder, this is a breach of copyright and the holder is entitled to pursue a claim – the extent of which cannot be estimated and could be significantly greater than anticipated. This is a situation to avoid.
Several websites offer images that are free to use in some circumstances, often referred to as being available under “Creative Commons licensing”. At the point of publication the photographer or Creative Commons licence must, in most cases, be credited; full information is available at creativecommons.org. Useful resources include Unsplash and Pixabay, which offer large selections of Creative Commons images, and geograph.org.uk, which has an easy-to-use accreditation tool. Warning: these sites can also include pay-for images, so please check in each individual case, and read their guidelines carefully.
If, having read this guide, you decide that neither live streaming nor pre-recording is something you or your congregation are in a position to offer at this point, there are other options, including video conferencing worship. Using video conferencing for worship became increasingly common through the COVID-19 restrictions. It is better suited to sustaining worship within a predefined group than to public broadcast, though most platforms can also broadcast out to streaming platforms. Many of the principles in this guide apply in a video-meeting context. Guidance from the Scottish Episcopal Church, specifically on the use of Zoom, is available here; much of it applies more broadly to other platforms, though some adjustments may be needed to accommodate the specific requirements of worship.