Top 7 Reasons Why Your Church Should NOT Live Stream

Maybe your church has been live streaming for years or perhaps you're just considering adding a streaming ministry to your church. Either way, you might simply assume you'd always find encouragement to take the leap and join other churches that live stream. This article is intended to help live streaming ministries be more successful --- both those that are just in the planning stages, and those that are already up and running.

So should your church be live streaming? The answer is, “No.” Not every church is gifted to do every possible form of ministry. Some churches don't have the culture, experience and spiritual maturity to live stream, even if you don't have other barriers.

So, this is a list of the reasons that you should not live stream. This is not meant to be a discouragement, but a preflight checklist to make sure that a new live streaming ministry won't crash on takeoff, hurting more people than it helps. This is certainly not an exhaustive list, but it should help you to know if you're ready to start live streaming or if there are red flags that need to be addressed first.

1. You don't have an answer for, “Why?”

Do you have a vision as to “why” you should live stream? There will certainly be weeks where it will seem harder than normal, weeks where trolls take over the chat, or times when the budget doesn't seem to support it any longer. When you're in the midst of one of those seasons, you'd better know why you're putting yourself through so much trouble.

Along with knowing “why” you should live stream, please immediately eliminate reasons that might be hiding in the subconscious of decision makers. Live streaming isn't the magic pill that will automatically reach teens and millenials. It won't necessarily bring young families back, especially if they left because of a culture that didn't welcome them. It won't increase tithes and offerings, especially if you can't articulate how lives are being changed by those gifts. It won't solve problems that were caused by things that haven't been solved.

“Other churches are doing it” isn't a good reason why either. This isn't some Church-wide game of keeping up with the Joneses. Just because another church is live streaming, doesn't mean that your church needs to.

No, consider your live stream to be a ministry. Ministries help people. So, figure out how your church can help people by live streaming or don't do it.

2. The problem of “who does what”

Along those same lines, if you don't have a “why”, maybe you don't have a leader either --- someone who is ready to devote the necessary time and energy into making the live stream a success. Don't tell me that an over-worked staff member will add it onto her to do list. That's a recipe for disaster.

Maybe the live stream will normally be straight-forward, but it won't always be like that. Sometimes equipment won't want to turn on or connect. Sometimes your ISP won't be giving you the speeds you paid for. At some point something will go wrong with your hosting. A thousand things can go wrong in any ministry. When that happens, do you have someone who can concentrate on solving the problem or will the worship leader have to decide between playing a guitar and troubleshooting with tech support? It's always better for the leader to have spare mental bandwidth so that emergencies don't cause a chain reaction pile up of failures with other ministries as well.

Depending on the scope of your live stream, you might need more than one person, too. Maybe your church is just barely keeping ministries staffed as it is…or isn't keeping them staffed, stretching to just barely make ministry happen as it is. If that's the case, it may be time to reprioritize and hold off on launching or continuing your streaming ministry.

3. You can't figure out how to make it a priority.

One way to overcome staffing problems is to keep the ministry smaller, at least at the beginning.

If your church tends to have grandiose visions and a track record of failures, maybe it's better to start smaller than you want and build from there.

When you start a live streaming ministry, it should be just that — a ministry. Make it a priority. Put the right resources into it, not too much or too little. If you can't decide which direction to take, maybe it shouldn't be something you do.

4. You play "The Blame Game."

It can be easy to let the live stream become the scapegoat for other systemic problems in the church. The live stream won't solve all your church's problems, but it's not the cause of them either. This type of thinking is behind the article “Attendance is down. Blame the live stream”

There's something special about attending church in-person, feeling the reassuring pat on the back from a friend and being with people, that the live stream will never match. If people really want to watch online, instead of in person, something is wrong.

It's this same thinking that leads professional sports teams to do blackouts. If the team puts on an exciting game and looks like they could win this year's championships, people will show up. Church is the same way.

This is just one example of the blame game that certain churches can play, though. If your church already has a culture that says, “if we didn't have to spend so much money on the kid's ministry, we could really accomplish some things” or “if people had better taste in music, they'd come to our church,” you've got a problem that having a live stream will make worse, not because it's a live stream, but because it's another ministry that people can blame.

5. Your's is a mission of condemnation, not love.

Another thing you should be wary of is how you plan to reach people. Think not only of your church, but The Church. Are you “the only church that will speak the truth about how sinful they are” or “the only church that's not afraid to tell people they're going to hell”? This kind of approach rarely works in person. It will likely be less successful in a webcast.

Consider that you might be coming across the same as the Pharisee in the parable of the Pharisee and the Tax Collector. Approaching people as if you're perfect, incapable of sin, while telling them about their sin only bolsters the negative stereotype that many people already have of The Church, while doing little to actually help them escape it.

6. You are unwilling to change.

This prideful spirit can carry over to how you actually do the technology of a live stream. No one can tell you exactly what to do to grow the ministry. No one can tell you what will work in your given situation with the challenges that you face, but you can find out.

To do so, keep an open mind and experiment. Maybe a wide shot that includes the pastor and the screen won't work because of the size of your stage or your particular camera angles. Try cutting between a tight shot of the pastor and the computer. Maybe that doesn't work either. Try lower thirds. In each context, best practices that work well in one church may not work as well in another.

A willingness to experiment comes from the humility to know that you don't know it all. Trying different things and different approaches, guided by the Holy Spirit, can help you reach more and more people, so that your live stream can be an effective ministry.

7. Ignoring red flags

As much as live streaming is a hot topic, it's not right for every church. But just because you have roadblocks that you should address now doesn't mean you won't have a successful live streaming ministry later.

It's not the case that you should never live stream if you have any one of these problems. Instead, address the problems first to give your live streaming ministry the best chance it can to actually help people. Today, you might not have a leader. Right now, you might have a culture of blame. Maybe experimenting isn't something your church is willing to do. That doesn't mean you'll never solve these problems. Just don't assume that the live stream will solve them. It could only magnify them.