The Millennial Star

Virtual Worship Tips

We all know that some ordinances must be administered in person, such as marriages, baptisms, blessings, and partaking of the sacrament. However it is possible to continue many aspects of community worship using other methods. For those who haven’t yet been invited to share in virtual congregational meetings, I wanted to share how this can be done.

Live Gatherings

My local Relief Society used Zoom for a gathering to discuss gardening and how to make bread. While there are several other platforms for communicating, Zoom offers several benefits:

My local Relief Society will begin gathering virtually on alternating Sundays at a set time on Sunday afternoons.

Our congregation has had an “empty nesters” group for Family Home Evening for many years. With the advent of the stay at home orders and cancellation of live Church meetings, this has also migrated to Zoom. Useful tips for live meetings:

Pre-recorded Devotionals

Folks in my local congregation have mad media skills. Since March 29 leadership has been assembling devotionals to support our Sabbaths. Talk about home-centered, Church-supported worship! The Easter devotional is inserted above.

The format of these devotionals has typically been:

I’m not part of the team that puts together our Annandale Devotionals, and I don’t know how they managed some of the magic that resulted in this devotional. For example, the performance of Beautiful Savior involved a singer in Annandale and a pianist in Utah. But as a moderately-informed person, here are suggestions on how such devotionals can be created:

If you are editing audio, Audacity is a great option. We use ProTools at the radio studio where I volunteer, but even the radio station is recommending Audacity for producers who are working on their home computers.

If you are editing video, Google has a video editing suite that is part of the suite of tools anyone with a Gmail account can use. Obviously, if you have experience with other video editing tools and you have access to those tools at home, use what you know.

For those intimidated by these technical things, consider reaching out to the congregation. You won’t know what people have to contribute if you don’t ask. Young people, in particular, tend to be both knowledgeable about how to create/edit/share content and eager to improve those skills.

Mainly, I hope you and yours aren’t experiencing Sunday worship merely as one multi-week snow blizzard. While out personal worship can be sufficient, community is such a lovely addition to the basics we can supply for ourselves!

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