Mobile Worship Pop-Ups: On Not Returning to Church Buildings in 2020

Mea Culpa

First of all, I need to apologize. I’ve been slow. Even though we have been social distancing since March, I have nevertheless continued to assume corporate worship for the whole congregation was still a thing we’d get back to. And honestly because our worship normally happens in the sanctuary, I’ve still been imagining models of corporate worship broadcast from the church building.

I pride myself on being an idea person. I should have been able to imagine alternatives to this a while back, because we hosted a whole set of outdoor baptisms at the beginning of June, and did them outside, and I officiated four outdoor weddings this month as well, and it was all lovely and safe…

But honestly the pandemic has sometimes left me a bit stymied and puzzled on how to proceed. I get stuck.

Honestly I hadn’t thought about this format I’m going to describe until this week. Four months into the pandemic. Please be patient with me and chock it up to corona-brain.

What I’m describing here is definitely a pastiche of a lot of ideas I’ve seen from different congregations and communities.

Very little is original to me, other than weaving it together in a trans media manner.

Pop-Up Worship

I’m encouraging pop-up worships on driveways in small groups. And then to connect all the pop-ups to each other, the pastor or another worship will travel from one pop-up pod to another and broadcast some portions of the service from that location.

Congregations will have to designate the number of people that can be present based on municipal or state guidelines. Maybe 15-20 people total, and then leave room for Elijah, one more family who might just join randomly from the neighborhood.

In our congregation, I will be there with my phone. And we will do a live stream of our worship service from that location, while encouraging many other pods to gather in various places, wherever they are.

And then, when we’re together, we’ll keep it short. Nobody said in the Bible or elsewhere that worship services had to be specifically an hour or three hours or 10 minutes, it’s just that you’re supposed to gather.

So gather together. Have a brief reading and some kind of message. Invite the organist and band to be traveling musicians at that location so they can share music.

Then check in with people and ask them how they’re doing. Use the camera on the phone to kind of pan across the group, so that people who are watching it can still see their fellow parishioners and friends.

Once you’ve done that let anybody who wants share a message on the video so that people can hear from one another, even at a distance.

Then provide some resources to do a couple of additional things. First, give people guidance on how to do the communion liturgy in their driveway. You could even ordain people to be the consecrators if that’s important in your community.

But anyway designate somebody to lead that part and then share a meal on the driveway.

Pop-up pods could do this a number of different ways. You could do a traditional communion liturgy, use the words of institution, say the Lord’s Prayer have everybody bring their own bread and grape juice or wine.

or you could share a love feast and have people gather together on the driveway and snack or eat together. There’s all kinds of different approaches you could take depending on your tradition, and your piety around this. But it gives the people a chance to eat together.

On Safety and Some Practical Notes

And then, of course, very important. Give really really direct instructions on how to gather safely. Everybody wearing a mask. Each family group social distancing from each other. There probably has to be some special conversations with families and kids so that kids understand what you’re doing and what they can do and what they can’t do safely when they’re seeing other families.

But the cool thing about this is you could host one of these anywhere. It could be your driveway, could be the park. It could be the stand or pavilion near your neighborhood swimming pool. It could be outdoors at your nursing home or assisted living facility.

And then what you should probably do is save some space. Iff you think that you’re going to gather 10 people together (based on Signup Genius results), set one extra place for “Elijah,” the potential visitor.

Then publicize in your community that you’re doing this and if you have a neighbor or a friend or somebody who is needing time socially with others, invite them to come along and join the group also.

Of course, if you’re the one broadcasting you’re also sharing your service with a wider digitally mediated community. And then what people can do in each of these pop-up pods is they could broadcast theirs as well if they want it as a way of extending the community out. Take as much time as you’d like to train each small community on methods of using social media for outreach and connection.

In our location, I’m thinking about designating two times per week for the pop-ups, Wednesdays at 6:30 p.m. and Sundays at 9 a.m. And for us, I’m going to ask our congregation to try and establish these as regular regional small groups for a reliable small community to gather with weekly.

Now there’s a lot more to this, and like I said, many reading this are probably dong various components of this. I think that probably people could add a lot in comments around how they’re already doing things like this in their spaces. But what it allows you to do in any Christian community, any religious community really is begin to gather again in a way that’s safe during coronavirus, but also takes the church out into the world and doesn’t require the building, doesn’t require special space that we’ve always assumed is where we would gather.

And by using the transmedia component, you’re turning the world into a cathedral. You’re still gathering the wider community even when you gather in the pop-up pods.

For those of you who will preach, you might try using Otter.ai to transcribe your sermons.

If you are a podcaster, you may want to ask an additional person to run an audio recording on their phone in addition to the live stream.

Question:

So if let’s say I am in quarantine for a week. What would I experience as a worshipper watching these broadcast pop ups? And would I hear a message from you each wed/Sunday.  I would think a pastor’s sermon would be important. 

Answer:

Yes there will be a sermon. You’d see other people from your church. You’d be part of a virtual communion liturgy. We’d have music like for the baptism service. Etc

Question:

How would you toggle between the sites on a fb live stream. 

Answer:

You don’t. Each service is at a different site.

So all the other sites meet and either watch the live or do their own service as they wish

Question:

So we have a main service somewhere?

Answer:

Yes. One Sunday it’s in West Fork. The next Sunday at Gulley. Third Sunday at somebody’s pool house. Etc. Over time people get to see the breadth of our congregation in location. To me that is one of the great benefits. Seeing each other where we live.