The Speak Life Podcast. Sharing Jesus in everyday life.
SPEAKER_03Are we ready? We are. You're live. And the irony of this is not lost on any of us. We're talking about how to go live. Broadcast. Your blessed thoughts to the world. But the only the the only bit of advice I have for you is don't get me to be in charge of the stream. Hey, and now I'm going to go. Yeah, better mute that. Better mute that. Infinite loot world. Infinite loot. There we go. Okay. So let's start again. My name is Glenn Scrivener. Welcome to the livecast. And uh with me across in Crowbra is Paul Feasy. Paul, say hello to the people. Hello, everybody. You're right. Yes. How did you do church yesterday, Paul? Let us know about that.
SPEAKER_05Well, it was uh pretty much, it was all done online. It was done via YouTube, uh, via a live stream, and it was it was just as if the service was happening as normal, but there was no one in the room. There was three people in the music group, a preacher, a service leader, and someone working the desk. I think that was it.
SPEAKER_03So and an echoey church. Okay. Yeah, interesting. We'll think about the pros and cons of that way of doing uh Sunday in a minute. Uh Marty Gray, we're going over the water to Belfast. Uh, tell us who you are, what you do, and then tell us what happened on Sunday.
SPEAKER_02Okay, so my name's Marty Gray. I'm a minister of a church in Belfast. And on Sunday, I put together like a little TV show that included all the elements of worship that you'd have in church, but just repackaged in a different format. And uh, I pre-recorded it and then put it on Facebook Premiere, and that took the kind of pressure off going live.
SPEAKER_03Terrific. And we'll see a little clip of you doing that in a minute, and we'll think about pros and cons uh of that uh method of doing things. And then uh across in lockdown in Sussex, we've got uh Andrew Satch, uh who uh is one of the pastors at Grace Church Greenwich. Uh introduce yourself, Andrew, and uh let us know what you did on Sunday.
SPEAKER_01Hello everyone. Um so we had a Zoom call with about a hundred different webcams all showing at once on the screen. And I controlled it and hosted it, but we had contributions from a sermon and a musician playing guitar and people from all over the well, some people in Greenwich, some people who've fled to the country like I have.
SPEAKER_03Fled to the country, yes, from the pestilence. Um brilliant. And uh up near Manchester, we've got Ian Anderson Gray, the founder of the Confident Live Marketing Academy, the person who should have been hosting this live chat, um, because we wouldn't have had any technical difficulties. Uh, introduce yourself, Ian, and uh let us know what Sunday looked like for you.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, so I help entrepreneurs level up their impact and authority using confident live video, and it's the confidence with hopefully the tech and getting in front of the camera, which is a big problem, I think, for a lot of people. Um, yeah, church for us was interesting. So we're in lockdown, uh, my wife and my kids in the house. And and so the way we did it is we we had um the clergy were in the church on their own doing the sermon and leading the service. And we were able to get, I was able to get a feed from the webcam and also the PowerPoint slides to my computer here. And and so I was able to do a live stream using a software called StreamYard. I don't want to get too technical, but it's really easy to use StreamYard. And so I was able to go between the different cameras. Uh, and I was leading the worship from from home with the kids, which was fun. So we're kind of going um between the church and us at home. And hopefully next week we're gonna have people from their homes as well being able to do readings and prayers and things like that.
SPEAKER_03Terrific, terrific. So lots of different ways of doing Sunday, and we'll think about some of the pros and cons of that. Uh, lots of great questions coming in on top chat. Please do keep those coming in. We'll try and deal with some of those. Um, but I I thought it would be interesting to have a look at um the opportunity um that exists in front of us. And um Tim Chalys uh did a great article just today, um, talking about today, or rather Sunday, as um perhaps the most unusual Sunday, or one of the most unusual Sundays in all of church history. And uh he collected together images of people worshiping um in 35 different countries uh in their homes. And so he's got images of people in Fiji, uh images of people in New Zealand, images of people uh in Singapore, in South Korea. Uh, if you're watching on the live stream, you can see all this. If you're listening on the podcast, just imagine, just imagine for me. Uh people in India, uh, people uh all throughout Europe. Uh it's been an incredibly different um Sunday, but it could be the new normal for us. Uh and I wonder how how we feel about that, um, about it being the new normal. One way of thinking about it is that it's a crisis, but it's also an opportunity. And uh there was uh a great uh article on The Guardian. Um was that was that this morning, um uh Paul, uh this this article from The Guardian?
SPEAKER_05Um I'm not sure. I think I was sent it, possibly I sent it yesterday.
SPEAKER_03Um that seems a little bit early.
SPEAKER_05It must have been this morning.
SPEAKER_03Yeah. And and they reckoned in this article on The Guardian, which I'm failing to bring up, but um that potentially that there could have been more people um visiting church in an online kind of state than there were um people physically through the doors uh last week. Um so it it is a crisis, it's it's um a very strange time, and uh pretty much every sentence I seem to say these days ends with the phrase strange days. Um but yeah, could this be an opportunity? Um and I just wondered if if perhaps we could you know go through different ways of doing Sundays now and uh perhaps have a look at um Marty's way of doing Sunday. And and as I um bring up uh a little clip from your Sunday show, Marty, can you just tell us a little bit about what your thinking is as you have thought about putting together uh Sunday services?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, so um one of the the questions, what was I gonna do? Most of our people are quite old in my church and don't actually have access to online. Um, so the the traditional service wasn't necessarily needing to happen because we they weren't going to be watching it. Uh and then there was the opportunity, well, what can we do to engage people? And my thinking was that people are at home, they're not able to come to the building. And I could show that I'm at home too, and also unable to go to the building and kind of with them in that. And then the other thing I was thinking was that um I love players. I don't know what's going on.
SPEAKER_03Um can you yeah, can can people can people can somebody tell me what screen I'm actually sharing right now?
SPEAKER_05Uh Facebook page, by the way, yeah.
SPEAKER_03Is it Marty's Facebook page? My face. Hey, well, that's good. That's good. Okay. So Marty, yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_02The other thought that I was having was that I love the theater. I love going to watch theater. Um, there's something that happens in a live performance that it doesn't happen if you watch the same thing on TV. Uh, you know, so to watch a to watch a play on TV is strange. So I thought, why could I make this maybe a little bit more engaging than just watching a church service? So trying to have little shoulder snippets that connected it all together. I don't know if it worked, but there was two people. Um, one girl said she shared it with a friend who doesn't come to church and they said they'd like to come to church, kind of when when all the COVID-19 stuff is over, and then I had an older lady in church who said that it was lovely to be able to share that with people. So I think it's it seems to have gone down well with the congregation, and I think they feel that non-church people can engage, which is which is really encouraging.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, let's let's have a look at just uh a minute or two of it. Honestly, don't put me in charge of these things. So did that did that not work? The the audio didn't work?
SPEAKER_02No.
SPEAKER_03Uh okay. So you you um obviously had in mind the kind of an all-age audience as well.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, so in our congregation, um, we're a very old age type of congregation. So the children are normally in at the start and they're in at the end. So again, I tried to mirror that in the in the show, if you like. So brought my son into the start bit and brought him back at the end and uh had a bit in the middle, which was really geared towards adults.
SPEAKER_03Okay, brilliant. So, what what would you say worked well? What would you say didn't work so well in this approach?
SPEAKER_02I mean, what worked well was it was probably I I you know, I I think it was more engaging than it was just me leading a service. You know, I think the the little parts that broke it up made it a lot more engaging. Um the the negatives are you you don't get to talk as long, you don't get to explain as much because you've got to try to keep people with you. Um, but I mean I'm I'm aware that that people, you know, when they're watching TV, they've other things going on. And even though we're encouraging people to come and worship, there's still all the stuff going around in them at home. So it was really just trying to get them to engage. Sound was difficult. Um, I need to work out how to get a microphone connected and all of that stuff. To I did I did it all on a MacBook with uh a kind of desk light as my lighting backdrop. Um it was all done at home by myself with with my MacBook. Um so difficult to get a good, you know, it could have looked better, and I think yeah, the content could have been better too, but that's that's every week, Marty.
SPEAKER_03That's every week. Um okay, that's that's really helpful. Um so over to Grace Church Greenwich, and and um I would share a screen of uh your excellent kind of 45-second promo for Sunday, which you guys did, but I just have no confidence that that that audio is gonna work.
SPEAKER_05Um but you guys obviously are saying people are saying on the chat that you just need to leave your mic open. That if you mute your own stuff, that's what's called. Did you mute?
SPEAKER_03I muted my mic because it came through. Right.
SPEAKER_05That's what stopped the sound coming through.
SPEAKER_03Okay, thank you.
SPEAKER_05So it's you, stop.
SPEAKER_03It's me. It's me. All right. Well, well, let's well let's let's just see. Uh, because I really enjoyed uh this particular uh promo that uh Andrew did and the others at Grace Church. Uh let's have a look at it.
SPEAKER_01We would love you to join us at Grace Church this Sunday as we meet online. You can be at church in your living room or on your laptop under the stairs or outside of your smartphone or inside but pretending to be in church. We can still read the live. Just type www.grange.church slash live into your browser. If you haven't already, then click to download Zoom and then you'll get the following message allow. And then here we are.
SPEAKER_03Brilliant, and that's that's um very helpful in getting people ready for that kind of stuff. Um so Andrew, talk us talk us through what your thinking has been in in terms of having to reorient everything about Sundays now.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, well, we the reason we did it live is we thought rather than just listen to a podcast, we wanted to see each other, connect with each other. Um, rather than me being the person who tells everyone the word of God, if we can have an element of we say the word of God to each other, that's really good. So we thought, how can we do that online? And so with Zoom, we had most people had their webcam on, some people were just listening. We had probably a hundred faces, and we did things like we we experimented with all singing on Zoom at the same time, and it was a disaster. We decided we'd have somebody who can actually sing with a guitar sing to us, but we encouraged everybody else to join in at home, and I um screen shared the PowerPoint of the words, and yet you could see everyone's faces, so you could see that other people were singing, even though you couldn't hear them, and we just got to hear Caroline. So that worked well. We tried to do a bit of scripture that we said responsively, and so we said part of Psalm 119, and I said the first half of the line, and everybody else said the second half of the line, and we did that with everyone's microphones on, and it was slightly out of sync, but you had the experience of we are saying these truths to each other, and that kind of outweighed the slightly chaotic sound that kind of worked, and then we tried to think what could how can we have as many interactive bits of the service as possible, even though we're not all there. Um, one thing that worked really well at the end that you can do on Zoom is you can assign people randomly to breakout groups. So at the end of the service, when ordinarily we'd meet over coffee, I just pressed a button, and the hundred people who were all together suddenly found themselves randomly with five other people at church, and then they could say, How are you? How are you doing? And uh we set a low bar, we said, by all means just say goodbye straight away, just say something. Some people actually stayed for 20 minutes and connected maybe to people at church they don't know, or some people's parents joined or friends joined. So I think that was quite an opportunity to draw other people into our community as well.
SPEAKER_03We should keep that, like when we get back into church, we should randomly assign people numbers and just draw it out of the hat and enforce fellowship across cliques. Yeah, yeah, okay.
SPEAKER_00That's that's so much like an introvert's nightmare.
SPEAKER_03Talk to a stranger now, in yeah, enforce chit chat. Um and you're thinking of being even more ambitious this next Sunday, Andrew.
SPEAKER_01Well, yes, I mean it went it went really well. And your point about people joining church, you wouldn't be there otherwise, I think really was true. So family members joined, uh, some friends of mine have joined that don't normally come to church. I think it it makes it easier just to have a lurk and be nosy. And and people are so desperate for some kind of community right now. So uh we actually ran out of webcams with 100 is the the basic license. So we're gonna pay for the upgrade, which is 500, and we'll see how we go.
SPEAKER_03Okay. And someone's just asked on top chat what kind of license for Zoom do you need to stream to 100 people?
SPEAKER_01Well, you can you can stream to 100 with just the free Zoom, but it only gives you 40 minutes, then it cuts out, and it's quite cheap to get the they call it pro, but it's I think it's about 12 pounds a month, it's nothing. Um and that gives you 100 people for as long as you like. Um, so I bought that last week, but now I'm gonna buy the upgrade to get up to 500 users, and I think that's about 40 or 50 pounds a month. So it's it's actually a lot cheaper than our current building hire is.
SPEAKER_03So sure. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Um, and so Ian, um, let us know what what worked well. You you've explained a little bit about what what you guys did, um filming from within the church, but also having aspects that, for instance, you were leading the worship from home and that sort of thing. Um, tell us what what worked well, what what could be improved upon.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, well, we were just experimenting with this this setup. I mean, the the clergy wanted to still do the main part within the church building, but the the great thing about the solution that we we're using, so it's this tool called StreamYard, but which by the way offers a free version as well. It's at Streamyard.com. And the so there are a number of advantages with the method that we chose. Uh, number one, uh, on the paid version of that tool, you can actually stream to more than one platform at the same time. So we uh we thought, well, we we do have it, we do have people that are uh using Facebook a lot. So we want to stream to our Facebook page, but we also want to do YouTube because that opens it out to people who want to watch on the smart TV. And so we found that when we went live, we had about 20 to 30 people watching on Facebook and about 145 on YouTube. And then when you take into account the number of families watching, that's actually quite a big number of people watching. So that was really encouraging. And so the advantage with this is that at the moment we're doing it from the church. But if we needed to get to a situation where the clergy are do are doing it from the homes, and we want to bring in people to do Bible readings and and uh prayers from their homes, we can do that. We can just bring people in to the chat. It works very similarly to Zoom, but it allows you to do all these other things, and so yeah, it w it worked really well. And uh I think there was a nice uh balance between uh doing it from the church building, but also having a little bit of I don't know, a bit of the raw quality of actually just coming in from my house. So I actually had the kids singing at singing uh singing along as well, and it was really quite sweet. And um we but we were also able to get church suite, I think, the software. So somebody was using church suite, the software from the church and changing the words, and we were able to put that up on the screen, and we had a little video of me and the kids singing um with the piano and stuff. So yeah, it works worked really well. And uh we had a lot of positive, uh, positive feedback about and then after that, we then tried to do something called virtual coffee, and we used Zoom for that. So Zoom works really well for you know, as as you were saying before, in that you can you can have these sort of chats together, it's a lot more intimate. So the only problem is is trying to get people to mute, first of all, when they come in, because otherwise it's like a cacophony of sound. But uh I think it's just gonna take um a little bit of time to for people to get used to the technology. Um the the main thing is I think for sustainability, we need to find technology that is simple and sustainable to use. Um I think we have this danger, or some people have this danger, myself included, of trying to make everything really, really professional and slick. But my question really is uh is that what actually what people are wanting? I don't think it is. I think people are actually wanting to feel connected, they want to feel part of church. And and uh yeah, a lot of people are stuck at home. So actually showing other people that are stuck at home in the same situation, I think it's a really good thing. So I was I was really encouraged by by what we did. It's a first start, and we'll see how we get on.
SPEAKER_03We've had lots of questions coming in on top chat. Paul, um, what what what are some of these questions we can be dealing with dealing with?
SPEAKER_05Uh sure. Well, one of them that I get maybe just picking up on the technology stuff there, um, we've had uh Steve Dodman asks about streaming to more than one platform. Are there bandwidth bandwidth issues? Do people know anything about that?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, those so there's there's two types. So I I'll I'll try not to get too technical. This is called multicasting, is is the technical word for this. And yes, you can use certain software on your computer that will broadcast to Facebook and YouTube and other platforms all at the same time. So if you can imagine your computers having to deal with all of that information and your internet bandwidth is having to deal with all that information. So that way, if you were to do it that way using certain software, absolutely, there would be bandwidth issues. But this is one of the reasons why I like software like StreamYard, because all you need to do is just broadcast it to StreamYard and then it just takes care of it their end. So you don't need to worry about any of that. So I yeah, absolutely. That would be a big issue for many churches who are maybe bandwidth impaired, we'll put it that way. So you want to keep it as simple as possible.
SPEAKER_03Brilliant. Can we perhaps talk about um some of the getting in front of camera issues? Um, because I've I've had quite a few people sort of ask me, like, how do you how do you preach to camera? Um, because it feels such a a weird kind of thing. Ian I know you've you've talked about the camera being a kind of an energy sucking machine, or or what what's the word that you kind of use about it?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, exactly that. I mean, it it really is, because when we're used as human beings, we're used to connecting with other people, we're used to seeing other people in front of us. And the other thing is that you know, even today, I've done loads of live shows over the years, but I still find it easier speaking to a group of people. I mean, I I would probably prefer to speak to 500 people than actually speak in front of the camera because you get the energy of the room back at you. And if you're on in a church building, or even at the moment, we can see each other, but it's still not quite the same as getting the energy from the room. And so I think for for for anyone who's involved with getting in front of the camera, there's a few techniques that you can try. I call this um heightened authenticity because what you want to do is raise the energy levels of the way you're delivering, uh, but you still want to be yourself. So if I if I if I came onto uh like a live show or if I started a church service and I went, hello, how are you doing? Like this, I mean, that would be completely over the top, and it wouldn't be being me. But the the opposite problem is that uh because the camera's a bit of an energy-sucking device, we end up kind of speaking in a monotone, our eyes glaze over. So actually practicing maybe the beginning of a sermon or the beginning, the opening of your opening words that you're going to say to start the live stream, just just repeat that at different energy levels. So just speak it first of all, if you were just speaking to somebody on a one-to-one level, the second level is is imagine you're speaking to a small group, the next one is to a workshop, the next one is um to a bigger audience, and then finally, if you were giving a keynote at a mega conference of 10. Hello, Wembley. Yeah. And so each time you're you're making sure that you're still being yourself. You're not you don't want to give over a false kind of impression of who you are, but but you're you're just raising the energy levels each time. That's that will really, really help. And then just to remind yourself each time and just to remember that the camera is this energy sucking device. And also in your head, and this is a bit of psychology here, just imagine the congregation, imagine all the people around the world that are actually watching. And you could eat this sounds really silly, but it does work. You could actually stick uh a photo uh of um a person behind the camera. So you're actually looking like you're it actually meet me feels like you're actually speaking to somebody.
SPEAKER_01That's one of the things I think that Zoom made easier for us because as we're preaching, we really did have the congregation. And you know, occasionally someone's kids are climbing up them and the talking crazy, and there's the distractions, but it it really did help, I think, that idea that you weren't just speaking into air, but you saw the actual people.
SPEAKER_03Marty, you were you were kind of speaking to camera and there was no one else there. Um yeah, what's that like?
SPEAKER_02Uh it's a bit strange, it's very strange. I think it was just thinking though, of people watching, you know, thinking through if I'm watching a TV show or if I'm watching something online, I want to be able to see people well and I want to be able to hear them well. So it was really just thinking, trying to do those two things, make sure that people could see and hear. But it was very, very strange. I'm quite a demonstrative person anyway. So it it you know, it's kind of worked okay. But um, but yeah, it was it's it's it was it was really weird.
SPEAKER_03I wonder if this this again might be an opportunity. Uh, certainly in my tribe, um preaching can often feel like it's a recital. It can often feel like someone brings their music stand and they're about to perform something that they've been practicing in their room and they just bring it out, and there just happens to be an audience. Um, but I I wonder whether the strangeness of all this um means that we'll have to we'll have to kind of rethink how we connect people.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, like what one thing I really find strange is on on for the for the video, I use no notes because I would have a filled manuscript normally if I'm preaching, um, just so that I don't get lost or I don't get stuck. Where with this I just had to speak to the camera and there was nowhere else to look. Right. And it was like it was a little bit exciting, you know, trying to do had some ideas in my mind, what I wanted to say, but but yeah, a lot of that tied to the script.
SPEAKER_03Yes, I I think you can't you can't do a recital now and film it because we all we all know that that doesn't work. Um and yeah, yeah. So we're gonna have to relearn as preachers how to actually engage and communicate with people. So maybe there's an opportunity. Paul, what what else are people asking on on TopChat?
SPEAKER_05Picking up on the kind of voice you're speaking in, someone's just asked on the chat if doing church via Zoom, when the camera is close to you, as it is with us now in these shots, are we aren't we able to go for the intimate voice rather than the stadium one?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I would agree. So it again it depends on it depends on the on the digital format that you're using. And I think with Zoom, it is that more intimate chat, isn't it? I think because you're all together in the room. Whereas if you're doing a live stream to YouTube or Facebook, I think the energy level needs to be a little bit higher. Not too much. So I certainly I wasn't advocating speaking to a stadium of 10,000. It's just practicing those different energy levels and feeling. I think sometimes we have to when when I've worked with uh people on this, uh you have to go and put a little bit more energy than you feel comfortable because it feels weird. You know, I'm at the moment, I'm in my home office speaking to a camera. Yes, I can see you guys, but I can't see the people watching live. And so it still feels slightly weird what I'm doing at the moment. And so, yeah, you just have to kind of maybe be a little bit uncomfortable to begin with and and raise your energy levels.
SPEAKER_03One one almost go on, go on, Andrew.
SPEAKER_01We I had it with another co-host, so the two of us in front of the camera, and that helped a bit, partly if we I forgot where to click to unmute people or whatever, but also just there's a bit of give and take between us. I think that can help as well. Present as a pair. But you can't preach that way, but leading the service as a pair might might help.
SPEAKER_03One absolutely tiny thing is um if you're speaking to a camera phone or if you're speaking to your webcam that's part of your laptop or whatever, actually look at the camera rather than the screen. Because even that difference is is it's quite a bit, isn't it? Like maybe now as I'm looking directly at the webcam, you feel like I'm eyeballing you. But maybe now it looks like I'm checking myself out, um, which I'm not.
SPEAKER_00Um this is a huge issue. And I had to I had to spend months and months and months training myself not to do that. And it's not that I'm wanting to look at myself, I'm not being narcissistic about it. It's just that as human beings, we're just used to looking at other people's faces, including our own. So, what I what I tend to what I find useful is to actually, I actually did a very kind of low-tech thing and put some arrows on an A4 piece of paper to the middle and then just put the webcam through it. And so that I'm just forcing myself, and if you're using an iPhone or Android phone, just put a little sticker near the camera because it's tiny usually. Remember, just train yourself to look at that camera because it does make a big difference. If we were to all look down at our faces now, uh it just it looks really disconcerting. It looks like we're not talking to the camera at all.
SPEAKER_03Yes, yeah, yeah. No, good, good tip, good tip. Uh, what else is there on the top chat, Paul?
SPEAKER_05Um, well, some people are asking um how are you dealing with people who are less tech savvy? So the elderly in particular has come up.
SPEAKER_01I was quite surprised that I mean, I I guess there'll be people who struggle with it, but quite a lot of our age range of people managed it. So you have people in their 70s and late 70s who I don't know how good they are technically, but they managed. So I we were encouraged by that, but I guess there'll be people who find it impossible.
SPEAKER_03And what they were required to do would be to download Zoom chat, click on the link, get into the meeting. Is there much much more that they would be required to do, technically speaking?
SPEAKER_01No, and we actually created a link on our main web page that took you straight into Zoom. So yeah, I mean it prompts you to download the software that you require. A couple of tick boxes.
SPEAKER_05And your video was good because it actually showed you clicking on it and doing it, didn't it? Yeah.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, very hard.
SPEAKER_00You can also get people to phone into Zoom. I've not tried that for a while, but you can just give people a phone number and they can join that way.
SPEAKER_01We also had a sort of trial where we encouraged people from church to have a go on Zoom earlier on the in the day so that when it came to Sunday at four o'clock, that wouldn't be the first time they they done it. Very helpful.
SPEAKER_05We've also got lots of people asking about the CC LI license stuff and thoughts.
SPEAKER_03Copyright. Okay. Yeah. What what do we do about that? Mart Marty, you you had that question in particular, didn't you?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, I I honestly don't know what the answer is. So we got the streaming license, which I know you need. Um, and we put in some songs. We didn't perform them, we had videos, and we put them up in our CCLI number, but I honestly am not sure if that is the right thing to do, and hoping to get some clarification.
SPEAKER_03Is anyone sure?
SPEAKER_02I think you're I think if you're performing, if if someone from your church is performing the songs for the for the broadcast, I think that's definitely okay. But it's the other side if you're in a church where maybe you don't have access to those performers at the time or those musicians at the time, then if you're adding a music, I'm I'm just not sure what the what the rules are yet.
SPEAKER_00And I think if you're gonna be using Zoom, you can probably you're probably gonna be okay because it's what's called narrow cast. You know, you're not broadcasting this to the whole public, you know, to the public. But you know, I I spoke to the PRS and the CCLI last week. This was before the new license that has that was announced on Friday. And uh yeah, that there they still they were very vague. I mean, from from my understanding, the license from the PRS uh allows also CCLI uh allows you to it allows you to stream to your website, but YouTube and Facebook um are not part of that because actually Facebook and YouTube have their own licensing agreement. And so they're treated separately. So what I'm not sure about with this new license from CCLI and PRS that was announced, whether we actually need that, because on Facebook and YouTube, you have your own, they have their own license and it and it works. So if you don't monetize if you don't monetize your videos, which probably we're not going to do as churches anyway, then the the worst that's gonna happen is the ads may appear. So they from my understanding, the copyright owner of a song will be notified if YouTube can somehow work out that you're playing this song, will notify them. They'll be assigned a content ID, and then that copyright holder with that content ID will then can choose one of the options. They can ask, first of all, for you to take down that video. Number two, they can ask to have to share the proceeds from the monetization. And I can't remember what the other one is. Um, so I'm not sure about the CCLI license whether this actually helps or not. I I think we need more clarification about this because most of us are not going to be streaming directly to our website, we're gonna be using a service like YouTube or Facebook for this, and I haven't really heard had a proper response on that yet. So I'm I'm waiting.
SPEAKER_01Ian, if you find out, well, can Glenn paste it to everybody on Speak Live? Because it would be we'd love the answer to that, and I wouldn't know where to find it. But once once it's Yes, yeah, certainly.
SPEAKER_00I mean, uh from what I gather in the in the States, they've so what the CCLI have done is they're trying to do this the same license they've got they've got on the states. And for my friends in the states, they've really not had a problem with this. They've been able to stream their services without any worry about this, but I haven't had uh actual clarification of that yet. So I yeah, I think over the next week, once the the noise has died down from CCL, I hopefully we'll get some proper guidance from them.
SPEAKER_01Glenn, is it worth saying a couple of things about Sunday school? I realized I didn't mention that earlier. Yeah, go on. Um, well, we thought about this and we wondered normally Sunday school is during the service and children go out for the sermon, and we thought that that's not going to work because each house is probably gonna have only one webcam and the bandwidth wouldn't cope with two on at the same time. So we moved Sunday school to before the service, and it actually worked very well. We had on Zoom, you can have a breakout room that you can enable. So I made it so the main room was just me and I welcomed people, and then I sent them to the breakout room because we didn't want random people to be able to suddenly access all of our children's webcams, but I could sort of check that I knew who they were and then send them into Sunday school, and they managed it really well. So we I think we were doing the Amalekites um defeat in Exodus 17, you know, where Mays' hands are lifted and they win the battle. His hands are and they had all of the different families divide themselves into Amalekites and Israelites. Everyone's watching the webcam with the hands going up and down, and then in living rooms all over Greenwich, people were fighting one way or the other. But it's actually amazing what you can do if you're I mean, it wasn't really saying a very creative number of students.
SPEAKER_05Uh coming in. One just a little practical one for those who use Zoom, and I think we've begun to touch on this already. But um, what do you do about the possibility of Zoom being hijacked by people who get in on it?
SPEAKER_01So there's there's some we looked at this a bit, there's some things that you can control in the settings. So, for example, on the chat, we made it so that people could only message me and they couldn't share files. We didn't want somebody to send a malicious file to everybody. You can um disable the screen share for everyone but the hosts, and that's really weird thing. When we had a trial, one of our congregations by accident shared her screen, and I mean it was nothing inappropriate on it, but it suddenly took over everyone's broadcast with family photos. So there's there's quite a lot of things that you can lock down for the host only that are worth doing.
SPEAKER_05Great, and then this one a bit more theological is with respect to the theology of church, uh kind of church meetings. Should listeners or watchers be passive or not in speaking? How do we become less passive in an online environment?
SPEAKER_01So we the way the way we did it was singing was just somebody with a guitar being broadcast on audio, everybody else muted but broadcast their video. So you could see that people were singing, but you could only hear Caroline. Um, and then some things we tried all speaking together, and it's kind of weirdly out of sync and it's quite difficult. So you kind of have to ignore everybody else speaking to just go for it, but you also can hear that there are other people speaking, and it that was just quite encouraging as we confessed our sins together or we said some words from the psalm together. So I guess a mixture, but it is it's a little bit distracting when everyone is speaking at once.
SPEAKER_00And if you're doing a live stream, uh it's uh obviously slightly slightly different. So this was one thing I was really interested in. You know, were people going to be talking a lot in the comments? So the church, our the church is probably, you know, it's it's not one of those, it's not certainly not a charismatic church, it's probably more traditional. Um, but it's still still a lot of people are you know praying for each other and we're we're talking afterwards, and it's great. And I was interested to see, well, are we going to actually have more people talking? And and are we gonna have people sharing Bible verses? And we did. We had it was it was actually really encouraging. So I and I I spoke to somebody in the US, they were at a church that was kind of fairly um, you know, just just quite quite a quiet church, and they were just getting so many encouraging sharing of of Bible verses and comments in the live stream. So one thing that we did is at the beginning and at the end, we had a little countdown sequence at the beginning and then uh some music at the end, and we just shared some of those comments. And so some people were saying, Oh, we're we're a family, we're in our PJs watching this, and some people were sharing Bible verses, and uh that just really added to I don't know, the community feel of it, and it made people feel part of it. And people love to see their their words being shared on on the actual video itself. So that was really nice. But of course, if you're doing the sermon, it might be slightly distracting if you see comments in the middle of the sermon coming down. So, you know, so yeah, there's a balance maybe to be struck.
SPEAKER_03Yes, yes, if especially if you've got uh certain troll-like members of your congregation, I can I can think of a few who would uh want to disrupt things. Um what what also are some of the opportunities? So we've we we've talked about how um you know there could potentially be more people virtually visiting church than a physically visited church in the past. Um how do we how do we get about? I mean, obviously, if you're narrow casting, maybe maybe is that's that's less of an opportunity, but if you're going Facebook or YouTube um that route, how do how do we how do we reach out at this time? What how do how do we use this as an opportunity for evangelism?
SPEAKER_02So one of the things that um I'm planning to do after Easter, so we're gonna build up to Easter with a few more of these shows and then after Easter offer Christianity explored through Zoom and try to do that and limit it to probably eight people at a time, but we can obviously run multiple, you know, multiple courses because people are gonna have time to come to them for once. The busyness has stopped. People are looking for things to do. So that's we're we're looking into doing that further down the line. Um, that's one way that we're gonna give that a go.
SPEAKER_03Yes, why not? Why not? Yeah, you can definitely do these evangelistic courses and invite people in.
SPEAKER_00Um yeah, and have I think it's really cool that you know uh we we're encouraged, obviously, as Christians, to be inviting people along to Christianity Explored or Alpha courses or to church on a Sunday. And and you know, for many of us that's difficult. We feel you know, embarrassed or whatever, just shy about asking our friends. Well, if you're now streaming your church service to Facebook or YouTube, I mean, how easy is it? You know, you just need to share. Well, it's not just that. Obviously, you you're we wanted to pray about it and stuff. But one thing that um I wanted to do is try and encourage our church members to to share out the church service, maybe 15 minutes before we go live, share it with their friends or share, you know, either publicly or share it on WhatsApp or whatever. And I found that with our church service, we had people watching around the world, just sometimes dipping in and out, but just the fact that they're they're dipping their toes in church and seeing what it's like. And and uh I I was really encouraged by that. So this is this is a you know, to borrow what you were saying before, Glenn, about opportunities. I think this is an amazing opportunity. And we need to be praying that God is going to use this. Um, because I you know, I think you know this could be almost like a a revival of of you know people being able to get access to church. Maybe they felt felt you know, they didn't really want to go into the church building, but they can dip their toes in and start to get involved. I think it's amazing.
SPEAKER_02Andrew, go on. I don't know what it's like in England, but in Northern Ireland, people have this set idea of what they think church is like, they have a set idea of what they think sermons are like, they have a set idea of what they think the Bible says. And yesterday, like we could see different people who were watching who have never been to our church before, uh, and yet very positively commenting on things. And I think it just it opens the door, this this door, which is a brilliant opportunity.
SPEAKER_03Yes, yeah, it's it's like having glass windows or glass glass doors to the church. People get to peer in right from the comfort of their own home. Um, and Andrew, I I know that you guys um are very thoughtful about um reaching out in Greenwich and and you'll put on events perhaps in a pub or that kind of thing and talk about topical issues. Have you have you set your mind to to thinking about how you can take those sorts of meetings online as well?
SPEAKER_01So we have a and last of the month in a local pub, we have a um a question and um a little talk and QA. And the next one was supposed to be about being agnostic, but we've changed it to where is Jesus in a pack pandemic. And yeah, so I mean the the usually it's live jazz and go and get a pint. And we've said there might be jazz if we can work out a way of streaming some from people's houses and you have to pull your pour your own beer, but otherwise it will be the same format. So we'll encourage people to invite others to that.
SPEAKER_03Okay, and yeah, when are you gonna hold that? The last so I guess is that next Sunday?
SPEAKER_01This will be this coming Sunday at 7 p.m. 7 till 8. Uh, where is Jesus in a pandemic?
SPEAKER_03Brilliant. So you've obviously done some prep for it. So tell us, Andrew, because we're every every preacher listening in is about to take notes.
SPEAKER_01I wish we've announced the talk, but I haven't written the talk. So send me your thoughts on that question.
SPEAKER_03I'd love to where is Jesus in a pandemic? I'm I'm just loving Mark chapter one at the moment, and just just thinking about Jesus reaching out to the leper, to the man who is meant to be in self-isolation on every level. Um, and where is Jesus in that? Uh you know, he he is reaching out to the person and and and blessing him and restoring him to community. And you know, what is what is Jesus doing at this at this moment? I don't know, but yeah.
SPEAKER_01Thank you, Glenn. Mark chapter one, it might be.
SPEAKER_03Maybe what were you preaching on uh Marty on on Sunday?
SPEAKER_02Uh we looked at two trists to cling to during COVID-19. God is in control and God is with us, but we will I'll now start into a series. But it was really to be honest, the last week was just trying to get something, all the technical side, to get something online. That's why I was particularly, you know, the content wasn't what I maybe would have liked it to have been. But yeah, two things to cling to.
SPEAKER_03So as we look back, let's imagine us in 12 months' time looking back on 2020 and going, My goodness, what was that? Um, that was like a tsunami that that hit us from nowhere. Um, what what do you hope we will have learnt as church together from this moment? Who wants to go first on that one?
SPEAKER_02I think we will value it. I think we'll value the corporate nature of church like we never have before, having not been able to meet. Um, and I also think that relationally we're going to be stronger because through this time, people will be just I think we see each other in Sundays, and the conversation sometimes doesn't go particularly deeper. But I think if people are starting to be in touch over this time, how are you? And and I think conversations will be deeper as well. But I think as friends and as those who we we know each other better after this epidemic, that we value being together much more than we ever have before.
SPEAKER_03Are people as as optimistic? I've I've got one friend who says, I'm really worried that now that we're getting used to isolation, we've we've wanted isolation the whole time. We've wanted to be part man, part sofa, watching Netflix until we die. And it's almost as if this is the judgment of God handing us over to what we want and saying, Do you really want this? Okay, here you go. You know, and but but I wonder whether many will not learn the lesson and whether when the doors of church open back up again, people will be so used to themselves and so used to isolation that they won't come back. Is it is that a fear for anyone else, or am I the only pessimist here?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I think I think that's why trying to make things as interactive as possible and interpersonal as possible is crucial. Because if if we switch to a culture of just a podcast, then you don't need to go to church. Whereas if it's connecting with people as we together hear God's word, and whether that's a podcast and afterwards everyone watches up to each other or we're on the phone to talk about the sermon. I mean, there's lots of ways of doing it, but I think it we must keep the Christian speaking to Christian, the truth and love element to it.
SPEAKER_03Very wise, very wise. Ian, if you have your 2021 vision, looking back at 2020, what what what what would you hope we've learned?
SPEAKER_00Well, yeah, I'm I I'm one of those optimists. I I think this is a huge shakeup for churches. And I think that's a good thing because I think so many, so many churches can fall into just doing the same thing all the time and and not thinking and not being creative. And I think this is forcing us all to be creative and to do things in a different way, to rethink things, to maybe kind of rethink the strategies and all this kind of stuff. And actually also will get us praying again, you know. Yes, we'll be maybe praying. Zoom room, but my goodness, you know, I have to say, I've I've not been the the most um I've not been going to as many that many prayer meetings over the last year, but now I'm finding I'm going to lots in Zoom because I it's just there's no excuse for not to be there because it's just you just click on the link. And so I I think I think it's gonna be a really positive thing. It's obviously gonna be a difficult thing too. And I think it's gonna get people to rethink things and and to um to be more creative. At the end of it though, we we've got to have like a an exit strategy and we've got to think, well, what are we gonna do after this? You know, because I think you're right, you know, about we we we might get to a point where we love this so much um that we we are then don't want to go back to church. But I I don't think it's gonna be like that. I just think I see in a year's time we're gonna have meeting physically, that's gonna be remain really important. But I think we're also gonna have these digital things as well. We're gonna hopefully continue using Zoom or hopefully continue to live stream services and reach more and more people. So I think a lot of churches have shied away from digital because it's scary. And now, um, you know, maybe in six months to a year's time, a lot of churches are gonna have those both in place, which I think is gonna be amazing.
SPEAKER_03Here's hoping, here's hoping. Well, um, coming up this week on on Speak Life, we're gonna be uh talking to some more church leaders about these things. Uh, Dominic Steele and Nathan Campbell in Australia. Dominic Steele coming from a very sort of high-tech, high-tech angle. Um, he's been broadcasting uh all sorts of stuff uh from Sydney, Nathan Campbell, um, uh a more sort of intimate one-to-one approach um from Brisbane. Uh, we're gonna be talking to them both uh about uh how they're responding to this crisis at the moment. Uh tomorrow we're gonna speaking, be speaking to uh Mark Odin, a church leader in Italy, going through uh just the the worst of this crisis right now. And what's it like uh being in Italy right now? What's it like being the church in Italy right now? Uh Paul and I will be uh talking to Mark tomorrow at 2 p.m. Do uh tune in for that. Uh right now in the Speak Live Studios, people are uh making together tutorials for how you guys can be live broadcasting, which is why they've left me in charge of this broadcast. And it hasn't gone as smoothly as it might. But uh the real pros are working on tutorials uh now. And do stay tuned for some webinars where we want to help you with uh how you can broadcast church at this time. Uh, we're also working on our Easter videos right now, uh, which uh is sensational. We've got we've got one poem from uh a very talented poet Ben Holmes that we're working on. Uh a video based on Beauty and the Beast and uh resurrection within that, and uh and a video based on the theme of self-sacrifice within films. Uh these three uh videos will all be launching this week uh in time for Easter. Uh, we've got a whole bunch of podcasts coming out. Um so yeah, do stay tuned. If you're not a regular here uh with us on Speak Life, do click the subscribe button, do click the bell uh so that you hear about all these new videos. And if you don't know about us, uh go to facebook.com slash speaklifeuk and uh you can get all our new videos and all our seasonal videos in your feed. Um and please do uh keep on giving at this time. Uh it's very easy to um socially isolate and hunker down. Um, but let's as as Christians be reaching out. And uh if you believe in our ministry and in uh reaching out online, uh you can go to speaklife.org.uk slash give, and uh any gift would be really uh really valued by us. Um guys, thank you so much uh for joining us. And um uh it's I I've learnt loads. Uh I I've learned that I should not be in charge of YouTube broadcasts like this, but uh I'm I'm learning along with you guys. Um but uh uh Ian, can you uh let us know how people can get in touch with you if if they uh want to find out more about uh going live?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, well I've I've carelessly scattered myself across the social network, so you can just just search for my name, Ian Anderson Gray. Uh but yeah, probably the best place is my website, iag.me. And I've also got a podcast called the Confident Live Marketing Podcast. So if you just search for that in your your favorite podcasting app, uh I've do a lot of uh yeah, a lot of things to help really about everything to do with live streaming.
SPEAKER_03Amazing, amazing. You're the man for the moment, uh Ian Anderson Gray and uh Andrew Satch, is is this is this thing that's happening on Sunday night is that available for others to to join in with?
SPEAKER_01Yes, it will be. Um I'm not exactly sure whether we'll do it by Zoom or over YouTube or a combination, but the our web page is uh at www.greenwich.church, and we will explain there whatever we're going to do. But it will be at seven o'clock on Sunday. Um where is Jesus in a pandemic? Please join us.
SPEAKER_03Amazing. And uh Marty Gray, would would your Facebook page be the best place to keep up with uh with guys at Ravenhill?
SPEAKER_02Yes, I will. Yeah, that's the best place to go.
SPEAKER_03Okay, so that's uh Facebook.com slash Ravenhill Church. Ravenhill Church. Awesome, awesome. Thank you, Marty. Thank you, Ian, thank you, Andrew, thank you, Paul.
SPEAKER_05No worries. Thanks to everyone kind of uh contributing on the top chat as well. They've had more engagement this week than ever before, so it's encouraging to see people uh wanting to engage with with uh the world through it.
SPEAKER_03So brilliant. And stay tuned tomorrow at 2 p.m. when Paul and I will be uh interviewing Mark Odin, a church leader in Italy. That's all we've got time for today. Uh so thank you to the guests. Thank you for the top chatters, and uh thank you to all those who are viewing. Uh, please do give this a share online and uh keep speaking life until then. God bless everybody. Bye bye.