Seize Your Church’s New Start—How to Live Stream Church This Fall

Fall usually provides a new start for schools—and for churches. But the calendar doesn’t look the same this year. Nothing does.

Can this fall still bring a fresh start? Yes! And it doesn’t have to be as hard as you may think.

If you’re already live streaming church services, you’re on the right track. Because of that choice, you can accomplish powerful things. Even if you haven’t started live streaming yet, you can still start right now.

And whether you began live streaming your services in a hurry months ago or you’re about to begin, you’ll need a sustainable way to do it for the long haul. You can’t be the only person in your church who knows how to live stream. Instead, you can share ministry responsibility by training a team of volunteers who can serve on rotation with you.

When you use the right tools, it’s not only possible but easy. (Yes, even if your team is tiny! Even if you and new technology aren’t generally the best of friends.) You can equip your church to shine brighter. You can take every opportunity to make this time one of compelling digital discipleship and tremendous outreach.

Ready?

Start reading, or click a link below to jump to that section.

Effortless integrations
Meaningful results
Simple training & teamwork
A simple live streaming process

Effortless integrations

Start with a user-friendly live streaming service that works seamlessly with all the other church tech you need—Faithlife Live Stream.

You can go live straight from Faithlife Proclaim with a click. (Available now for Windows, coming soon for Mac.)
You can engage your viewers in a whole new way by writing on your slides—live! It’s one of Proclaim’s new attention-boosting features.

And so that you can reach a broader audience, people will be able to watch your sermons and events in three places:

Your church’s Faithlife group (accessible to group members)
Your church’s Faithlife Site (no sign-in required for guests)
Your church’s Faithlife TV channel (also available on the Faithlife TV apps)

Here’s a big bonus: all those places automatically update . . . without you having to do a thing!

Plus, the live stream gives your audience chances to fellowship with each other over built-in chat as well as a button to give if your church uses Faithlife Giving—making it easy for your congregation to give as a part of their worship.

All these integrations mean it’s not just easier to live stream your church service and events. It’s easier for people to join you in worshipping God.

And when you need help? We’re there with free support 365 days a year—even on Sundays, Easter, and Christmas.

Meaningful results

Because of live streaming, you can:

Foster a sense of togetherness. With built-in chat functionality through your church’s Faithlife group, your attendees can share prayer needs or note a powerful point in the sermon. The speaker can ask a question and invite viewers to type in their answer for an impromptu poll that keeps people engaged. It’s not the same as in-person fellowship, but it helps build that vital church community!
Keep your typical service time. Church time is a set part of our weeks. Keeping your service time helps people stay in that rhythm.
Avoid busywork. You don’t have time to edit a prerecorded video. Whether you’re a pastor, church admin, or lay leader, you may not have the time or equipment to record the service start to finish—much less edit it. With live streaming, you don’t have to worry about do-overs or splicing audio. It’s all there.

Simple training & teamwork

When you use Faithlife, you’ll find all kinds of how-to’s, from blog posts to support articles to videos and webinars.

For example, you could share this one article with your volunteers, and they’ll know how to live stream from Proclaim: Live Stream from Proclaim.

A simple live streaming process

Since live streaming is here to stay, it should be as simple as possible—every week, for your whole team. It should be reliable and sustainable. Right?

So once you’ve chosen your live streaming tech (church presentation software and live streaming platform like you saw above, plus any equipment), there’s one more ingredient to transforming live streaming into a thriving ministry of your church, long-term.

It’s preparing your process, and you can do it in just four steps:

Make a simple order of service—example below. (Yours might look different depending on how you choose to show the camera view and slides. Here are some great options.)

8:49 a.m. – Go “On Air” and start recording.

8:50 a.m. – Start 10-minute countdown timer. (Make sure your live stream cues include the countdown timer.)

9:00 a.m. – Show welcome announcement from platform with on-screen text overlay. (Or if using prerecorded footage, drop that footage into Proclaim.)

9:03 a.m. – Switch to “Digital Bulletin/Connection Card” link slide.

9:05 a.m. – Switch camera to worship team with slide overlay showing lyrics.

9:20 a.m. – Switch camera to pastor with slide overlay showing sermon points.

9:50 a.m. – Switch to “Text to Give” slide during offering.

9:55 a.m. – Switch camera to worship team with slide overlay showing lyrics.

10:00 a.m. – Switch to outro music and “See you next week” slide.

2. Find your live stream volunteers and ask for a commitment to volunteer for the next six months. That might sound like a long time, but with a little training, this team can serve on a weekly or biweekly rotation just like other ministry teams. And you can finally take a break!

3. Provide training. Here’s an on-demand webinar and a no-nonsense support article you can send immediately. Volunteers will see every step.

4. Make a one-page diagram of your hardware and its purpose. (For example, “We run our whole live stream production from this main computer. This is our camera, which is hooked up to our computer.”)

5. Write a step-by-step process for how to live stream using your particular setup. Write this so a teenager could run it—because you might have some teens on your volunteer team.

Once you finish that process, you’ve set up live streaming to become a successful part of a ministry that cares to share the truth with those near and far.

Ready to get started?

Faithlife Live Stream is easy to use and affordable for churches—and you can start using it right away. Your first 30 days are free, and pricing after that is based on how many people watch live in a month.

To get started with Faithlife Live Stream, hop to livestream.faithlife.com, click Start free trial, choose the size that fits your church, then select or create your church’s Faithlife group. That’s it!

If you need any help, chat with our friendly church tech experts.

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