Reporting back

A few brave souls joined me in experimenting with a Compline service via Google Hangouts tonight! Thank you Matt, Diane, Daniel, and Brent! For this post, I’ll walk you through the order of things, share reactions from the group, and share some of the challenges along with possibilities for tweaking the experiment (in no particular order).

Around 8:40pm, I posted this invitation on Facebook:

I got a number of comments from folks interested, but not available for tonight, and 'yes' responses from Brent in Florida, Matt and Diane in Pennsylvania, and Daniel in Pennsylvania. 

From my Gmail screen, I invited everyone to the Hangout. Here we are:

The nice thing about Google Hangouts in a group conversation setting is that whoever is talking gets bounced to the full screen (or, Matt said he could choose who was featured in full screen). This feature was not so good for Compline, where poor Google Hangouts didn't know what to do with us while we were reading or singing in unison. The screen was constantly in flux, which was distracting and visually jarring. 

Besides the images jumping around, one other challenge was sound. During the hymns, I noticed a lag in the sound. I seemed to be ahead of the others, but I heard them as all singing together. It was still good to hear everyone, and in many ways it was appropriate that I had to get a "feel" for the rest of the community and adjust my singing accordingly. Matt suggested perhaps the issue was the feedback of the voices coming through the speakers and going right back out through the microphone. So, one possibility would be for all but the leader to "mute" their microphone.

Another challenge was resources - Brent had an LBW (the hymnal before the current one), Daniel and I had both LBW and ELW (the current hymnal), and Matt and Diane had no hymnal, but were following the ELW liturgy, utilizing Sundays and Seasons, which is a subscription-based online worship planning and liturgy assembling tool (Matt and Diane are both pastors). There are a few small differences between LBW and ELW in the Compline service itself, as well as in the psalms and hymns, so we weren't fully together. 

Hymns could be found at websites like this one or this one (thanks, Matt!). Brent suggested creating an entirely digital version of the liturgy for each participant, which would ensure that even those without a hymnal sitting around could participate. I am mindful, though, especially after our conversations in class today surrounding copyright, that this may not be a legal option. Matt suggested looking at the Compline service in the Book of Common Prayer, which is in the public domain (though is text only, no music). 

A few other reflections:

In the invitation to confession in the Compline service, the leader says, "Let us confess our sin in the presence of God and of one another." This idea of "presence" really caught me as I read it in front of a webcam - What does "presence" mean when we're just seeing tiny thumbnails of one another? Though it was certainly different from being physically present, I still appreciated seeing and hearing the others.

During our reflective portion after completing the liturgy, I asked if the experience still felt "worshipful," despite the jumpy video and sound issues. Diane put it nicely, that the difficulties were worth it to be in community in some way and to participate in Compline, which she doesn't get to do very often.

I was pleasantly surprised at the number of folks who were interested in this type of offering. There is something wonderful about the ability to worship together, despite being geographically distant. It really is "so great a cloud of witnesses" (Heb. 12:1)!

Overall, things went well enough, and there was enough interest, that I'd like to try this again with a different video platform. Brent suggested ooVoo, which is free and seems to feature the tiled look for multiple video feeds we were looking for. Group video calls are also available on Skype, although at least one person in the call has to be part of Skype Premium. 

Stay tuned for another go at this, maybe early next week!