How will You Keep Them Down in the Pews after They have Prayed Online?

It usually takes me weeks to produce a blog post.  I write and rewrite and send it around to other people to catch the typos and tell me where I lose them. I knocked this one out in a couple of hours. It probably will read like it. But I hope it will help, anyway.

Many churches are canceling their services for a few weeks. (We hope it’s only for a few weeks.) Some churches, like the one Jacquie and I attend, have the resources to telecast the service online. They can also assume that most, if not all their members, have the devices needed to watch the service.

Those who are doing this or are thinking about doing it next week may be wondering:

Will people actually join us on Sunday?

If they do, will they ever come back to church?

Won’t they prefer to keep attending in their jammies with a cup of tea? Will they switch to something more congenial if the preacher starts meddling in their personal sins?

If they do it, will we lose out to churches that can put on a better “show?”

This is an unprecedented situation. No one has a crystal ball to see how it will turn out. However, I have an unusual pastoral experience with broadcasting a worship service that might point to some answers to these questions.

The last eleven of my 45 years of ministry were in an old downtown First Church in a city of 50,000 in Northeast Ohio. For over 50 years that church had been broadcasting its main Sunday service over the local radio station. The signal did not carry far, but it covered all our resident members. The station began live-streaming over the internet while I was there. One of our members serving in Iraq used to listen whenever he could.

This was a live broadcast. When I listened to a recording, I thought, who would waste an hour listening to the rustling and dead air while the kids came down for the children’s sermon? Or the teenager rushing through the reading from Ezekiel — and mispronouncing “Ezekiel?” Or, for that matter, the congregation singing a hymn that their pastor thought they knew, but they didn’t.

It turned out that a lot of people listened.

I would always be surprised when people who had not been in church made a comment about something they had heard.

When I would visit a member in the hospital who was just a name without a face since he or she had never come to church. I was even more surprised that, as soon as I introduced myself, they would recognize my voice from their weekly radio listening. I learned to ask if I was as good looking in person as I was on the radio?

I appreciated their gracious, if dishonest, answers.

Here is what I learned.

1.  People who attended weekly but were unable to come because of illness or for any other reason, felt connected to their church. They came back without feeling like they had been away.
   
2.  There were people who did prefer to go to church in their jammies. Even so, they felt connected and they supported their church. Our giving and our program were one-third larger than our average attendance indicated.
3. We had a lot of members who were homebound or were caregivers for whom the broadcast was a weekly lifeline. We distributed little kits with a communion wafer and cup of juice to them a week before our monthly communion service. They patiently listened as our ushers distributed the elements to the congregation and then took communion with their friends over the air.
4. We broadcast at the same hour as Robert Schuller and Joel Osteen. But people listened to our ragged, low-tech, old-fashioned, live broadcast instead, because they were listening to their church.
   
5. However, if a mic was not working or if the service ran over the radio station’s one hour limit, the church staff and I would hear about it all week. I try not to remember that terrible Sunday when communion took so long that the poor folks at home were left holding their cups when we went off the air.

So, just a word of encouragement:

1. If you can find a way to broadcast something that feels like your regular service, do it.

2. You don’t have to be flashy. Just make sure it is competent enough so that people can see and hear clearly.

3. You may be surprised at how much this ministry will mean in the weeks ahead. No one knows what’s coming. But, as our pastor said last Sunday, getting people through wars, famines, and epidemics is what the Church has done for 2,000. In some ways, it is our job.

Be safe and may God be with you.