Streaming is a Cheap, Simple and Great Ministry Tool

I’ve been streaming a low quality live feed of our high school services online lately. I’ve had some great feedback like this Facebook message a girl left for me today:

This is a great idea to:
- Reach regular students who can’t make it to church
- Allow prospective students to check out your church from a distance
- Archive your services so students or parents can revisit them later
- Watch the videos later to evaluate and improve your services

Here’s a student-led service I recorded as I streamed it: (Turn your volume way up and lower your expectations – we had some serious audio and lighting issues on this recording. I’ll try to remember to replace it with a better one in the future.)

To stream our service for free, I signed up for a free account at Ustream.tv and embedded the feed to my blog (you could just send a link to the feed on Ustream, but I prefer to have students on the blog. There’s even a free Ustream viewer app for iPhone students can use to see it.

Using a borrowed webcam and my laptop computer mounted (taped) to above the soundboard, I stream the service live. When I remember, I click the record button on Ustream so I can archive the service online.