We are ending our live-stream in 2024. Why?

Hey Anthem,

After almost four years of use, we have decided to stop our Sunday morning livestream in 2024. We will still publish video and audio recordings of our sermons every week (we always publish them by the following Tuesday), but we will no longer be streaming the gathering at 10am in the new year. December 31 will be our last Sunday morning stream.

For many of you, this explanation is sufficient. You have been and remain indifferent to live-streaming and live-streaming philosophy, and honestly I don’t blame you. At this point you are free to continue on your merry way. For those who care a bit more, however, or are curious as to how we reached this decision, or for those who want to enter the Wonka factory, carnival mirror experience that is the live-stream deliberation world, feel free to read on…

The debates in the Christian community about the validity, acceptance, efficacy of live-streaming raged before COVID, reached a new pitch during the pandemic, and, rest assured, still rage to this day. I have nothing to contribute to these debates, nor have they really swayed us either way in our decision. At Anthem we have always seen our livestream as a tool used to equip our church during a difficult time and, Lord willing, as a means of outreach to our community as we have emerged from the pandemic. We hold that the mission of the church doesn’t hinge upon its use, nor is it the evil that some have made it out to be. It served us greatly in its time, and while it would be easy to continue to use it, there is one main reason we have decided to stop its use.

I can summarize our decision in one phrase: we want our online ministry to be where the eyes are.

What do we mean by this?

In the spring of 2020, live-streaming became an overnight necessity. Pastor Allen and the staff (mostly Paden, to be honest) spent hours and days getting everything dialed in. It was very complicated. Learning inputs and outputs, trying cameras, learning what OBS is, and trying to get things not just functional but also aesthetically acceptable all took months of hard work. Many of you likely remember how hard it was in the beginning. We had a number of weeks where, despite our best efforts, technical difficulties were a weekly occurrence. We are a fairly tech-savvy church, but this was an big step above in terms of a production learning curve. It stretched us, we grew, and we put together a livestream that was impressive for a church our size. When we met outside under the tent, we dragged the whole production outside, still live-streaming. We didn’t want to miss a beat; we didn’t want anyone to be disconnected from Sunday morning ministry at our church. I believed then and believe now that it was the right thing to do at the time.

However, we are in 2023 now. Many churches have adopted live-streaming as a regular part of their ministry, and we have followed suit in simply continuing what we have done through the pandemic. However, unlike other churches, our livestream isn’t quite doing what it is intended to do. Here’s what we’ve been mulling over the past few months:

We are at a crossroads in terms of the quality of our livestream production. We have reached the limit of our current setup and gear in terms of how good the mix is, how consistent the audio levels, how engaging the viewing is. As a staff we have really broken this down a few times. What would it take to increase our quality to make things more “industry standard?” We talked about getting a new sound board, we talked about adding another camera angle, we talked about the expense of other tools to make our livestream more engaging. None of these solutions are simple, and to really make a noticeable impact, we would be spending thousands and thousands of dollars, at the very least. We could do it; we definitely thought about it, and if the circumstances were different maybe we would have, but then we began to look at the data…

Across both of our streaming platforms (Subsplash (our app) and YouTube) our average weekly viewership is consistently less than 10 homes on a Sunday morning. Many weeks it’s as low as 1-4 homes on a Sunday morning. Now, we never set out expecting we would get hundreds and hundreds of views every Sunday morning. It’s not just about the numbers. Each of those homes is important: what if its someone exploring who Jesus is, and they are being fed from home? Isn’t this worth keeping the livestream for? One could make an argument that it might be, except for a few other important data points.

1. The viewership is not consistent within the county. Our system doesn’t allow us to see too much, but we are able to see that many people who happen to log in to livestream don’t do so on a regular basis. In other words, if we do get people from Marin County tuning in, we don’t get them coming back consistently. This is an important note - if there were consistently considerable amounts of people tuning in from the same regions of the county, then we could take steps towards engaging them towards deeper involvement with our community.
2. The viewership is not consistent in terms of geography. We often have a few people tuning in from surprising places all over the country. While we appreciate the viewership and are always glad for people to hear the gospel, we aren’t trying to livestream or minister to folks in Southern California or to other parts of the US… at least not on a Sunday morning. On Sundays, we are focused on the gathering of the saints in our community here in Marin County. These curious people from elsewhere can always catch the podcast on Tuesday.
3. The viewership is not consistent in time. Perhaps most convincing is the fact that we can see how long people watch our livestreams. Even with these low numbers, sometimes people are only on for 10 minutes or so, even less. One or two people a week may watch the length of the sermon, but most people don’t stay the whole time.

We have all of this set up, but who is it really reaching? This isn’t a knock on live-streaming as a strategy for other churches, but our situation forces us to ask ourselves: what are we doing here? Is it worth it?

This would all be very gloomy and depressing if we stopped here, but this is not where the data stops, and it is this additional data that is really driving our new strategy forward. 

By God’s grace, we have much better viewership of our content once it is posted to our app and to Apple Podcasts and Spotify. We aren’t talking viral numbers… but this is definitely when our content is more readily consumed. This tells us a few things: first, it shows that there is interest in our content, just not at 10am on a Sunday, which has important outreach and missional implications. Second, it tells us that the vehicle of live-streaming should not be where our primary focus lies in terms of digital outreach. To pour more time, energy, and resources into perfecting a source where very few eyes are looking would be unwise.

Instead, we are going to try a different approach. We are going to record our sermons as we always have, and we are going to publish them to our app and other regular podcast venues as we always have. But where are most of the eyes these days? Where do most people go to consume media of all kinds? You guessed it…

In the coming months, you’ll see us experimenting a lot more on social media. Of course we have always been present in these venues, but it’s been a while since we’ve had a consistent presence here. So we will be trying new things, looking into best practices, and doing all we can to get the message of Jesus out in this way. In order to film well for socials, we need to adjust our camera zoom, making our regular live-streaming view untenable. We have tried social media posting with our current camera view, but it does not translate well… either the speaker is too far away for the video to be engaging, or if we zoom in post-capture the speaker is very grainy (check our Instagram or Facebook for examples). This new view will work great for our video posts and for social media, but is the main reason we can’t do both live-streaming and experiment with our new approach. Whether we like it or not, online presence is the new front door of the church. People will go there first before ever setting foot in a building or even giving up time on a Sunday morning to view a livestream.

If you have read this far, you must really, really care about this topic… so to close I’ll share this video from Brady Shearer, one of the current gurus of church media. He describes perfectly what we are hoping to accomplish with this new approach.

Our livestream has served us well for the past four years. And who knows… perhaps at some point we will decide again that it’s an apt tool to use for our church. But for now, we will do our best to steward our time, resources, and attention to reach more people for Jesus, bringing them into the fold of the church for the glory of God.

In Christ, with a hopeful heart,

Andrew