The crew running the hybrid services at Christ Church St. James, Toronto is tiny but mighty. During the pandemic, there had been six hosts, but that number has now been whittled down to a single person: Judy Glandfield is the familiar face waiting to greet attendees at each service. Similarly, all the technology running the online counterpart to the service is manned primarily by Jeff Coatsworth, along with one person to work the soundboard, a priest on the slideshow, and a few folks acting as backups. With clergy like the Rev. Brian Suggs occasionally wandering out of view of all three cameras while talking, lately there has been some effort to build a little platform at the back of the church, where the team can set up its video production lab to be able to see over people’s heads.
One of the parish’s first experiences with hybrid services was the children’s ministry series it held online during the pandemic. Rotating hosts told stories with props and songs, and the recordings are still available online today.
But not everything can transition to a hybrid format so easily. Once a quarter, the church holds an informal service in the basement, complete with snacks and round table discussions. Trying to stream that service didn’t work as well as the team had hoped, as there were a lot of empty pauses while people thought. But by recording and editing it afterwards, they can try to make it a bit more interesting. That isn’t their only struggle, though: moving all the technology to the basement is complex, with long cords and internet cables all over the place, along with a lack of microphones. They hope that in the future they will find ways to make it more manageable.
Though the livestream team had experimented with streaming to YouTube early on, it found that the limited interactivity and feedback through You Tube’s chat feature was not enough. By contrast, Zoom’s chat feature was crucial in helping Mr. Coatsworth and Ms. Glandfield stay on top of troubleshooting, although texting could be used if the chat wasn’t an option.
Ms. Glandfield now provides a one-sentence summary at the end of each service – a reference to a hymn or sermon. It gets viewers talking to one another in the chat, like a quick bible study to end each service. It also provides an opportunity to have more complex questions from the community forwarded to others within the parish if deeper consideration is required. As it turns out, the benefits of Zoom ended up being so many, and the number of events to be held so high, that the parish invested in two paid accounts.
The process of moving to a hybrid format has been largely trial and error for Christ Church St. James, with plenty of online tutorials to learn the many necessary tasks. Mr. Coatsworth was a Sunday school teacher before the pandemic, so this was an entirely new skillset for him to learn. Now, though there are still a few hiccups, he runs most of the livestream smoothly. The team has also learned to use a hardwired connection instead of Wi-Fi after the internet went down one day in mid-stream. While the crew is managing for the time being, it’s hard not to dream of one day having a bigger team – one large enough to work music, lyrics and everything else all together. There’s room for improvement with the equipment, too: Zoom recordings aren’t the highest resolution, and while OBS (Open Broadcaster Software) could probably solve the issue, there’s the concern that running all the programs at once may be too much for the laptop.
Even with the lower resolution, the crew at Christ Church St. James still does its best to upload quality content over the course of the week. After a bit of experimentation that taught them that they would be unable to upload so much video content without crashing their website, they decided to shift to YouTube, this time for recordings instead of streaming. It’s hard to break up a whole sermon into a YouTube short, but when it fits together just right, it’s very satisfying. Before shifting to hybrid services, they hadn’t even known that the parish had a YouTube channel, but now the shorts attract followers, with some shorts gaining up to 2,000 views and bringing in eyes for longer-form content.
Difficult as it’s been, the team says moving to a hybrid format has been worth it. The offertory went up so significantly in 2020-2021 that the parish leadership had to confirm with the diocese that they had indeed recorded the right numbers. But nothing is more important than how hybrid ministry has benefited the community. From accessing help with bereavement and grief management, to simply being able to attend services during a snowstorm from the comfort of their own homes, hybrid services bring convenience, comfort and connection to the whole community.
Divestment