You know that old saying about ducks? The one that says not to let how graceful and calm they look on the surface mislead you because, beneath the water, they are paddling like crazy?
Yeah… That’s about what I’ve decided producing a live-streamed worship service is like. For everyone watching at home in their comfy pajamas and fuzzy slippers, I pray that, Stan, the musicians, and I have all seemed like paragons of peace and calm.
That’s what I hope and pray, but the truth is that, behind the scenes for these three weeks, there has been a whopper of a crisis for each and every worship service. It’s like the Lord’s Prayer or the Doxology; unbeknownst to anyone, the misadventures are just built into the Order of Worship at this point.
But unlike those predictable parts of online worship, the disasters don’t give us any foreshadowing that they’re coming. We’ve had everything from totally dropping the internet connection – like down-for-the-count dropped – to having cables go bad to losing one pastor’s Bible. (I won’t mention which pastor’s Bible it was, but it wasn’t mine.)
Because of these live-stream surprises, a general sense of nervousness just comes with live-streaming – a nervousness that just appears when you shift from seeing folks in 3D to only being able to show up two-dimensionally on tiny screens. It’s the kind of nervousness that’s a mix between the first day of school, Christmas morning, and waiting for a root canal. You want to love it, but you also know it’s going to hurt somehow. And you’ll be so glad when it’s over.
In the end, we show back up and do the live-stream thing again, regardless of the unknown surprises, regardless of the strangeness of talking into a mic in an empty sanctuary, and regardless of how surreal it feels to preach and pray to a camera lens. We ignore all of that; we disregard the twitchiness in our bellies, and we robe up because we know that, in whatever form it comes, worship matters. We pretend like everything is perfectly normal because of the people who generally fill those pews – because of the people who are watching from home. We forge ahead because we know that the magic of a digital feed is what will hold us in community until we can all be together again.
And that alone is worth all the crazy paddling.
Y’all stay safe out there…
“See, I am doing a new thing! Now it springs up; do you not perceive it?
I am making a way in the wilderness and streams in the wasteland.”
Isaiah 43:19