Field Reports by Video Conference?
Feb 17, 2005 2:54 PM, By John McKeon
Proselytizing may be an abstraction for many worshippers; they may understand that their church has missionaries around the world but can’t very easily picture what those people do. Some experts in media for ministry think video conferencing could be a powerful tool to bring missionary activity to the foreground for home congregations.
One potentially popular application of audio or video conferencing for many churches is supporting presentations to the home congregation by missionaries in far-flung places. “Traditional video conferencing has a huge role when we’re talking about these one-off, occasional events,” says Matthew Card, vice president at Clark Pro Media. The video image on such occasions may have shortcomings, he adds, but these are outweighed because the content is valuable enough.
Most congregations, Card adds, will accept lower video and audio quality in an exceptional event like a field report from a missionary. (In fact, the perception of the missionaries roughing it could even heighten the report’s impact.)
Shane Long of Waveguide Consulting in Atlanta sees a promising future for this type of conferencing. “The reception to the idea is pretty phenomenal,” he notes. “Most churches put a good emphasis on reaching the world through supporting missions and missionaries. Many missionaries have access to phone lines. We have started designing telephone and video conferencing devices into church AV systems.”
In the most basic implementation, Long explains, the missionary sends pictures and information from the field and home-church personnel assemble it into a presentation. Then the missionary calls in to provide commentary and take questions. One step up, technologically, is addition of a webcam to add a more personal connection — if the tools and infrastructure exist at the missionary’s end to support this.
So far, though, not many churches seem to have actually tried the idea. Several years ago, Plymouth Park Baptist Church in Irving, Texas, set up a hybrid system that linked the church audio system to a telephone line and staged an interactive presentation involving missionaries in several nations. Church member Gary White, who is also a senior associate at Wrightson, Johnson, Haddon & Williams in Dallas, says the program was well received but has not been repeated.
“The missionaries in the field may not have the technology to take advantage of the infrastructure, even if the infrastructure is there,” he comments. Moreover, acquiring such a capability may not be a high priority for financially pressured mission organizations.
Card feels the interest in video conferencing reflects a broader trend of churches away from the arena churches of the last decade or so and moving toward more evenly spread, smaller worship venues. “A lot of our customers are implementing a hub and spoke model,” he says, referring to a model in which several satellite locations conduct separate worship services but share a video feed for the pastor’s sermon or other content.
These applications, though, are rarely fully interactive and can present a variety of logistical problems. In the meantime, advances in such areas as Voice over IP are helping create receptivity for the video conferencing concept, Card says.
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