Around the world without leaving your seat

 The weekend was a good example of the possibilities that coronavirus has alerted us to. We could have done this anyway, but we didn't, and now we do.

So Saturday began with a 8:45 15minute talk from Romans 3 for our church in North Wales. This happens on Facebook live and I found that Google Chrome works for that on my laptop. I can also prop it up on my nice new adjustable stand which I bought to replace the bent coat-hanger I had been using since March 2020!

Sunday morning I was in one of our supporting churches in Bath, giving a brief update, doing the Bible reading and leading in prayer. The church posts its services on Youtube, so I needed to video myself doing the three things in advance, standing and filmed basically waist-up. So I stood Catrin's old tripod on our bed and stood in front of the wardrobes. This gave the right distance, good lighting and a neutral background.

Sunday evening was Bordeaux Church's meeting where our video projector refused to connect to anything we plugged in, so quick-thinking Sylvain exported the projection file as a pdf and we posted it to the Bordeaux Church Facebook group. People sang from their smartphones. 

We'd been thinking for a while whether we need to find a better way of streaming the services. At present we use Facebook live from my smartphone via 4G. There's no wifi at the church building. A techie-task-force will take this in hand.

We hustled off home and arrived in good time for the curfew to fall and to make a quick cup of tea before connecting to one of our supporting churches in Cardiff for a short Bible message, a quick update, questions and answers and a time of prayer.

It will be interesting to see how coronavirus changes our approach to communication with churches in the future. Will we continue to do three-week whistle-stop tours of the UK once we can?


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