When the first big shutdown due to Covid-19 was announced in mid-March of 2020, it was a Saturday. Hiawatha Church’s overseer team, like everyone else, was forced to make difficult decisions very quickly. Ultimately, we opted to comply with the early recommendations to close down in-person gatherings immediately. It was not an easy decision but it proved to be the right one. We quickly communicated to the congregation at large that Sunday worship gatherings were paused indefinitely due to a dangerous pandemic.
Once the decision was made, we shifted focus to what we COULD do. We had never attempted to livestream our Sunday gatherings before. Our belief has always been that the physical gathering of the church is an extremely important part of BEING a church. We’d preached sermons pointing out this fact as recently as 3 weeks before shutdown! And yet here we were needing to find a way to provide connection with our homebound church family in a time of extreme crisis. So we got to work on pulling a very basic livestream together with < 24 hours of notice.
The first few live streams were very, very basic. We used a smartphone on a stand with the Facebook app. Mark Edwards and I distanced ourselves on stage to lead a couple of songs (masks were not yet recommended at this stage!). Pastor Spencer gave some announcements. Pastor Chris preached to the phone. We all felt very unmoored by the whole experience, the only 4 people in the building on a Sunday morning.
And yet, this bargain basement livestream was a huge blessing to Hiawatha Church. In the uncertain and fearful dawning of the pandemic, we needed this connection so badly. Over 200 people tuned in to those first few streams, learning along with us what church would look like for the foreseeable future. Spencer copy/pasted song lyrics into the chat window and we sent links to lyrics too, trying to cover our bases as best we could.
During these first couple of months, we learned a lot more about livestream technology and began discussing how we could plan for a future where we would have an in-person and a virtual church gathering at the same time. It seemed clear that restrictions on religious gatherings would be loosened to some degree eventually, so we needed to figure something out. This ended up being a rather large task and required many hours to build a sustainable system that used our soundboard feed and actual webcams. Even so, it required a dedicated “producer” to control the stream and our sound team needed to create two sound mixes at the same time to serve both the sanctuary and Facebook. By God’s grace and through our amazing volunteers and staff, we settled into a rhythm with it all. We re-launched in-person services in late June of 2020 and continued the Facebook Livestream.
Time marched on, the pandemic waxed and waned, restrictions on gatherings continued to be modified. Finally, the vaccine was developed and rolled out more widely in early 2021. As all these things happened, we monitored the viewers on our livestream and our attendance in person. We watched with joy as God brought more and more people back into our building and fewer and fewer people were online only.
And now here we are: discontinuing the livestream. We’ll still, as always, publish our sermon podcast for anyone who can’t attend (find it on the ChurchCenter app or any podcast platform). We’re back where we started.
This is what we want, we want our people to see each other face to face (at least the top half of the face, for now). We want the physical gathering of the church to be a representation of the physical body of Christ on earth. We want people to laugh together and cry together and sing together and hear the gospel hitting our ears together. It's just not the same doing these things through a screen, especially when it's the same screen that gives you work, school, news and Netflix the other 6 days of the week. When that’s the case, it’s easy to disengage and begin to make church another thing you consume but do not participate in or another task you need to check off each week.
To put it another way: church might just become content, not community.
1 Corinthians 13:12
For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known.
Relying on “virtual” church alone puts us at risk of cheapening what church really is — the family of God. Just as we longed to see our extended families during the quarantine and share a big meal with them without fear, we should long to be with our spiritual family in the same way. Sharing a FaceTime call with our distant relatives is not the same as laughing around the dinner table at Christmas. And moreover, Christians long for the day when we will see Christ face to face. We should not sit back and say to ourselves “the dim mirror is fine with me, in fact it’s preferable because it’s just easier for me today.” We should say, “I long to meet my Savior's face without a glass between!”
So as we turn off our livestream this week, take joy, brothers and sisters, that God has made a way through our sufferings this past year and brought us back together. There is no more need for the dim mirror! See this as a very good thing. See this as a foretaste of the day when we will physical gather with the saints at Christ's table on the New Earth!
And for those who just aren’t ready to re-join us in person, we know this might be difficult. We truly love and value you and we want you to be in our community. Listen to the sermon podcast, email a leader to meet in a safe way and connect, and send us a prayer request. Actively seek the community of the church, to be fully known as Paul wrote in 1 Corinthians.
You have a home here at Hiawatha Church because, in love, Christ shed his blood to bring you in. May we find joy in this truth and in the community of believers.
PETER CARLSON / WORSHIP PASTOR