For some pastors, all this is brand-new territory
- and not a place they necessarily feel comfortable.
For Presbyterians who think the best place for people to be on Sunday morning is in church, the idea of posting sermons online may seem counter-intuitive. Isn’t that sort of like a big fat invitation not to come to worship?
In reality, congregations that are trying sermon podcasts and other kinds of online interaction often find the reality to be a little more complex – and more exciting. While some don’t track usage of the podcasts carefully, pastors have picked up anecdotal clues about who listens — everyone from parishioners who are traveling that week but don’t want to miss the sermon to snowbirds spending the winter in warmer places, to people who have no direct association with that congregation but tune in anyway.
“We get a lot of interesting feedback from people who are not necessarily church people,” said Julie Riley, associate pastor of Woodhaven Church (woodhavenpres.org/) in Irving, Texas, a suburb of Dallas.
While some congregations are slow to dip their toes into technological waters, others are becoming increasingly inventive with online interaction – many of them not necessarily sure where it will lead, but willing to try new approaches to see what might happen.
Some congregations and presbyteries are conducting committee meetings by Skype (a toasty alternative to driving out on an icy night) or interactive Bible study through Facebook. Some pastors post their sermons on iTunes and hear back from congregants who regularly listen while working out or commuting to work.
“If anything, what we have people pushing us for is to expand,” said Jeff Lincicome, pastor of Sammamich Church (spconline.org/) a congregation of 800 not far from the Microsoft headquarters in Redmond, Wash.
In 2009, people downloaded sermons from the Sammamich church Web site about 100 times a month. Technology “is just so much part of the DNA” in the area that his church is looking for ways to do more, Lincicome said — including possibly using Twitter to give parents suggestions of things to talk to their children about after each week’s family worship service.
“You just can’t do anything without technology in the rest of life these days,” Lincicome said. Too often, “the church is the one place that doesn’t happen. It seems archaic and out of touch. That’s exactly what we don’t want to happen” — and why more congregations are taking the plunge.
First Church (fpcbellevue.org/) of Bellevue, Wash., for example, is just starting to provide a live video feed of its Sunday morning services. People can download the audio of Bible study lessons, respond to online discussion questions, and watch videos of the congregation’s work in Rwanda and Sudan. The home page of the church’s Web site features a welcome video message from the pastor, Scott Dudley.
GETTING STARTED
Other congregations are not as technologically sophisticated, but just as eager.
In New Jersey, Paul Leggett, pastor of Grace Church (gracemontclair.org) in Montclair, has been offering an online Bible study for about a year and a half now, an endeavor he still refers to as “experimental.”
About two years ago, Leggett noticed that some younger members of the congregation “just weren’t in church as much. We’re in a world where it isn’t automatic that people go to Sunday worship,” so some of these families would be present on some weeks and missing on others.
So he invited three men, all of them under 40 with young children and wives who work outside the home, to get together for coffee and doughnuts one Saturday morning. “I saw these guys as potential leaders,” Leggett said. And he asked them, “What can we do to help you guys get more involved in the life of the church? In unison, they all said, ‘Put more stuff on the Web site.’”
They wanted sermons, Bible studies or other material they could access at midnight or whenever they had time.
“There is certainly a group of people who are probably a little too busy to come to a Wednesday night Bible study,” said Scott Wipperman, interim associate pastor at Wasatch Church (www.wpcslc.org) in Salt Lake City. “They like the idea of being able to go out on the Web when they have the time to do it, after they get the kids to bed or get home from a late night of work.”
At Wasatch, Wipperman and the congregation’s interim head of staff, Ginger Memmott, tried something new in December — posting online videos each week during Advent previewing Bible passages that would be used for that week’s sermon, an approach they plan to continue using for Lent. People who watched the videos were invited to offer their own comments or questions about the Bible passage, although many were too shy to do so.
The idea came, according to Memmott, from a discussion the worship committee had about the potential impact of H1N1. If things got really bad and people with vulnerable immune systems feared coming to public places, “how would we provide worship for our members? That was the original question,” Memmott said.
So Memmott and Wipperman decided to see what they could do with video. Their approach isn’t elaborate. “We got a home video camera,” Wipperman said. “The first day we didn’t even have a tripod – we kind of balanced it on a chair.”
In each of the videos one of them talks for about five minutes about the Bible passage. By Lent, they hope to be including some visual elements as well.
For some pastors, all this is brand-new territory — and not a place they necessarily feel comfortable.
“I don’t own my own computer at home,” Memmott said. “I see people living their lives more and more online – I don’t want in some ways to do this. But I don’t think there’s a choice, because of the way our culture is moving so rapidly, faster than any of us could have imagined.”
WHO’S TUNING IN?
Those who have tried some new approaches say they’ve sometimes been surprised by the results. Memmott, for example, has heard from a colleague in Sweden and from former members of the Wasatch congregation who have moved away, but want to stay connected.
Leggett, the New Jersey pastor, has posted online Bible studies on Mark’s gospel and on Genesis from the Old Testament, a study he plans to finish by Easter. He’ll start with the New Testament book of Romans in the second half of 2010.
So who’s using these studies?
Leggett gets about 100 hits per month on the Bible study, “and that’s more than we have showing up for any (other) Bible study in the course of a month,” he said. Word is getting around; he’s had contacts from a pastor in Colorado and a man doing prison ministry, both of whom wanted to use the materials.
And some months ago, Leggett got a call from a law professor at a nearby college. The man has never attended Grace church, but told Leggett he’d been listening to some of the sermons and had downloaded the Bible study. The professor said he had questions, and asked if Leggett would be willing to meet him for lunch.
As for the people already in his congregation, Leggett has noticed some interesting patterns as well. With the help of a seminary intern, he did a study last fall of attendance at the 8:30 worship service on Sundays, asking people to sign in to record attendance and also taking a physical head count. During a two-month period, the lowest attendance at that service was 32 and the highest 57. Over the two month period, about 120 different people attended. “What that means is you’ve got 120 people coming to a worship service, and you never have even half there at one time,” Leggett said. “People are attending less frequently.”
In other words, even those who do go to church are not necessarily there every week.
That’s a clear sign that “life has changed,” Leggett said. “Sunday is not a day that’s reserved in any way, shape, or form for religious activities anymore. Where are people on Sundays in this area? They’re in the supermarket” – as he learned when he had to make an emergency grocery run one Sunday morning and found the parking lot jammed.
BUILDING CONNECTIONS
For Leggett and some other pastors, all that adds up to an argument in favor of sermon podcasts — a way to keep people connected even when they can’t come to church.
“It’s a useful tool,” said Robert “Rocky” Laha, pastor of Old Presbyterian Meeting House (opmh.org/) in Alexandria, Va. “Folks that miss church use it a lot. Or folks that want to hear it again for some reason.”
And while he’s not particularly comfortable with Facebook (“I’ve got one up and I hardly know how to use it”) Laha recognizes that Facebook is a key communications tool for those in the youth group and members in their 20s and 30s.
Carol Howard Merritt, an author, blogger (tribalchurch.org) and pastor at Western Presbyterian church in Washington, D.C., told the Moderator’s Conference recently that her congregation has about 200 in worship on a typical Sunday, but 600 to 800 people download the sermon to listen on their own.
And at Woodhaven church in suburban Dallas, sermon podcasts just seemed like a logical next step. For some time, Woodhaven had been digitally recording the sermons each Sunday and making them available on compact disks for shut-ins or others who wanted to grab one and listen. Then a task force on communications suggested making the sermons available for download on the Web as well, as a possible evangelistic tool.
“It was really a no-cost venture,” Riley said. At the committee’s urging, the church printed up business cards with the Web site address for the podcast that members can hand out to friends or colleagues.
Does offering the podcasts mean that some people will be less likely to come to worship, knowing they can listen on their own instead?
“We believe that community is such an important aspect of worship that it would be their loss,” Riley said. “But anything we can do that will plant God’s seeds, God’s still at work in it. I don’t think we would ever withhold the word so they would show up here. In fact, I really do think it has kind of the opposite effect. Today’s young adults are (a) different kind of consumer — and they approach worship as a consumer.”
If they listen to the podcast before deciding to visit the church, “it helps them get a glimpse of who we are.”
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Back in the 1960s, we (First Church, Higginsville, Mo.) helped raise funds to build a retirement/nursing home. One of the deacons … was concerned about their not having church services. He suggested connecting the churches with the home through a telephone line. (He) worked for the local telephone company, which was owned by (two women) who later became elders. So, we started broadcasting services by telephone, which could be moved from church to church, if they joined the hookup. Our Session agreed to go out on Communion Sundays and serve Communion to the residents while our members were being served.
How long this continued after I moved to another community, I do not know. But it is a good example (of) how new ideas come into existence through laypersons who use their everyday experiences. Thank God for dedicated and innovative laypersons!
James N. Murray, honorably retired
Harrisburg, N.C.