“This program has been pre-recorded in front of a live audience.” The boomers reading this will remember that statement from old-school TV shows. It’s a tried-and-true concept to have a show feel live with the safety net of a recording for broadcast. And that’s the approach a lot of churches are taking with “live stream” these days. The stream is happening but it’s not a live stream of the church service happening at that moment. Churches are showing recordings at satellite campuses as well.
Grace Church sits just outside of Kansas City, Kansas. There are three campuses, the main one in Overland Park South that seats about 2000 people and two smaller campuses within about a five-mile radius.
“The way that we do our teaching is at South Overland Park, our original location, there's usually live teaching there for the most part. And the other campuses, the other two, they'll do like 50% live out of a year. 50% of the time it'll be our senior pastor teaching by video usually,” explains Grace Church Director of Worship Arts Ben AbuSaada, who sat down for the Church Production Podcast with Joseph Cottle to talk about their production routine.
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“The main thing we do on a weekly basis is we create the programming,” he explains. “So, our programming is fed to them on Thursdays by three o'clock and that way the worship directors can have everything by Thursday night so they can run it for rehearsal.”
Messages, worship sets, media like bumpers, testimonies and series introductions are all pre-produced for the satellite campuses and live stream long before Sunday.
“For online services we have our message capture that we do on Tuesdays. Message capture is what we would use online, and then we also feed it to those campuses. If our senior pastor is teaching by video at the other two locations, our North Overland Park and our Olathe campus, we'll use the same teaching video that we just produced for our online service.”
While worship is still done live at all the campuses, multiple worship sets for online use are recorded in front of a live audience once a month. “We'll have the last Sunday of August, we’ll do an all-campus worship night,” AbuSaada explains. “So, we'll capture that with all the people in the room, and then we'll probably have three worship sets out of that time that we would attach to our services online. And then we'll kind of build a catalog of worship sets, and then we'll attach those to our service online.”
AbuSaada says COVID gave them an opportunity to really look and fine tune what the online experience had been like. “We did an online service, but we weren't paying close attention to it as far as quality and what the experience was like for someone online. So, when COVID hit, that was all we were doing for a while. It was like we got to produce basically a TV show every week.”
So how do attendees now feel about video teaching at the satellite campuses? “We've had mixed responses for the people who are live in the rooms in the auditoriums,” AbuSaada admits. He says last fall they changed the location of the sermon recordings from a studio to the stage of their newest campus. “They have a nice LED wall in the background,” he says. “So, they're teaching from a stage, which I think has created probably a little bit more positive experience, I think, for people both online and the people in the auditoriums. But the response has been fine. I think anytime you do any kind of video stuff, you're going to get people that are like, well, I just really live teaching, which I totally relate to and understand. So, we actually modified our amount of live teaching in a year based on some of those responses.”
>> To hear more of the conversation between Joseph Cottle and Ben AbuSaada at Grace Church, listen and share this podcast here: https://share.transistor.fm/s/4234bb36
