It's hard to believe everything you read…especially online. That's how I felt when I read a post on one of the church tech forums. The author talked about how his church was planning on dropping the live-stream (or at least limiting it). Why? Attendance had dropped at the live worship services.
I empathize with the problem of dropping attendance. My church is going through a crisis right now, and for the first time in our history our attendance is declining. I get it. It's frustrating.
Even so, the first thing that entered my mind was, “How does a live stream result in declining attendance?”
Let me give you an analogy. Let's say you have tickets to a sporting event. Better yet, you can pick wherever you want to sit. Your favorite team is playing. It's a nice day. It's close enough that you can drive from where you are. You don't have to worry about parking; you know you'll get a decent spot. Yet, you decide to stay in and watch it on TV or even on your phone. What's wrong with this picture?
That's like staying home to watch church on a live-stream when nothing is preventing you from going to the actual service. It's just not the same as being there.
I'm a huge fan of live-streaming. It's where I serve at my church. I'm also writing a book about it. I do it five days a week in my own ministry. Still, on weeks that I'm not serving, I drive to church.
So, what's going on if attendance has dropped, but your online congregation has increased? It could be that people are simply not driving to church and are attending online instead, but I doubt it. Some people might do that, but not the core members of your church. The committed people in your church would only do that if they couldn't make it to church for some reason. Maybe they have a sick kid, car troubles, or are out of town, etc.
If you don’t dig into the problems, any success will be short-lived.
Others may be attending online only because they have a problem with attending in-person. Maybe there's a person who annoys them. Maybe parking is a hassle.
Others may have left the church altogether at the same time as new people have started attending the online campus. In this case, the number drop has nothing to do with the increase in the online campus, except that they happened at roughly the same time.
Finally, others may just not want to attend in person. Maybe attending online is much more convenient. Maybe attending online is just a filler until they find another church.
Regardless, I have a suspicion that limiting online services or eliminating them is not going to restore attendance. There are deeper issues at work here. Like the sporting event analogy, people will normally want to attend live, so the first step is figuring out why they don't --- or are doing so in declining numbers.
Perhaps it's a gap in understanding the value of in-person community. Some people claim that they worship God best on the golf course or while hiking. This may stem from ignorance about what church is supposed to be.
Sometimes, I think the word “church” itself is the problem. The word has come to mean “a building used for religious observance.” If that's the case, you can do “religious observance” almost anywhere. The word, as Jesus and the Apostles used it didn't mean that at all. It means community or gathering. An empty building isn't a church any more than an empty field is a football game. You need people to make both of those into what they're intended to be. To say that you can worship God alone is like saying you can play a football game alone. You can throw or kick the ball, but you can't play a game. You need at least two people for that.
If there's a problem with the church or the church service --- a problem that is solved by attending online, the solution isn't to stop the live-stream. The solution is to find out what's broken and fix it.
Is there a parking problem? See if you can persuade the most committed members of the congregation to park at an adjoining business.
If a certain group has decided this is “their church” and new people aren't welcome, deal with that group.
Whatever the issue, deal with it before attempting to get local people to come back. If you don't dig into the problems, any success will be short-lived.
Find out if people who are attending online are the same people previously attended in person. You can start by looking at your analytics. If you're getting most of your online congregation from afar, they're not the same people who used to attend live. The only way they could be is if a large local employer recently closed, forcing those people to move away.
You can also poll the online congregation to see where they're from (in case the analytics aren't accurate).
A few years ago I met a guy who was struggling with integrity issues. He was from a different part of the country, but still he felt it was necessary to go by his middle name online. We connected and I even was able to meet him in person when he came to town to visit. He didn't feel safe sharing what he was going through with his own home church. He wanted a level of anonymity before he felt safe enough to share. That's one of the cases when online church can be better: it enables people to be honest because they can be anonymous while attending.
But what if my friend had formerly attended my church? What if he had never gotten up the courage to talk about his issues? Online, he felt safe to share and that safety enabled healing. In that case, might he have been better off attending online than hiding in person.
There are many reasons why attendance online could increase while attendance in-person decreases. Most of them are unrelated to the live-stream. The few that are will not be fixed by stopping the live-stream. In those cases, the live-stream just revealed problems that were already there.
