Should your church still livestream its services?
TL;DR
Livestreaming can help people who cannot attend, but it needs a clear purpose and a capable team. If the full-service stream looks or sounds poor, a well-recorded sermon may serve people better.
Stop Your Streams
Today I want to talk about something a lot of churches started doing during Covid and then never really questioned again.
Livestreaming.
For some churches, it has become one of those things that just happens every Sunday now. The camera goes on. The service goes online.
I think it is worth asking a slightly uncomfortable question.
Should your church actually be livestreaming the whole service?
Sometimes we keep a method alive long after we have stopped asking what it is actually for.
Pew Research did a helpful study on this in 2023. They found that around a quarter of U.S. adults regularly watch religious services online or on TV, so this is clearly not irrelevant.
People are watching.
But the same research also found that in-person worship is still far more preferred across age groups and demographics.
Among people who both attend in person and watch online, 76% said they prefer going in person. Only 11% said they prefer virtual services.
So the fear around livestreaming replacing gathered worship is overstated.
But I don’t think that is the main story.
For a lot of people, livestreaming is not replacing church. It is supplementing it.
It helps people keep up when they are away.
It helps people stay connected when they are ill.
It helps older members, housebound members, people travelling, people recovering, people caring for others, and people who genuinely cannot be there.
Those are a good reasons to do it.
But it is not the same as saying every church should prioritise livestreaming the whole service every week.
Because the online experience is not a like-for-like replacement.
Pew found that regular in-person attenders were far more likely to feel strongly connected to other worshippers than people watching online.
A livestream can help someone listen. But it is much weaker at creating connection, so there is a natural, built-in weakness with livestreaming.
So before we go any further, let’s say this: livestreaming has some positives, but we’re not in 2020 anymore, and it’s certainly not going to solve a host of problems for us.
Why a full church service can be difficult to livestream
Some parts of a church service translate better online than others.
The sermon usually translates fairly well. Someone can listen while making lunch, driving, walking, resting, or catching up later in the week. If the audio is clear and the video is decent, it can be genuinely useful.
Worship is far harder.
In the room, worship might feel warm, full, and sincere. Online, it can sound thin, echoey, unbalanced, or awkward. It is very difficult to get a good mix of music through a livestream without the right in-house tech and skills.
So livestreaming is not neutral. It changes the experience.
If someone is checking out your church for the first time, the livestream might not be showing them your church at its best. In fact, a poor livestream can sometimes create a worse first impression than no livestream at all.
This is why, for many churches, I think the better priority might be simpler:
Record the sermon well.
Tidy it up in post-production.
Upload it to YouTube and maybe turn it into a podcast.
Send it to people who missed Sunday.
Use short clips during the week.
That might serve more people, with a better end result.
Decide whether livestreaming serves a clear purpose
My answer would be: maybe (annoying I know).
If you have the team, the equipment, and a clear reason for doing it, then yes, it can be a handy supplement to meeting in person.
But doing it because “we started in 2020 and never stopped” probably is not a good enough reason.
And assuming it works as an outreach tool probably does not cut it either, unless you have the evidence and you know the service looks and sounds good on your stream.
You could keep it available without making it prominent on your website.
A poor livestream is not automatically better than no livestream.
A clear, well-recorded sermon may be far more useful than a poorly shoot livestream of the full service.