I’m not a technology expert nor an audiovisual guru. However, I maintain several websites. Every week I publish 7 audio files with accompanying video, as well as 2-3 other videos. I’m no expert, but I know something.

As I hear people complain about church services that are streamed online, I get very frustrated. Most of the people murmuring know less than I do about how streaming works and what goes into making it work. And I know very little.
Let me educate you with some of the little I know, to see if it helps at all:

• Most of our churches are trying to provide professional-level services with consumer-grade equipment. Mind you, consumer-grade equipment is very good these days. But don’t expect your local church to produce something that looks like the Discovery channel.
• Most of our churches are using consumer-level Internet to deliver their product. Yeah, that same level of service that froze up the last time you tried to watch a movie online. That same service that delivers “live sports” with a 3-5 second delay. If you’ve been in any Zoom meetings, you’ve seen the limitations of most Internet services. Most churches don’t need industry-level Internet on a day-to-day basis; paying for that to use it a couple of hours per week doesn’t make sense.
• Most of our church professionals didn’t train for this. Even those that did were probably hired to do something else at your church. And you still expect them to be doing that something else. I’ve admired the way I’ve seen ministers sharing ideas and experiences as they learn new skills; rather than criticize them, why don’t we applaud them for the progress they are making?
• Much of church staff is dealing with kids at home. Remember when you insisted that your church hire younger ministers? Guess what. Younger ministers typically have younger families. Besides trying to tend to your needs, they may be running a school all day and dealing with stir-crazy kids at night. While answering texts and phone calls from stir-crazy church members.
• Most of our church professionals are busy trying to survive a pandemic and trying to help others do the same. It never hurts to maintain a little perspective.

Churches and church staff all over the world are learning more and more about the technology that is available to us. Much of it is still in the developing stages. When it works, it will be wonderful to have. When it doesn’t, we need to try and utilize a bit of patience. If you can’t watch a service, open your Bible, sing a hymn, and break bread in memory of Jesus. Thank God for what you have rather than complaining about what you don’t have.

And now, let me see if I can figure out why this blog post won’t publish…