Due to the current COVID-19 pandemic, churches around the world have cancelled their regular meetings and worship services and suddenly many have gone online. It’s the same with my denomination. We’re still neophytes in this area of online broadcasting or live streaming but it was very helpful that we already had set up a GCI Philippines website sometime in 2010 and more than couple of years ago we also had set up a GCI Philippines YouTube account for our denomination in the Philippines. This has helped a lot rather than starting from scratch. With the help of several techie young people in my denomination we were able to pull it off last Sunday, March 15, 2020, our very first online worship service. It was not perfect but we learned a lot from that experience.

What is amazing about this is that all of these techie young ones are all volunteer workers. They are not employed by the church. They do it for God and for the church for free.

For the second online worship service this morning, March 22, 2020, we decided to pre-record everything and posted it online as a playlist at our GCI Philippines YouTube account trying to avoid copyright issues and trying to overcome technical difficulties along the way as we tried to learn this new development in the life of the church.

Then I posted it at 10:00 a.m. in our GCI Philippines Facebook Group for our church members to watch our Online Worship Service. We had announced it in advance so many of our church members nationwide were able to watch it online.

Thankfully, I’m glad we had set up a Facebook group for our denomination in the Philippines some ten years ago too. We even created a Trinitarian Theology Forum for those who are interested in incarnational, Trinitarian theology. After some years, we requested Pastor Ted Johnston to take care and moderate that group and it has been going on very well for a long time now inspiring and helping people around the world about the true gospel of Jesus Christ.

The past couple of days, the tech support group–composed of techie young ones in church–had a busy night and day working to produce today’s worship service. Thankfully we were able to pull it off again and we learned lessons again on what to do and what not to do. Another learning experience.

I was assigned to create a video composed of snapshots of our denomination around the country. I do have several shots so I just compiled it and turned it into a video. My original video was only two minutes long but someone on the team suggested to slow down the speed without reducing the number of photos so that the images can be better viewed. It turned out to be longer. Oh well, haha! As it is turning out, viewers online seem to like it although it’s a bit longer. Maybe next time 3 minutes or less should be good enough. Here’s the video below.