Wow, 2020, am I right?
This year has been nothing short of crazy. For the uninformed (not sure you exist, but you know…), March 2020 saw the almost-overnight shut down of all non-essential businesses and services in the United States due to the global pandemic known as COVID-19. In the church world, that meant if we weren’t already online, we needed to get there. Fast.
And at Schweitzer, we weren’t there yet. For years we had been recording the sermon each Sunday and uploading it to our website. But in March of 2020, that was not going to be good enough. That first Sunday, we simply filmed Pastor Spencer give a few announcements and a sermon from the desk in his office. For the following week, we needed to feature music, announcements, offering, and more. My coworkers, Alec Knopf and KJ Roelke, and I developed a plan to recreate the Schweitzer Church experience in a prerecorded online format. The online service features all of the things listed above and more.
The video included here is from our Easter service. The online service saw a lot of tweaking and fine-tuning in the months that the pandemic continued. Now that the online service is a thing, it will continue to be part of what we do at Schweitzer indefinitely, but Easter 2020 is one of my favorite examples of our earlier online-format.