Since this week at the latest, Corona has fully arrived in Germany, with all the consequences that entails - and these have a huge impact on churches as organizers of events with more than 100 people. As a software service provider, we ask ourselves: Can Corona also have a positive impact on our church, initiate long overdue processes and ensure that the church reaches people in a more contemporary way in the future? Below we have put together concrete ideas for your congregation in Corona times:
1. Live Streaming Services
The concept is not new, televised church services have been around forever. However, digital progress has made it possible for even small local churches to set up a live stream - and not only that: the stream can be designed to be interactive, so that digital viewers can also participate in the service in a very practical way through comments or prayer requests.
An exciting project that is worth highlighting here is the project sublan.tvThe project was funded by the Protestant Church in Hesse and Nassau. This offers Protestant churches a complete set of software and streaming hardware for broadcasting your church service.http://sublan.tv
If you want to build your own stream team, we can recommend this very detailed article about setting up, implementing and running a live stream. Here you will learn both technical and content-related do's and don'ts:
And for all those who want to watch a streaming service first – in this blog article, Lothar Krauss from the Leiterblog will collect livestreaming offers in the next few days.
2. Digital communication
Digital church thrives on digital communication, which ideally leads to analogue encounters. A lot happens in parishes. Even outside of official services, which are now better suspended for the time being. Our Communi platform helps to connect people. Through a "digital bulletin board", all visitors to the parish can share events, offers, requests and recommendations.
For example, house groups can communicate that they will meet on Sundays when church services are cancelled and share recommendations for live streams or sermon podcasts. Even without Corona, this is of course a great way to network the congregation. https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/h2MStO-dFt4
Do you like the idea of Communi? You can create a test app for your community with no obligation using this link:
The trial app simply expires after 30 days, so you don't have to cancel anything.
3. Prayer and pastoral care
Here, too, there are already some good offers that try to bring pastoral care and prayer into the digital world and thus make it accessible to people who would not dare to go to church. For example, the SCM publishing house has developed the platform "Amen.de". This makes it possible to share prayer requests anonymously. After checking, these are then sent to several people who can freely choose how they pray for the request.
The Protestant regional church is providing Telefonseelsorge.de and Chatseelsorge.de There are two important and competent counseling centers where people in unusual situations can receive anonymous pastoral help. You can find an overview of all pastoral care services offered by the Evangelical Church at: https://www.ekd.de/
Conclusion
In addition to all the terrible things that Corona is doing to this world, it offers congregations the chance to invest in projects and ideas that would otherwise have been postponed for some time due to a perceived lack of urgency. This blog entry shows that there are already good approaches, and we hope that we will see more of them in the near future - especially if we can no longer hold traditional church services in the usual way for the time being. We hope that we have been able to inspire you and your congregation a little with these ideas during this difficult Corona period. As a service provider in the digital environment of churches, we are also happy to provide advice if your congregation wants to take digital steps but is still unsure.
With that in mind: Stay safe, and here’s a little goodie to keep your sense of humor:
Goodie: Washyourlyrics.com
The free service “Wash Your Lyrics” turns your favorite songs into washing instructions for safe hand washing. It could look like this, for example:
Create your own washing instructions at: https://washyourlyrics.com/
You don’t know Communi yet?
We are the platform that has made it its mission to bring communication in large groups to one place by providing your community with its own app in your design. In this app, anyone who wants to can communicate with each other easily and efficiently without causing disruption and new people can be integrated easily!
Communi could be something for you? Then create now at communiapp.de/testapp your own app and test it for 30 days free of charge and without obligation.
