Due to COVID-19 guidelines and restrictions on worship, seniors Skylar Hedgepeth and Elizabeth Eby, both Pastoral Assistants, have been working with Campus Ministries to create Sunday Night Worship, a safe yet meaningful service that is broadcasted over Zoom on Sunday evenings at 9 p.m.
Creating a service that appeals to many people across campus has been Eby’s and Hedgepeth’s main goal. The team is making efforts to engage the student body and cater to their many different interests, hoping to reach a larger audience.
Thus far, their services consist primarily of song and scripture. Hedgepeth is used to a more contemporary form of worship service, while Eby has a background of older Mennonite hymns. Together, they incorporate their worship styles to create a more diverse and inclusive service.
Despite lacking a sermon, the service is still centered around a simple theme. Last Sunday was centered around “joy”. “[We want to] make it so it is all centered around a certain kind of idea,” Eby said.
The service is primarily student-run. Hedgepeth and Eby have been doing most of the planning and organizing but are also recruiting other students to read scripture. In addition, both are encouraging students to provide feedback and suggestions, especially scriptures or songs.
“If people want to be involved in this, we want them to be there. It’s not…something where it’s exclusively people who are involved in and work with campus ministries [who] are the only ones who can do this. Anybody who thinks that they would want to help with it, we really want them to be there,” Hedgepeth said.
Campus Pastor Brian Martin Burkholder has been helping the team with some organizing and recruiting other students to help out with the worship, primarily in reading scripture, while also typically opening the service and offering a blessing. Clay Showalter does most of the “Zoom magic,” running the more technical side of the service to make sure everything is broadcast smoothly.
One of the bigger challenges comes in finding good ways to engage people online. Due to the format, Eby and Hedgepeth are only able to see the attendance once the Zoom meeting is closed, making it hard to gauge the audience. Hedgepeth finds this “kind of comforting and also a little unnerving at the same time.”
Furthermore, it has been challenging to try to bridge the gap between online viewers. For Eby, this has meant learning “how to pretend you are connecting with someone and can actually see how they are responding when you really can’t. You’re just looking at a camera or a clock on the wall.”
Despite this, there are still some advantages to meeting online. Eby notes how Zoom services make it possible for people to sing along to the songs since health officials have been discouraging people from singing in crowds inside. “If you are on a Zoom service and have access to the lyrics, and the people you live with are cool with it too, you can sing as loud as you want, or dance, and no one has to see you.”
Hedgepeth has also been enjoying the resources YouTube has to offer, which have been giving the team the ability to choose almost any song they want to play during the service. While relying on YouTube for most of their music, the team has also been offering students the chance to record themselves rehearsing a song which will then be broadcast over Zoom.
