Online Worship

As we prepare for the Christmas (Advent, technically speaking) season, Kevin is preaching today and next Sunday. I'll be taking over for the first three weeks in December and for Christmas eve services. Kevin will be preaching on the 23rd. I'm taking off some time to make sure that my Christmas season sermon preparations are complete.

So today, Sunday, November 18, Nancy and I didn't "go" to church. However, we did worship. One "emerging" phenomena of the way we do church is the growing number of people who worship through streaming live online worship services. We thought we would give it a shot.

I've enjoyed following the ministry of Craig Groeschel at LifeChurch.tv so we started there. However, after about an hour of working with their online tech support, downloading a new browser, an update to Adobe Flash, and much frustration, we gave up. (Kinda like trying to find parking, the right door, childcare, coffee bar, etc. in an actual church visit.)

We went instead to Flamingo Road Church who had an online experience using Windows Media Player. (I'm not promoting Windows products, but this format actually worked for me.) Here are my random observations about the experience:

• I enjoyed sitting next to Nancy, on our couch, and experiencing worship together.
• At first it was awkward to sing the songs out loud, but we quickly got over it and enjoyed ourselves.
• The production used multiple camera angles which changed often enough to maintain my interest but not enough to be distracting.
• I found it way to easy to get distracted on other things. At one point I clicked on a link and started to fill out an online attendance registration. Nancy got irritated with me and so I went back to the worship service. (Whether you call it multi-tasking or computer technology induced A.D.D. I found it difficult to maintain my focus.)
• On the other hand, Nancy said she found it less distracting than the presence of many people.
• Troy Gramling's message was very good.
• Music was superb. Though I was surprised how little of it there was.
• I missed the fellowship. I didn't get to greet anyone, except Nancy and the cat.

Have any of you tried to worship online? In our case I thought there was something "special" about streaming a live worship feed. I could have easily gone to any number of online worship service archives and worshipped that way. I chose to go live. Would that make a difference to you?