Challenging Times… Changes Ways of Doing Church
With the cancellation of worship services as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, McDougall’s worship team quickly moved their creative energies towards sharing meaningful worship services online. Rev. Joanne Anquist and her very small team of talented staff and volunteers have been video-recording high calibre worship services that have been shared on this website, YouTube and Facebook. If you haven’t already discovered these recordings, I encourage you to take a look!
According to the YouTube count, views of McDougall’s Easter Service video have now surpassed 400, many of which were after Easter Sunday morning. Sharing videos of our worship services online is clearly a new opportunity for McDougall to ‘get the message out’ about who we are and our mission to share God’s love in the world.
How can we facilitate and grow this part of our worship ministry? How can you and I help?
The worship team is currently borrowing specialized equipment and using their own computer software to produce these quality recordings. They have been experimenting to find the best technology to meet our needs. This trial and error work has given the worship team a clearer idea of what will work best for us now and in the future when we are ready to move to livestreaming of our worship services. Finding something that will be user friendly for a wide range of worship volunteers is also a priority!
It is estimated that the cost to purchase the technology we need to enable Joanne and her team to more efficiently produce high quality video recordings of our services at McDougall will be about $10,000.
Although the dream of moving towards the livestreaming of our worship services has been alive at McDougall for some time, it has never moved to a position of priority in our annual budgeting process. But we are in challenging times, when worshiping together in our sanctuary is not possible. This is also making us think to the future when many past worship attendees could have difficulty getting to worship services at the church. Providing the worship team with the technology they need to produce quality online worship experiences (without burning themselves out) should be our priority.
Fortunately for me, I am not unemployed as a result of the pandemic. I am a retired teacher. I have a pension. So, I am able to make a special donation to McDougall’s Technology Improvement Fund to support the video-recording and future livestreaming initiatives of our worship team. If you are similarly interested and able, I encourage you to make your special tax-deductible donation by sending a cheque to the church office. Please make the cheque out to the McDougall United Church Foundation with a note that your donation is to go into the Technology Improvement Fund. Thank you! Challenging Times… Changes Ways of Doing Church by Joanne Pritchard, Council Chair.