Both/And: Maximizing Hybrid Worship Experiences for In-Person and Online Engagement By Jason Moore. ©2022 Invite Press 204 pages
This book grew out of the reality of COVID-19 and the changes pushed on churches by the lock down. Of course many places had been doing some form of hybrid worship long before March 2020 but many of us were suddenly pushed to do worship differently in that month. And then as the world moved into the later stages of the pandemic many of us decided (either intentionally or by default – more on that later) to continue with some form of hybrid worship. Whether we were/are doing it well might be a whole other question.
In fact that is one of the questions I brought with me into Sabbatical, which is why this volume ended up on my reading list. I am instinctively convinced that hybrid worship needs to mean more than simply streaming what happens in the sanctuary on Sunday morning, but am not entirely sure what I think needs to be done differently. I was hoping this book would help me sort that out.
It did and it didn’t.
Moore affirms my thoughts that we need to do things differently. He draws out questions and concerns that had not occurred to me and ones that had but not at a conscious level. At the same time, many of the suggestions he presents for how to do things differently seem like they only work within specific worship structures, with a bigger volunteer/staff team, and with far different technology than some of us work with. So the questions were good. The suggestions made logical sense. The challenge is how to adapt them to the context (worship style, team size/expertise/comfort, technology available) where one is.
One of the key pieces I took from the book was the idea that we are serving different audiences. We have the people who are in the room. We have the committed church folk who, for a variety of reasons, who are not in the room but are on-line instead. We have the people who are using the livestream as a way to check us out, to test this as a possible faith community. We have those who drifted away, or left more intentionally, who are wondering about coming back. There are probably more subsets as well. We also have the reality that some will join online as the service is happening, and some will join when their schedule fits better. How do we build hybrid worship that meets these various needs? How do we make all feel welcomed, included as participants rather than observers? How do we keep them engaged? What language opens or closes doors? What pieces work really well on screen but not in the room, and vice versa? In the end it becomes an inclusivity question.
Another piece that kept occurring to me, particularly early in the book, was that maybe improving the experience for the online side of the hybrid worship equation will improve it for the in-person side as well. Maybe that hit me because it ties in to my ongoing pondering of “does our current worship order actually work?” (or maybe who does it work for and who doesn’t it). Can worship (on-line and in-person) be more interactive and participatory? How? Changing worship is always a bit of a tightrope to walk, but worship styles/patterns need to evolve and change over time.
Then there was the key question, the one many of us may not have spent much time on. Why are we doing hybrid worship? There are lots of answers to this. There are also people who, in 2022/23 were saying “OK we can stop now so all those people will come back”. It is possible that we need to talk about why we see the need/why we are called to be hybrid churches (or the reverse) as we move forward into a new era. I appreciated Moore’s suggestion that one of the reasons for hybrid worship is as a way of living out the Great Commandment, seeing it as much as outreach as service to the current members of the community.
It is my belief that the church of the future will need to be a hybrid church. This is about worship and about everything else we do. Generally speaking we (clergy and laity alike) have been well-trained to be church in one way. We need to learn a new way. There are churches that are primarily (or only) on-line. That is not what most of us are looking for. We need to figure out how to be Both/And.
