Tuesday, April 10, 2012

Screen Preaching


Video venues aren't going anywhere.

For those who may not be familiar, sometimes when a church experiences a great deal of growth, they will open up "campuses," essentially a branch church off of their main church hub, typically referred to as the "main campus." Depending on who the pastor is, their church background, or sometimes which book they most recently read, these campuses may have different fancy names or operate slightly differently. They all tend to serve a similar purpose though. That doesn't make it a bad thing, in fact its often times a great convenience for those who attend the church. When there are multiple places where the church meets, you can find a place that's closest and more accessible for you and where you live.

Because the person preaching on any given Sunday cannot be at all places at once, this can pose a problem. Will the church have a live pastor at each campus speaking at each service, or will they have one campus where a primary communicator does his thing and the other campuses become what is called "video campus," meaning they have huge screens where the sermon is shown movie-style.

If they choose to go the video route, will they live-stream the sermon? Or will they put the video campuses on a week delay? Because there are ridiculous opportunities for everything to go wrong while live-streaming (lag, loss of connection, more equipment to potentially fail, possible need for someone to give an impromptu talk if everything goes sideways), most churches who go the video route choose to go on one week delay. You may have your suspicions and concerns, but these video campuses work surprisingly well in practice. Let's face it. We're a culture built around staring at screens all day long. TV screens, computer screens, movie theater screens, cell phone screens, screens up the yin-yang, yo! I promise you that as someone who was originally skeptic of the technology, it all goes out the window very quickly once you actually experience it yourself. Watching a sermon on a screen in a church building works.

I was thinking through this a few days ago when a weird question popped into my head, as they do.

Assuming these video campuses do work (which I lean towards), is there any need for any of the campuses to have a live communicator at all? I know it's a crazy idea, but what if whoever is speaking on a Sunday (be it a single primary communicator, or a rotating group of pastors) pre-recorded their sermon during the work week and all campuses showed the same presentation at the same time without having to lean on the clunky technology found in live streaming. It fixes a lot of the technological problems and introduces all sorts of interesting possibilities. The tech team can do post work on the video, the speaking pastor is freed up to do other things on Sunday, even if that just means that he can sit with his family.

So I figured I'd toss the idea out there and see what you guys think? Could it be a good idea? What do you see as its strengths and weaknesses? I'd love to read what you think!