And for the first time, worship services will also be broadcast in Spanish. All of the live broadcasts are under the direction of the Media Center in the Department of Communication, which will be capturing video of other significant events during the four-day meeting and posting them to the Covenant website for viewing through the week.
Joining a live broadcast through the Covenant website is easy, notes Executive Minister Don Meyer. “Simply go to the Covenant website (old.covchurch.org), click on the annual meeting banner near the top of the page, and select either the English or the Spanish broadcast option.” He recommends visiting the website in advance and running the brief test video clip. If the test video does not run properly, a link will direct the visitor to download the most recent version of Flash Player software.
Four worship services will be broadcast – at 7 p.m. CDT on Thursday, Friday and Saturday evenings, as well as the concluding ordination service at 10 a.m. CDT on Sunday morning. The Friday and Saturday morning devotional sessions, each beginning at 8:30 a.m. CDT, also will be broadcast live.
A number of special segments during regular business sessions will be captured on video for posting to the Covenant website, including reports from President Gary Walter and Vice President-Finance Dean Lundren, as well as presentations to recipients of the T.W. Anderson and Irving Lambert awards, among others.
The news team will publish stories throughout each day as events unfold, with hundreds of photographs illustrating news stories as well as photo gallery pages tied to various activities. Coverage also will include regular Twitter (#ecc125) and Facebook updates.
“Technology has made it possible for the church to be connected in real time as never before,” Meyer observes. “Hundreds of individuals were logged in to participate in last year’s worship services,” he recalls. Several churches brought high-speed Internet connections and large viewing screens into their fellowship halls so that members could join in worship and even watch pastoral staff being ordained.
One of many emails received following last year’s annual meeting captures the importance of the live broadcasts, coming from a couple in Wisconsin:
“We want to express our thankfulness for webcasting the ordination service (during the 2009 Annual Meeting in Portland, Oregon). We were very disappointed that we would not be able to attend our son-in-law’s ordination. This was the next best thing to being there. We not only saw him, but also his dad, who was standing in his aisle . . . so we knew where the family was sitting! Thank you! Thank you for providing this opportunity!”
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