Dear LAC Family,
On Sunday we tried in-person worship for the first time following the safety guidelines adopted by Session to reduce the risk of infection from COVID-19 while gathering indoors. We had only four people register to attend worship, and five more attend as walk-ins, with five volunteer usher/safety monitors. All told, there were 20 of us in the building, including worship leaders and staff.
Because the livestream was not transmitting properly due to a technical problem with the settings, our regular online community of 30 plus households was not able to follow along with us right away. This was never our intention and I am very sorry about the pain and frustration it caused you. The transmission and recording occurred, but it did not land on our website. We asked the outside vendor of our livestream system to help us rectify the situation this week, but it appears we have discovered the fix on our own. You can now go to our new website at www.lacny.org and click on the worship livestream tab to see the Sunday service. Please understand that in-person worship is not what it used to be because of COVID-19.
Many who worshipped in-person and those who saw the worship service livestream online later in the day were disappointed by the lack of our usual variety of voices and singing in the worship service. In order for us to restore the hymns, brass and wind instrumental music, our soloists singing, a greater variety of voices and congregants participating, and all the other dimensions of worship that we enjoy, we will need to pre-record videos of worship leaders in places where they can speak and sing safely. It may be possible to produce a hybrid, livestream of some aspects of worship and upload videos of others, but it will take us a little while to learn how to use our new technology more fully to implement a hybrid worship service. We may also need to have our communion Sunday worship services completely online in order to include the communion experience of eating bread together, which we cannot do in the sanctuary.
On Monday, September 28th, the Session will meet and determine how we will conduct worship services in October, and beyond, whether on-line only or in-person with livestream, or some hybrid of the two. If you have any thoughts or comments you would like to share with Session about how we should proceed as a church to include everyone in our worship services, please send an email to our co-clerks of Session: Leah Griggs-Pauly (leahgp@gmail.com) and Clark Morehouse (cmorehouse12@gmail.com) for inclusion in our correspondence review for our Monday meeting.