We are so fortunate to be able to provide live-streamed services to enjoy from the comfort of our own homes! I for one have also been enjoying the ability to tune in Sunday night instead, freeing me up to spend quality time with my husband Sunday mornings when our schedules align.
There are many perks to keeping our content online! However, in recent days, a small impromptu group of communications, technology, and worship folks had a sensitive conversation about protecting anonymity in worship, the dangers of having youth images up online, and even new copyright issues we’ve never had to consider before!! We know we are not the only church going through this right now, but we did have to make some changes to the way we keep content online, in line with our values.
The following are the decisions that have been made at this time (and very likely to change and get better and better as new ideas roll in)
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We now immediately remove greetings after the live service.
Greetings are only available to be seen live. We hope this will increase willingness to participate for those who do not want their image to live on YouTube but are ok with the single broadcast.
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We keep the complete service (story, music, meditation, homily) online for one week only.
We want people to be able to access the service throughout the week, but with copyright concerns and privacy, it is best for us to limit this. Yes! We keep a private archived copy of the whole service for our historical record-keeping!
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Services with a great deal of youth participation will not be kept online following the live streaming
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After one week we pull the service down from YouTube and replace it with a video of just the homily.
This lives on YouTube for as long as we want. So the homily can always be watched again, accessed by new members, and shared widely.
We have a backlog of services to edit into just the homily so if you visit our YouTube and wonder why there are only a few videos so far, trust us! We’re working on it and they should be up soon!
If you have questions thoughts or feedback about this, please contact Marie and your messages will be shared with all those working on this important issue.