Hello, my name is Mark Hoffman. You see me leading worship in our Sunday morning services just about every week here at MCF, and it is a blessing to be able to do so. As Director of Worship Ministries, I’ve been asked by Pastor Andrew to give you all a worship ministry update for the past year.
Has much changed over the past year? Yes! Global pandemics have a way of disrupting things, and it was just over one year ago now that we all found ourselves trying to figure out how we do church during a lockdown, and for us, first and foremost this meant live streaming our worship services.
At the very beginning, Andrew streamed the entire service from his house as the main hub, and we incorporated other pre-recorded elements.There were weeks when the Bees led worship from their home live; weeks when Jim Herold recorded the worship songs, and several weeks when my daughter Sarah & I also pre-recorded worship from home. At least for me, there was a learning process here in lighting the room, positioning a phone to record the video, figuring out how to mic the piano and vocals, and finally editing together the audio and video. I have to give credit to Sarah, we always did everything in one take, except ONE TIME I lost my place and forgot the words and we had to restart. (I’m still a little mad about that!!)
Back at that time Andrew and I already had our Good Friday and Easter services all planned and ready to go, so we had to adapt the best we could, making a quick pivot to turn our Good Friday service into a self-directed service at home, and then Easter was another live stream from the Bee home with pre-recorded worship.
In May, some of the lockdown restrictions were relaxed so that we started being able to gather in groups of 10. This meant that we could bring in a small worship team and tech team and do the live stream from the church sanctuary with no in-person attendance. We began to use a new live stream system called Switcher Studio which allows us to use iPhones as our live cameras and produce a live stream with multiple camera angles. Special thanks goes to Andrew for all the work he put into figuring out all the technical aspects of how to do our live streams from the very beginning to what we have now. I’m so grateful for his knowledge and willingness to make things like that happen.
About this time we also began to use Faithlife as a tool to keep us connected and informed as a church. As it relates to worship, we’ve used Faithlife for posting my weekly Preparing for Worship blog, for maintaining an up-to-date page on our church website related to our Sunday services, creating digital bulletins, gathering info from digital connection cards, in addition to many other ways the church staff uses Faithlife for communication and connection. Faithlife isn’t a perfect digital tool, but it has several good features that we’re trying to leverage right now.
The plan for moving into the summer of 2020 was to begin having outdoor services once a month so that we could actually begin to gather people for worship again. We did have one outdoor service the first Sunday of June, but then as guidelines changed yet again, we made preparations to have in-person worship in the sanctuary for the first time in months. This meant as a staff figuring out capacity and distancing, setting up an RSVP system, working on COVID guidelines and much, much more. It also meant expanding to 2 worship services, one at 9:30am
and one at 11:00am, in order to accommodate as many people as we could while following our COVID guidelines.
This has pretty much been our standard up until now, 2 in-person services, while live streaming the 9:30am service. There have been bumps along the way, of course, like the COVID outbreak we had back in November that affected so many of us, along with the multiple times our staff and volunteers have had to navigate COVID exposure, possible exposure, getting tested, and on and on. This past year has not been easy. We now have 2 services plus the added element of live-streaming, and yet for a variety of reasons (some related to COVID and some not) our worship and tech teams have a total of about a dozen less volunteers than we did pre-pandemic. If you have a musical or singing gift and you’re interested in serving on the worship team, please feel free to talk to me. We especially have needs on our Tech team right now. We can train you. For the most part, if you know how to use a computer or a smartphone, you can learn how to serve on our Tech team by either running our slide presentations, or helping to produce the livestream, or being at the soundboard mixing audio. If you have questions and want to learn more, I strongly encourage you to come to our Tech Team “Open House” on Sunday, May 16th at 1:00pm. You can see what the Tech Team does, get hands on with the gear we use, and ask all your questions about these important behind the scenes serving opportunities.
I especially want to thank everyone who has been making Sunday mornings happen over the past year. To our Worship Team and Tech Team, some of you have gone above and beyond, coming to Thursday evening rehearsals and serving multiple weeks a month. You all make serving here such a blessing and I am so very thankful for each one of you. Thanks to all the folks on the cleaning team, thanks to our greeters and ushers, and to our Communion volunteers. Thanks to Pastor Andrew and our fantastic staff team of Eryn and Susan. Thanks also to all those helping now in our Sunday Children’s ministry, and thanks to Marcia Jarrett for all the fantastic Kids’ Time videos you recorded for our worship services last year.
Looking ahead, there is much more to do. There are more decisions to be made and steps to take in order to get back to “normal” Sunday worship. I look forward to getting us all back together in one room, at one time, seeing all of your faces and hearing all of your unmuffled voices praising the Lord together.
I’ve been reading a book called Corporate Worship by Matt Merker, and he writes this:
“Christians go to church because we are the church. God initiates in love to bring his people together for his good purposes. If a church never meets, it is no church at all. Meeting isn’t just something churches do. A meeting is, in part, what a church is.”
If nothing else, I hope that coming out of this pandemic we will have found a greater appreciation for the gathered church, for the special blessing of God’s presence in and among his people when we are together. In the year to come, may God continue to bring us together both physically and spiritually for his glory and for our good.
Ministry Update From Mark Hoffman
Hello, my name is Mark Hoffman. You see me leading worship in our Sunday morning services just about every week here at MCF, and it is a blessing to be able to do so. As Director of Worship Ministries, I’ve been asked by Pastor Andrew to give you all a worship ministry update for the past year.
Has much changed over the past year? Yes! Global pandemics have a way of disrupting things, and it was just over one year ago now that we all found ourselves trying to figure out how we do church during a lockdown, and for us, first and foremost this meant live streaming our worship services.
At the very beginning, Andrew streamed the entire service from his house as the main hub, and we incorporated other pre-recorded elements.There were weeks when the Bees led worship from their home live; weeks when Jim Herold recorded the worship songs, and several weeks when my daughter Sarah & I also pre-recorded worship from home. At least for me, there was a learning process here in lighting the room, positioning a phone to record the video, figuring out how to mic the piano and vocals, and finally editing together the audio and video. I have to give credit to Sarah, we always did everything in one take, except ONE TIME I lost my place and forgot the words and we had to restart. (I’m still a little mad about that!!)
Back at that time Andrew and I already had our Good Friday and Easter services all planned and ready to go, so we had to adapt the best we could, making a quick pivot to turn our Good Friday service into a self-directed service at home, and then Easter was another live stream from the Bee home with pre-recorded worship.
In May, some of the lockdown restrictions were relaxed so that we started being able to gather in groups of 10. This meant that we could bring in a small worship team and tech team and do the live stream from the church sanctuary with no in-person attendance. We began to use a new live stream system called Switcher Studio which allows us to use iPhones as our live cameras and produce a live stream with multiple camera angles. Special thanks goes to Andrew for all the work he put into figuring out all the technical aspects of how to do our live streams from the very beginning to what we have now. I’m so grateful for his knowledge and willingness to make things like that happen.
About this time we also began to use Faithlife as a tool to keep us connected and informed as a church. As it relates to worship, we’ve used Faithlife for posting my weekly Preparing for Worship blog, for maintaining an up-to-date page on our church website related to our Sunday services, creating digital bulletins, gathering info from digital connection cards, in addition to many other ways the church staff uses Faithlife for communication and connection. Faithlife isn’t a perfect digital tool, but it has several good features that we’re trying to leverage right now.
The plan for moving into the summer of 2020 was to begin having outdoor services once a month so that we could actually begin to gather people for worship again. We did have one outdoor service the first Sunday of June, but then as guidelines changed yet again, we made preparations to have in-person worship in the sanctuary for the first time in months. This meant as a staff figuring out capacity and distancing, setting up an RSVP system, working on COVID guidelines and much, much more. It also meant expanding to 2 worship services, one at 9:30am
and one at 11:00am, in order to accommodate as many people as we could while following our COVID guidelines.
This has pretty much been our standard up until now, 2 in-person services, while live streaming the 9:30am service. There have been bumps along the way, of course, like the COVID outbreak we had back in November that affected so many of us, along with the multiple times our staff and volunteers have had to navigate COVID exposure, possible exposure, getting tested, and on and on. This past year has not been easy. We now have 2 services plus the added element of live-streaming, and yet for a variety of reasons (some related to COVID and some not) our worship and tech teams have a total of about a dozen less volunteers than we did pre-pandemic. If you have a musical or singing gift and you’re interested in serving on the worship team, please feel free to talk to me. We especially have needs on our Tech team right now. We can train you. For the most part, if you know how to use a computer or a smartphone, you can learn how to serve on our Tech team by either running our slide presentations, or helping to produce the livestream, or being at the soundboard mixing audio. If you have questions and want to learn more, I strongly encourage you to come to our Tech Team “Open House” on Sunday, May 16th at 1:00pm. You can see what the Tech Team does, get hands on with the gear we use, and ask all your questions about these important behind the scenes serving opportunities.
I especially want to thank everyone who has been making Sunday mornings happen over the past year. To our Worship Team and Tech Team, some of you have gone above and beyond, coming to Thursday evening rehearsals and serving multiple weeks a month. You all make serving here such a blessing and I am so very thankful for each one of you. Thanks to all the folks on the cleaning team, thanks to our greeters and ushers, and to our Communion volunteers. Thanks to Pastor Andrew and our fantastic staff team of Eryn and Susan. Thanks also to all those helping now in our Sunday Children’s ministry, and thanks to Marcia Jarrett for all the fantastic Kids’ Time videos you recorded for our worship services last year.
Looking ahead, there is much more to do. There are more decisions to be made and steps to take in order to get back to “normal” Sunday worship. I look forward to getting us all back together in one room, at one time, seeing all of your faces and hearing all of your unmuffled voices praising the Lord together.
I’ve been reading a book called Corporate Worship by Matt Merker, and he writes this:
“Christians go to church because we are the church. God initiates in love to bring his people together for his good purposes. If a church never meets, it is no church at all. Meeting isn’t just something churches do. A meeting is, in part, what a church is.”
If nothing else, I hope that coming out of this pandemic we will have found a greater appreciation for the gathered church, for the special blessing of God’s presence in and among his people when we are together. In the year to come, may God continue to bring us together both physically and spiritually for his glory and for our good.
Mark Hoffman