Our peak views for the month of August totaled 770; which is up slightly from June (728) and down slightly from July (813). The summer peak views, in general, have proven to be lower than the spring months (both were over 1,000), but as this is all new and is compounded by pandemic closures, it is hard to say what is lower or higher than average.

The ability to worship outdoors has proven to be a good compromise when it is possible, but also brings some live stream challenges. The first two outdoor Sundays we attempted to use Pastor Stanton’s phone for live streaming (the best option from a small survey of staff’s phones). Unfortunately it wasn’t up to the task, as the stream would freeze up, and on the second Sunday simply stopped altogether when we were 30 minutes into the service.

To solve this we decided to use some of the equipment from our inside setup. So on our third outdoor Sunday, after the 8am service, I extended some cable runs and moved a camcorder and laptop outdoors. While it worked much better, we had a rough start. The audio was muted on a channel that we don’t use inside, so once I figured that out the stream sounded good, but we missed the prelude. But then our software encoder crashed, which affected each platform differently: YouTube & Boxcast (which streams to our website) went black for several minutes but kept going while I restarted, but Facebook and Twitter simply stopped streaming. The lesson here: if the platform you’re trying isn’t working, please try a different one; a great place to start is 1stlu.org/live. 

And we’ll need your patience in October, as we resume (hopefully) with live streaming the outdoor services, and as we begin to learn a permanent setup that is being installed in the sanctuary in mid-October. There will certainly be kinks to work out in the new system..

A big thank you to member Jeff Olson, who has embraced this new ministry and directs many of the worship live streams at First. We will need more members to help with this, so if you know someone—or would like to do so yourself—please contact andy@firstlu.org. 

And lastly, if you appreciate this ministry, please make certain to support First Lutheran with your regular donations at 1stlu.org/give. Thanks!