Announcing some changes in our Livestream availability
Hello Spirit Garage:
After some conversation with staff and the Drivetrain, we’re making some changes to the ways you can access our Worship Livestream. Currently, you can watch our worship service on the Spirit Garage facebook page and the youtube page, and watch concurrently or any time after. Starting in January, we’ll be creating a private link for YouTube only. You will still be able to watch concurrently or later, but you will need to have the link.
We’re doing this for a few different reasons:
The impetus for the change is to protect people from the increased dangers for marginalized folx who attend and sometimes are leaders of our worship space. As the political climate changes and hate crimes rise, having a very open way to see what’s happening in our setting each week invites unwanted attention and makes everyone less safe. We’ll still be open in our web presence about who we are, but that doesn’t require open access to the livestream.
We want you here. Increasingly, I’m convinced that being together in person is ultra important. A central purpose of church is for people to be together, supporting one another, hearing about the joys and sorrows and jumping in to help each other when help is needed. This may be especially true at a place like Spirit Garage. That requires an in-person presence, so we hope you’ll be here IRL as much as possible, so that you are known, and so you know people. We’ll still have a livestream available for most weeks of worship, available for our internal crowd, to stay connected as best we can when you can’t be here, but please be here when you can! Your presence is part of what makes Spirit Garage special.
We’re pretty sure the livestream isn’t an effective “outreach” tool. Both because it is hard to get the sound right (especially music) and because we have large gaps of time when not much happens online (the peace, communion) it isn’t the best experience online for anyone, but especially people who don’t know us. We can’t come up with ways to make that better that don’t create a lot of work, so we’re prioritizing in-person worship, and providing an online experience for an internal group (you).
Sometimes we do quirky things: Every time we do something a little different than music, sermon, prayers, communion, we have to think about how to make it work in a livestream, but prayer stations and other “experiential” parts of worship don’t translate well to the livestream. So on weeks when it doesn’t make sense, we probably just won’t livestream. It frees us to imagine that it’s okay if there aren’t 52 livestreams a year, plus holy week and Christmas. You can still find us most weeks, just not when there’s something weird going on that’s hard to film.
There’s a cost, too. The tool we use to broadcast in both places has significantly increased their fees. If we thought it was an effective tool to reach people who hadn’t found us yet, or there was a really large audience out there, it would be worth it. But generally there are about 25 max viewers, and we know who many of you are. We think your experience will be the same.
So-what do you need to do? Open your weekly email. Starting in January, each week at the top of the email you’ll find the link to this week’s worship service. You’ll just be able to click on that youtube link and join us for worship. We will no longer livestream to facebook, and the livestream won’t be public, but you’ll have access, and we will have the assurance that we have a pretty good sense of who is in our email crowd, (and as you know, anyone can request to join, but we’ll get some information about people first).
Thanks everyone! We love being in community with you all, and are committed to keeping Spirit Garage a safe space, even though we know we can never promise complete safety.
Pastor Holly Johnson
in conversation with Pastor Michelle Lewis, Andy Pokel, and the members of the Drivetrain leadership of Spirit Garage