How to Build a Strategy to Engage Your Group When Using a Virtual Platform

August 4, 2020

Webinar Transcript

- Like John has shared with you, John is gonna be sharing with us how to build a strategy to engage your group when using a virtual platform. So John, if you will, take it away here and again let me encourage you, please put your questions down in the Q&A at the bottom of your screen if you tap on it. Put your questions there and we'll get to them a little bit later on. All right John, go with it if you will, we're ready.

- Sure will. Well good evening folks, it's good to be with each of you today and to try to share with you a little bit about how you can use a virtual platform to be able to teach, whether you're a Sunday school, small group or just wanna get a group of folks together and do disciple making, those kinds of things. And the method that they've chosen for us to teach through the Pinnacle, is through a webinar. And there are some advantages to webinars, you can control things a little bit better. Some other possibilities that exists there. But in a smaller group if you've got less than 20, Zoom works just as well and you're able to see all the panelists that have video capabilities and interact, see facial expressions, those kind of things, which we can't do tonight. Y'all can see me but I can't see you. But we're gonna try to do some things to show you how to interact. Because the relationship part of virtual teaching is the hard part. It's really easy if you're out there as a participant to be texting or doing other things or doing household chores, or work chores while you're listening to a webinar and not having to participate. But I'm trying to do some things tonight to model for you a few of the ways that you can cause the participants to have to interact a little bit, so I hope that you'll find that helpful. I remember reading a book when they asked me several months ago would I teach a conference using technology. 'Course I agreed to it 'cause technology is kind of my hobby, it's something I've always done, always enjoyed. And I remembered a book that I'd read probably 15 years ago, the title of the book was, Did Jesus use a modem at the Sermon on the Mount? Now, some of you millennials may not know what a modem is, but it was how we used to dial-up to get on the internet. But I remembered a poem that was in that book that I went back and kind of updated a little bit and I'd like to share that with you as we think about using technology to teach the Word of God and engage people in learning. So here's the poem as I've modified it a little bit, said did Jesus have a tablet at the Sermon on the Mount? Did he ever try Facebook Live to send His message out? Did the disciples use cell phones as they went about their route? Did Jesus have a tablet at the Sermon on the Mount? Did Paul use a laptop with lots of RAM and ROM? Were his letters posted on a blog at Paul.Rome.com. Did the man from Macedonia send an email saying "Come?" Did Paul use a laptop with lots of RAM and ROM? Or did Moses use a joystick at the parting of the sea? Or a GPS to show him where he needed to be? Did he write the law on his tablet? Or were they really on CD? Did Moses use a joystick at the parting of the sea? Did Jesus really die for us one day upon a tree? Or was it just a hologram or technical wizardry? Can you download the YouTube clip to play on your device? Did Jesus really die for us one day upon a tree? Have the wonders of this modern age made you question what is true? How a single man, in a simple time could offer life anew? How a sinless life, a cruel death, and then glorious life again could offer more to a desperate world than all the inventions of men? If in your life, the voice of God is sometimes hard to hear, with other voices calling, His doesn't touch your ear. Then set aside all your devices and all your fancy gear and open up your Bible and let your Father draw near. Some days, sometimes in this world of technology that we find ourselves in, it becomes more about the stuff, the technology and the professionalism if you will, than it does about the word, the gospel. And I've been trying for years to get folks to understand that social media can be a good tool, but it can also be a bad tool and it's used of the devil, but why not make it a platform that the word of God can get out and use it to communicate. And so that's kind of the motive behind the teaching tonight. As we begin this time together, I'm gonna try to illustrate how you would conduct a class, we're actually gonna teach a lesson from The Gospel Project Unit 23, Session 1, talking about Jesus teaches about discipleship. And so we're gonna go through part of a lesson, I'm gonna do some things to show you how you might be able to teach a lesson virtually. We'll take some questions along the way if we need to, but if we can, we'll hold most of those to the end. We'll take plenty of time at the end of this to be able to answer your questions about how things worked, how I did things or how we might do things, Mallory and Lydia may have some other comments, some things to add. They're our millennials on board, so they grew up with this technology, some of the rest of us have tried to figure it out. So I'm gonna tell you what I'm about to do, you see the background that's behind me, right now it says Pinnacle. I'm gonna change that background so that it will take us to the Holy Land. The setting for our lesson tonight, we are looking at the mount where Jesus gave the Beatitudes, from the Sea of Galilee. So you can look across there and somewhere on this mountainside that you'll see, Jesus was when he delivered the Sermon on the Mount. And so we're gonna share in that tonight, and I just wanted you to be able to kind of get a visual because we are looking at a virtual setting. So I thought, well, if we could do some virtual things to be able to enhance the teaching, we would do that. So without further ado, I'm gonna grab my notes if I can find them here, so just hang on a second, let me get my stuff and I'll be right back, it won't take me but a second. I know I've got them here somewhere. Mallory where did I put those?

- [Mallory] I don't know.

- No ope ope, here they are, here they are, nah I'm just messing with you. But listen, teaching point number one, always be prepared. Whether you're teaching virtually, in a classroom setting or combination thereof. Have your stuff that you're gonna use in hand. This lesson that we're gonna share tonight, I've practiced three times on my own and then we ran through it a little bit beforehand, just to make sure the stuff works like you think it will, and it's supposed to. But you know anytime technology is involved, that there can be hiccups and glitches, and internet drops out or something happens and things don't work exactly like you planned for them to. You've been watching virtual sermons from your church, I'm sure. And some Sunday mornings the Internet's down and the sermon doesn't get out till the next day, that's part of it. But you can always record these and upload 'em later, which is what will happened with this webinar. It will be recorded that you can share it or go back and watch it later. Lydia is gonna be helping now with question number one. You'll see a poll pop-up on your screen, and it's gonna ask you a question, "What kind of student were you in school?" and they multiple, choice pick one. I was a so-so student, I learned more of the alphabet 'cause I knew A B Cs Ds and other letters. I was mainly As and Bs or man nothing but A's for me. So if you will, check one of those boxes. These polls are anonymous, we won't know who is what. But if you'll share in those and then in just a few seconds, we'll get the results of those. And we'll share that results with you just kind of get an idea of what our audience was while they were students in school. And you can pick whether that's elementary or high school or college or whatever school you went to, homeschool, whatever that was, just answer appropriately. Now one of the things as we move into the Sermon on the Mount, kind of laying the groundwork, which is the the deal behind this question is, Jesus was trying to prepare the teachers in His day for what He was about to say, the expectations of being a disciple of Jesus. Then you that it's been tough on our teachers and administrators and professionals to try to get ready for this school year. They keep having to set dates and then reset dates and teachers have been getting rooms ready for weeks and months, and now it's gonna be even later for some of them to get started. So teachers know what it's about to get prepared, to be ready at all times for things that are gonna happen. And Jesus was trying to do the same thing with the crowd that was set out on this mountainside. He was preparing them for what was about to come, about what it's like to be a real disciple, a follower of Jesus Christ. And so, when we look at Matthew 5:13-16. I'm going to share a screenshot with you here, because this is what we're going to be talking about here in just a second. So I'm having to do screen changing here so that you'll see a pop-up on your screen here in a second. What are those two things represent? obviously salt and light. So for some of you that resonates, for others of you, this one may resonate more. Millennials may like this one, It's a little more colorful and graffiti looking like. But what's the purpose of salt? When Jesus talked about the purpose of salt, and when he was talking to those folks that were seated on this hillside with Him, and he was talking to them about being salt in their world. When we think about salt, we think about flavoring our food. And that's certainly a good illustration for it. Now we wanna flavor our food, we want it to taste good. We want to be able to use salt, some of us have to use it more sparingly than others. But in the day of Jesus and those followers that were there, it was a an important aspect of their life, 'cause they didn't have refrigeration and things that we have today to preserve things. And so salt was used as a preservative. It kept things from rotting, so to speak, to put it bluntly, I guess. So, Jesus was talking to His followers at that point about being that preservative, sharing the gospel, but also being that flavor, that seasoning that makes a difference in the life of people. I wanna read to you those passages from Matthew 5:13-16. It says, "You are the salt of the earth, but if the salt should lose its taste, how can it be salty? It's no longer good for anything but to be thrown out and trampled under people's feet. You are the light of the world, a city situated on a hill cannot be hidden. No one lights a lamp puts it under a basket but rather on a lamp stand." And I know all of you probably remember that song about that song hide it under a bushel, no. Nope that doesn't work. "And it gives light for all those who are in the house. In the same way, let your light shine before others so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father in heaven." In this passages, He talks about being the salt of the earth, the folks that were seated out on that hillside would have been thinking about the role of salt in their life. And how that represents the preservative factor of the gospel and there to be spreading this preservative, if you will, the flavoring to make a difference in the lives of the people around them. And so could you imagine sitting on that hillside and having the master teacher talk to you about using illustrations that were really relevant to the people of His day, and we have to we have to take ourselves back to fully understand exactly what He was talking about. When He talked about being the salt of the earth, we have a little bit different purpose of salt, we still use salt for curing some things and preserving some meat but we don't have to use it like they did in that day. But we're still called it to be the salt of the earth. That's what Jesus said we're to be, if we're a follower of His, we're to be the salt of the earth. He also says we're to be the light. Now these folks are seated on this hillside, and Jesus says, "Do you take your light to a hillside and hide it? Or do you let it shine?" Because a light in those days when there wasn't a lot of other ambient light, like we have today, a light on a hillside really stood out. You could see it for a long, long way. And so that's way our lives are supposed to be. The third part of this passage Scripture talks about something that we don't like to talk about today, and that being obedience. We don't wanna be held accountable. We don't wanna do what God's Word said unless it suits us. We don't wanna hold others accountable. We don't wanna talk to folks about where they may have sin in their life 'cause sometimes we take a passage of the Scripture and misuse it or misapply or whatever so, we wanna make sure that we're doing a good job of taking the Word of God and living it out, that we are the salt, we're the light, but we're also obedient to the teachings of Jesus. Because when you if you remember, when Jesus is ready to depart this world that we live on, and headed into heaven, the last thing He told His disciples was to, "Go make disciples." He didn't say, "Go build a big church." He didn't say, "Go share the gospel." He said, "Go make disciples." Because that's what he'd taught them to do. That's what we're supposed to be, we're supposed to be obedient, we're supposed to be sharing the gospel, the good news, but we're to make disciples and that's more than just telling them about Jesus and how they can have salvation. But it's also teaching them about Jesus and what He told us to do and be, we're to be salt and light and we have to show them how that works. And so we wanna make sure that we're a big part of that. As we think about light... In our world today I'm fascinated by space things, always have been, and they've shown some pretty neat shots from the space station recently with the SpaceX launch, it went off and seeing the views from space and it's really interesting to see where all the spots of light are around the world and then where you have those areas where there's no light, it's just a dark spot on the face of the earth. We don't have a whole lot of those dark spots left, but there are a few. And I wish that we could say that's the light of believers glowing but we're kind of becoming the minority. So it is unique when unbelievers see a believer shining and showing the love of Jesus and being the salt and light that Jesus has called us to be. There's not a question for this one for you, But as you think about your life, you don't have to raise your hand or anything on this but ask yourself this question, "Am I being the salt and light that Jesus has asked me and commanded for me to be, that I can make the difference in this world and His reason He's left me here to do that is to make that change." So Jesus's disciples are to be salt and light. So if you're not salt and light, are you really a disciple? That's the question we have to ask, are you really a disciple? And so ask yourself that question, and see what God might have response for you there. We're looking also now at Matthew 6:1-4. Jesus's disciples are to obey God for God's glory, not for their own. And you guys know that on social media these days, you don't have to look real hard to see who's trying to toot their own whistle. They're posting pictures. In fact, there's a deal out there about trying to outdo somebody else. Some people get off social media 'cause so and so is always bragging and these things are going on. And so it's really easy to toot your own horn these days. But sometimes, oftentimes, I see a lot of Scripture being posted. I see things that are happening at church and youth groups and children's activities and VBS, and those are the ways that you can help promote the Kingdom of God, not your own personal kingdom. And there's a balance in there, it's okay to share things that your family may be doing together but if you're always showing off the new clothes and the new boat, the new car and the new house, and then everybody gets tired of hearing that and they're going to take you off their friend list, they don't wanna see your feed. But if you're doing it in a loving kind way, and you're helping promote the kingdom of God and how it makes a difference in your life, it can be have an impact in social media. But let's look at Matthew 6. Says, "Be careful not to practice your righteousness in front of others to be seen by them. Otherwise, you have no reward with your Father in heaven. So whenever you give to the poor, don't sound a trumpet before you as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and on the streets to be applauded by the people. Truly I tell you, they have their reward. But when you give to the poor, don't let your left hand know what your right hand is doing. So your giving may be in secret, and your Father who is in secret will reward you." Now, I understand that sometimes it's difficult to do things in secret so that you're not seen by others. Because somebody is always watching you, and sometimes they will toot your horn. That's okay. If you're doing it with the right motives in the right attitude, and you're doing what God's asked you to do, then if that happens, it happens. I enjoy some of the evening news when they get to the end and they show some of the good things that are happening in our world, not a whole lot of those the media reports but there are a lot of 'em that happen. And when they talk about a football team that took up a collection for a player whose bicycle had broken, and he didn't have way to get to practice. In the team, all boys all came together and bought him a bicycle, gave it to him. And you have a employee who was walking 15 miles one-way to work and so the the boss got wind of that and he went out bought him a car, and so that he could get to work and not have to walk that 30 miles round trip every day. People have a good heart. And they don't do it to be seen but sometimes it gets picked up and people find out about it, it gets plastered all over and that's okay. A lot of those times I give credit to God for being a Christian, and that's what we ought to do, that's why we ought to treat people. That's kind of what this passage is talking about. As believers, we should be setting the example. We should be showing the world what God is all about. He does love everybody. And he wants everybody to have an opportunity to go to heaven. Now, some people will accept that and receive it and have salvation and eternity in heaven. Others are gonna reject it. My issue is, I don't know who those are. So I have to tell everybody, anybody that God puts in my path, I'm supposed to be the disciple who makes disciples, by sharing about God's love so in a way that God gets the glory, and I'm not building me a kingdom. And look at what I did, I've led X number of people to the Lord. That's the wrong motivation. I don't ever save anybody, God does the saving. I'm just a vehicle that sometimes He uses to share the gospel and then He chooses to save and they choose to receive. And so that's what that's about. And so as we as we think about being a disciple, who are you discipling today or who you being discipled by? Because all disciples should be being discipled as well. Because we need to be fed, we need that nourishment, we need that encouragement, to be able to continue doing what we're supposed to be doing. And then this is the last part of this two chapters that we're gonna look at. Jesus's disciples are to live purposefully. Lydia I think we have another poll that I wanna throw up at this point. If you'll go ahead and show them poll number two. Oh, there's the answers to poll one. look at that, let's see. The majority of you were As and Bs, all right. Nobody willing to say they were so-so. Well, that was me. I was so-so. I kind of went to school, did okay. As, Bs and Cs occasional below that. But good, y'all good students. All right, poll number two, what do we got Lydia? Pop that one up. Yeah, we talked about this, now see if you remember it. Yeah, that was five minutes ago. So what was the purpose of salt in biblical times? Flavoring, illustrations, preserving or all the above? So you got a few seconds to respond to that when we'll finish up this last point, we'll come back and look at that one. Jesus's disciples were supposed to live purposefully. Now, all of us know that we're here for a reason. So sometimes, we don't know what that purpose is. We've not sort God to try to figure out why am I here? What am I supposed to be doing? I hope a lot of you, all of you have asked that question. Why does God have me here? What is it that I'm supposed to be doing? Otherwise if there weren't a purpose for us when we got saved, God just takes us on out, and we'd be on in heaven and our purpose would be fulfilled. But He's chosen to leave us here, and so we need to find out what our purpose is. So let's look at Matthew 7:19-24. Says, "Every tree that doesn't produce good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. So you'll recognize them by their fruit. Not everyone who says to me, 'Lord, Lord' will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of my Father in heaven. On that day, many will say to me, 'Lord, Lord,' didn't we prophesy in your name, drive out demons in your name, and do many miracles in your name? Then I will announce to them, 'I never knew you, depart from me you lawbreakers.' Therefore everyone who hears these words of mine, and acts on them." And here's the key, "And acts on them. We'll be like a wise man who built his house on the rock." We have a purpose. We have a purpose. Have you discovered what your purpose is? Well, according to Matthew 28, our purpose for everybody, every believer is that we're to make disciples. Now you may have a different pool from which to fish in, for who those disciples might for some of you in your stage of life, it may be your family, you may have children or grandchildren that you're discipling, it may be people that you work with. It may be just a friend and in this day and age, through media such as Zoom and others FaceTime, you're able to do discipling over the virtual reality world, where you can you can talk with people on a regular basis and you can see them face-to-face, even though you may be miles apart. Who would have thought that in our generation that we would be able to literally reach around the world, never having to leave our home or job situations, to be able to disciple others. So we have no excuse for not making disciples, other than we may choose not to. But there really isn't a choice, God has commanded it that's what we're to do. If we're going to be a true follower. It says, if you're not producing good fruit, gonna cut you off the vine. Well who wants that to happen in their life, He'll prune you to get you to the place that you need to be. So as we think about doing some of these things virtually, and teaching a class, I hope that in this time of teaching... I'm gonna share a couple of other screenshots with you. Just some funny things that I've run across, that I hope will help us think about some of the virtual things in our world that we deal with. It's funny our family bought one of these Roombas over the weekend. And so we got to hook that up to Alexa. You can tell Alexa to go do this, or have this done and turn this light on, those kind of things. And so I'm into that kind of technology, so it's kind of cool. And so we got to name this Roomba, and so I asked my wife, "I said, what would you like to name it?" She said, "Well, I don't care. whatever you want to." And I said, "Well, do you remember the Jetsons had a robot maid that they call Rosie. And so that's what we named our Roomba. And so now I can tell Alexa, "Hey Brooke, tell Rosie to go clean." And she goes and runs to the vacuum and that's kind of neat. But I never dreamed I would really live in a world that I watch cartoons about growing up. Now I haven't seen too many flying cars yet but that may come. Some of you will see that, I'm sure. We are seeing spacecraft that's being newly invented and created, those kinds of things, So it's kind of different. But I hope you'll find some of these little cartoons entertaining, but I also hope that it will put an imprint in your brain about salt and light, and about the difference that we're supposed to make. So let me share my screen and then we'll run through a couple slides and I have some music at the end that we're gonna kind of close out the lesson part of this time together, and then we'll get into some Q&A, so hang on. You can see some of what I'm doing is I'm sharing my screen. And we'll go into full mode here. Says, "My mind is like an internet browser. 17 tabs are open, four of them or frozen and I don't know where the music is coming from." That happens here in our office sometimes. This is Moses not a real clear graphic, but it has no data or Wifi downloads to a tablet anyway. Kind of a funny... Good news, your pastor now approves you being on Facebook during church. I don't know how your pastor feels, but I've had some that thought Facebook was of the devil but now they're preaching on it. So it's kind of interesting times. Technically Moses was the first person with a tablet, downloading data from the cloud. Didn't happen quite the way... Some of our younger folks have trouble envisioning a time in the world when there wasn't technology, anywhere near like what we have it today. I remember my granddaughter several years ago was doing a project. She's probably in first or second grade, and she was doing on Alexander Graham Bell and the telephone. And she had one of those big crank phones that she's looking at a picture of, and she asked her mom a question, "How did y'all carry that in your pocketbook?" And so her concept was we've always had cell phones and so sometimes we to help our folks understand that back in biblical days, they were face-to-face and wrote on tablets of stone, leather or other ways. So it's hard for them to really grasp some of that concept sometimes, and so I've taken a little extra time to help them revisit that. No, I don't want you to follow me on Twitter, I literally want you to follow me. And there's a big difference between hitting a Follow button on Twitter and being a real disciple of Jesus, who does what He says, who's the salt and light and who is obedient to the teachings of Jesus. He's called us to be His disciple, He doesn't pick up the phone, we don't get the audible, but we get the Word of God, and we get that tug in our heart that says, "Accept Jesus as your Lord and Savior, be a disciple of His." And that means more than just getting fire insurance. So think about those things. Now want us to listen for just a minute, I want you to reflect on the salt and light as Lauren Daigle shares this. We probably won't listen to all of it but we'll listen to a minute or so. But the lyrics will be on the screen if you're not familiar with it, but it talks about salt and light. ♪ Oh, the beauty of the King ♪ ♪ You make righteous those who seek ♪ ♪ You have written ♪ ♪ And redeemed ♪ ♪ My story ♪ ♪ Let my eyes see your kingdom ♪ ♪ Shine all around ♪ ♪ Let my heart overflow with passion ♪ ♪ For Your name ♪ ♪ Let my life be a song ♪ ♪ Revealing who You are ♪ ♪ For You are salt and light ♪ ♪ Oh, the love that set me free ♪ ♪ You bring hope to those in need ♪ ♪ You have written ♪ All right, I understand the words weren't popping up on your screen like we'd hoped and once again technology, sometimes it works sometimes it doesn't. But I hope you were listening to the words of the song as Lauren Daigle shared that, that's a download from YouTube. You can go there and listen to that song and see the lyric video or see her perform and it's, there is both ways, and it's there. One I hope you've learnt something from the lesson tonight of being salt and light, being obedient, being a disciple of Jesus, one who makes disciples. But we're gonna move now into our Q&A time. I know some of you are having issues with not being able to see the polls that we put up. Sorry about that, I don't know why some did and some didn't. That's something we'll have to work on. Lydia or Mallory, Y'all got an answer for that question. I'm sure they'd be glad to hear it, oh there's our last poll. Some said for flavor 11%, preserving 44%, all the above 56%. I kind of agreed with the last one, I thought it was a good illustration, although that wasn't the real reason for it, In biblical times. But Jesus used it as an illustration, so I'm with the majority of you there, although preserving is the main reason it was used in biblical times. But thank you Lydia for putting that up for us, I had forgotten to get to that conclusion. But what other questions... So Lisa wants to change her answer in her poll. Sorry, we didn't know what your answer was but you wanna tell us? You can type an answer in. But I appreciate y'all being with us tonight. What questions do you have for us tonight that we might be able to help you about how this webinar was put together? How you might use this to teach virtually in your church? That part of what this time is. Yeah, put your questions in the Q&A box and we'll try to get John to answer it there. So if you'll do that, I'll appreciate it. While we're doing that John, can you help us, it may be one of your tech people that has to answer this but how did you go about sharing videos, or charts, some of the photos that you shared there? How do you do that if we're gonna teach virtually there?

- Yeah, when you're in Zoom, or if you're one of the panelists on a webinar, we could give each of the participants the option to be able to share their screen, we just chose not to do that for the webinar. But that's a setup feature in settings when you set up your Zoom or webinar. Who you want to allow to be able to share their screen. And if you're a participant, you probably don't have the option because I don't think we granted it to you, but there would be a little green button right in the middle of the bottom of your screen that says Share Screen. And so you'd click that button and then it pops a window and says, "Okay, which screen do you want to share?" And it would show whatever windows you have open behind the webinar or Zoom, and you choose the one that you want everybody to see, and then that one pops up. And then when you're done sharing that particular screen, you just Stop Share and then you go back to the regular view. It's really easy to do. There's also another feature called a Whiteboard that you can use. In fact, that's in the Share Screen button as well. I'll show you how that one works when I pop-up that green Share button. One of the features it tells me I can use is a Whiteboard. And so if I clicked that button and says Whiteboard and click share, you now see a, I hope you do see a whiteboard on your screen. And then you can use that to do all kinds of neat things. You can draw or write, you can type, whatever. So if there's something you wanna do on the fly as you're teaching and you wanna, if you're an artist and you wanna draw 'em a sketch or show 'em a map, the Whiteboard feature is there to be able to do that, so that's kind of cool. And so that's available as another way, another teaching tool. It's kind of like having a whiteboard or chalkboard, if you will in your classroom, you could be able to do that and have that ready. Now the polls that we did in the in the very beginning or throughout, those I set up ahead of time, that's part of your setup procedures in a webinar. I just use questions right out of the teaching material, modify them a little bit with my responses. I thought they were maybe a little bit easier to answer. And then I type those questions in and it's answer one answer, answer two, answer three, answer four. You want multiple choice or what are your other selections, fill in the blank, couple of choices there how you want people to respond. So it really has a lot of built-in features to help you teach. They help you engage folks, because the more you can engage them, the more apt they are to stay with you throughout the duration of your class time together. We taught about 30 minutes, maybe 32 minutes, from the time we really started teaching the lesson. And that's about the duration of most people's patience on a given subject. So you gotta keep your lesson pretty concise about what points you want to get in. I could have also had Jamie or Mallory or Lydia, since they were panelist. Now if I were in a Zoom setting I could have had anyone, they could have read the Scriptures for me, I could have signed those ahead of time, so I could have gotten them to participate in that fashion. And you can have as many panelists in a webinar I guess, I think up to 100 panelists in a webinar, if you buy the Pro subscription, so you can literally do webinar with a whole class if you would want to go that route, because it does give you some features that you won't be able to find as easily or do as easily in a Zoom meeting. But to engage other folks in the prayer time, you can do your prayer request on the Whiteboard and write those out. You can save those things in a download if you needed to, or do a screenshot and have it. So there's some really cool things that you can do to keep your class engaged. Jamie is that kind of answer your question,

- Answered it. Nancy asked this question which kind of goes along with that and I will start to answer it and then you can help us out with either Lydia or Mallory as well. She ask, Nancy asks a question of, well, she just went away here. yeah, let's see. Basically is could you walk us through how you set up a Zoom meeting? And I'd like to answer that by simply saying, that's why we have Mallory and Lydia on tonight. Is you have someone to help you set up, be at a Zoom meeting or webinar. There're people in your church and what we're discovering is that their Sunday school members, they would not teach a lesson in a million years, but they would help a teacher teach virtually,

- Yes.

- Enlist these people. I love the Scripture that talks about that we're the body of Christ and each of us have different abilities and responsibilities. So some of those class members that would never teach may be great at helping you set up a virtual Sunday school class. So I wanna encourage you to do that. Like I was talking to Doug, I think it was last week, he's in our office of communication. I said Doug, I can go online and I can read it. I can look at a book about it. But I need somebody to walk me through it, step by step, stage by stage. So tonight, it would be hard for us to do this. So let me encourage you Nancy to go to someone that is tech-savvy, and let them show you how to do this would be much better than us trying to explain it here tonight.

- Jamie, I'm gonna try this and see if we can pull it off since we're already in a Zoom meeting, I'm gonna be limited and I think what it's gonna let me show them, but I'm gonna share my screen and I'm gonna see if I can actually show them where some of the settings are, if it'll let me do that. Right now, do y'all have you have a white screen? Or did you just see my screen, my background? Okay, good. Let me see if I could pull this up. Right now what're you seeing?

- [Mallory] Still see your background. You're still seeing my background. Okay, let me pull this down. We'll get this on my my screen I'm sharing. Now do you see the four of us?

- [Mallory] Yeah.

- All right. And you see up at the top left-hand side where it says Zoom.us, on my screen it top left. If you click that, there's a thing there to down that says Preferences . And under Preferences is a whole bunch of stuff. You see my mic, you can test your mic, you can do all of that. If you go up to the General tab, you can choose whether you're using dual monitors or a single monitor, how the meeting is gonna start. So you have some options to come in and look to set up all of this before the meeting. But obviously, you can do it on the fly if you need to make some adjustments. What kind of video you're gonna have. You can add touch up my appearance, it still doesn't help me look very good, but that's the best it could do. You could shoot this in HD, a lot of things. You can you can do your audio, I've tested that ahead of time. I'm using a SmarMike+, you don't have to have this device, you can use the one that's built into your computer. I just want to make sure that I got pretty clear audio there. This is where you have the Share Screen features, you can set up how this is gonna look and what's gonna be able to, and there's an Advanced tab if you really wanna get sophisticated. And then the Background & Filters, now y'all notice that during that, I changed from this look the Pinnacle to the Sermon on the Mount location, Sea of Galilee. You can download these just by hitting this + bar over here. You can download stuff from the internet and save it here and then come in and select those, I did this ahead of time so that I was prepared for it. Again, I've been trying to put this together for several weeks, trying to get the finishing touches on it. But I went in even as late as today and made sure that all my settings were right. Talking about whether you're gonna record this webinar or not and how, most of them are gonna be recorded and where you're gonna store that recording. And then Statistics on the call, the whole bunch of stuff that's here. So that's where you'd find a lot of those settings. You can go across the top, because I have the feature here, I'm one of the hosts, so to speak. And there's some features that I have that you don't have. But if you were setting up your own meeting, you would be able to do that. Unfortunately, what I can't do is take you to zoom.com and go into the settings from there, I don't think. But let me see if I can pull that off Jamie. And show them if you log on to the web and log into your account, which there's a free account, if you don't currently have one. But I'm gonna actually go into the one that I use here at work, see if it lets me, I'm not sharing my screen yet so you're not seeing that. But now I'm going to share that screen, so hopefully you'll be able to see what's there. And lets see if that works. All right, so now you should be able to see what's what it looks like to go in and set up a meeting. Are you seeing that on the screen? All right, so this where you log into zoom.com and you have your meeting setup. And you can see that we have several meetings set up over the next several weeks. I have a Zoom meeting in the morning with our pastors and staff, so we went in and set that up. And we can go look at that just by clicking on it. But if I wanted to set up a new meeting, you just schedule a new meeting, you see where my mouse is there. And we will schedule a new meeting. So we'll go ahead and do that. We'll click on that to say okay, we wanna schedule a new meeting and you can call it whatever you want. And then enter a description in it, if I could type it would help. Enter description if you want, you don't have to. Okay, when do you want this meeting to be, what time? How long do you anticipate it be? And then timezone that you're in so that when you send invitations out, if you're sending 'em across the country, it tells 'em it's Central time that the meeting is, If they live in Eastern or Mountain or Pacific or something it would be. Generates the meeting ID automatically or if you wanna use your personal meeting, and every user has a personal meeting ID. I typically let it generate it so that every meeting has its own ID. I have a Waiting Room enable, which means that they can't get into the actual meeting, just like you folks were there today, you're waiting in a waiting room, waiting for Jamie to say, "Okay, y'all come on in." Your Zoom meetings or your webinars will be the same way. You set up the waiting room, you can even make it have to have a passcode if you want the extra level of security. But with the invitations that we send out, you have to have an invite to be able to get in, even to the Waiting Room. And then if I happen to see somebody in there that I don't know, I don't have to let them into the meeting, they have to stay out in the Waiting Room, and they can't hear or see anything. Whether I want the video to be on or off for the host and participant. What the audio is gonna look like is, do I have people dialing in or am I gonna be dialing in or both, so that they can do whatever they want. And I can make it where you can join before I get there, If I want to or I can uncheck that, that you can't get there till I start the meeting. And then if I've got Alternative Host. And I do every meeting that I conduct I've had an Alternative Host, one of our associates here in the office is usually one of our hosts but in this case, there were four of us that were alternate host that would get the invitation, come in and they could be able to edit it. So if that tells you how to kind of set one up, it really isn't that difficult. Then once you save it, it puts it out in your deal. Now you can post it to your calendar or it'll do that for you. And then you can copy the invitation here to email it out. So it'll copy it into the clipboard, go to your email, post it into the email, that is one way you can do it. You can also do it from your calendar. And so then when you're ready to start a meeting, you just come into where your meetings are, and there's the test meeting that we just created. And if you're ready to start it, you hit Start. And everything picked starts going live. So that's a pretty quick, it really isn't that difficult. And you really can't mess it up 'cause if you mess it up, you just come right over here to the end, hit the Delete button and that meeting is gone and start over again. So you really can't hurt anything, and like I say you get the free accounts, they're good for 40 minutes and you should be able to teach you a lesson in about 30. So if you got five minutes on the front end for a little fun time and five minutes on the for wrap up, you can literally do a good lesson in the 40 minute period of time. If you need more time than that, you can log off, it also can log you off, you can log back on and start again and get another 40 minutes. So-

- That would encourage Sunday schools to really look at that because it is hard,

- It's hard to stay much more than 30 to 40 minutes, they're just not gonna do it. Our backsides aren't conditioned for that, especially if they're at home, there's too many distractions and other things that they're gonna want to get to. so if you can keep the teaching time, and I don't know if you've noticed it but a lot of our pastors, I won't even say most of them but a lot of our pastors have shortened their sermon length down a little bit. Some that used to preach an hour now got it down to 45/50 minutes. A lot of them have gone to 30/35 minutes. But they've learned that they're just not gonna engage people much longer than that. And if you've got 15/20 minutes of music on the front end of that, you're looking at right at an hour or so. That's just stretching it out there a little bit and a lot of folks have gone to no worship time on the front end, they're just posting sermons and inhaling it that way. So-

- Okay.

- I hope that helps answer the question about how to set up a meeting.

- Good, good, thank you. Appreciate that John. Neil ask this question, "Do do other see your hand being raised?" You answered my original question I had about why would you have the opinion or the option to raise your hand when you have to Chat also and the question and answer boxes. So I guess he's saying, why have all of these option, question and answers and Chat and raised hand.

- Well, the chats basically so that if there are other folks on the participant list that you wanna Chat with directly, or if you just wanna post a comment for everybody to see, that's what the Chat features is for. The Q&A is really aimed at the panelist, that you've got a question that you want everybody to know the answer to, and so that's where you would put that. So that's the real difference between the two. And most webinars that you go to, use Q&A only, they do exactly what Jamie did in the beginning. If you wanna ask a question, please don't post it in chat, we might miss it 'cause sometimes the chats, people get to chat and that thing gets lost because they scrolls past it and you don't see it. But if it's in Q&A, we know to go look there when we're looking for Q&A, so that's the real difference between the two I think.

- Yeah. Going back to what you said earlier about having to schedule meetings back-to-back, I see Phyllis said that they'd been able to schedule hers back-to-back so that they can quickly get back on

- That's right, yeah.

- Over the hour.

- You can do that.

- You can do that.

- You can do that, you sure can And if you get a lot of interactions especially if you're in a Zoom setting where they can talk and chat a little bit, but you can make it a little lengthier, but boy, it's tough to keep 'em much past 40 minutes.

- Yeah. what's gonna happen to you a lot of times and you'll you'll see somebody's screen where they, all of a sudden their video goes away and they just have a picture like Mallory and Lydia have up. That means one of two things, either they have to go to the bathroom or they've got other things that are more important at the moment. Sometimes it could be that they don't have video.

- Sure, sure.

- Some moms don't have cameras on their computers, but for the most part it's said they gotta something else happening.

- Right listen, I think Nancy has another question here. So for an adult class, did I understand you say that having a class with 30 minutes of teaching is preferably to say, 50 minutes or an hour session, like we do for most class settings.

- Yes, that is a correct response.

- Okay. That is exactly what I'm saying. And I would even say even if you're teaching face-to-face, they're in the classroom, about 30/35 minutes of teaching time is about all that they're going to sit there for. Now you might stretch it into 45 on a really good Sunday. Now, it doesn't mean the whole class time might not be an hour 'cause you've got prayer request time, you've got social time, you've got fellowship time, those things that need to happen during that period of time. But the actual teaching time, 30/45 minutes is just the absolute max that most folks are gonna, they're gonna take several vacations or commercial breaks anyway, and after 45 minutes there're gonna check out, there are already switching channels looking for the next program. And TVs conditioned us that way, a lot of it so.

- I think you said this but you may have descended in passing there. Neil asked a question, says, "If you go over your time limit set in for minutes, will Zoom kick you offline?"

- It will Yes they will. But you can dial right back up. It's fine.

- That's what Phyllis says she goes ahead and gets her son.

- Yes, just go ahead and set it up.

- Get back.

- Yeah.

- So if you've got a long winded teacher or something like that. You can go ahead and plan that.

- That's why anytime in teaching, these books that you get, they got way more you can teach in an hour, and certainly more than you're going teach in a half an hour. So you've got to find the nuggets, the things that are gonna really catch your people, get their attention, use some illustrations, like the background that I did, like the the questions answers. You gotta get them engaged if it's just a 35/40 minutes of you lecturing, and they don't get to engage in any shape, form or fashion. Unless you're a lecture style learner, you're not gonna really love that that much. You like the engaging part? It just helps communicate better.

- Just thinking about this John, could this virtual teaching we find ourselves caught in today, could this not expand the discipleship process? For example, we said it over and over that for you to teach 30/45 minutes and hold people's attention, it's very difficult. But if you pull in class members throughout the week, or even however far out in advance, you wanna plan and you pull them and say, hey, we're teaching this lesson on this Sunday. And I need you to prepare this or to look up this.

- Absolutely. So what we're doing is we're discipling them, because they're getting involved, instead of just being a listening participant.

- Absolutely. The more you can engage like you mentioned it, you got folks that well maybe I'm not tech-savvy, but so and so in my class is or they've got a granddaughter who is, they would be more than willing to help you do that. And you are in essence in helping disciple them, learn how to use their skills and talents to spread the gospel and they help you teach a class. So yeah, the more you can make assignments ahead of time to say, hey, would you read this passage of the scripture? Would you handle prayer requests? Will you be ready to respond to this question? Set some of that stuff up ahead of time. Jamie and Lydia and Mallory and I talk before session about who's gonna do what and how this's gonna be handled. And so do that with your class to engage them. Number one is gonna help them be there, whether you're virtual or live. And so it's helpful. Now, Phyllis made an important point. Got in the Q&A, she said, she's found that most people don't wanna say too much during her teaching time. So the first 40 minutes that she's on Zoom she teaches, the second session is Q&A. So that's kind of a neat way to do it, and if doesn't take full 40 minutes, then that's awesome. So Phyllis, kudos to you, good job, that's a great way to think that out. And 40 minutes of teaching and then engage 'em in Q&A. Go for it, if it works, keep going.

- I'd like to you say I have trained her in that but I can't take credit for that. She is one of our faithful teachers from years ago, about 30 years ago, so it's good to see her still in the ranks there

- Jamie Lisa's got a question, will they be able to share this with other teachers in the church when we're done tonight? Tell 'em how that's gonna work.

- All right, very good. These webinars will be posted on the website at the Alabama State Board of Missions website. Best way to get them would be alabamapinnacle.org, alabamapanicle.org. You can go there and see those that are upcoming, and those that have already been viewed, well hopefully we'll say it tonight, we're recording all of these. Doug will spend some time editing them, and as soon as he gets them edited, they will be out there online. So by all means, encourage your other teachers, leaders, staff members to go online and view any of these that we've already shown. And again, we've got more to come. We've got 'course this one tonight. We got Thursday night, we got Alan Raughton will be sharing with us as from 6:30 to 8:00. And then Saturday morning, Liz Sherrer from Oklahoma and we'll be sharing with us from 8:30 till 10:00. And then Sunday afternoon, we'll be having the panel back with us, on Sunday afternoon with Alan, I believe you have a commitment there John, but Alan,

- I'll be there.

- Oh, you'd be there too, great. Alan, John, Liz and Joe. After Joe does a 45 minute presentation, we'll spend the last 45 minutes of questioning and answers about Sunday school leader training. So love for you to come and be a part of that. But do keep in mind that all of these will be posted online at alabamapinnacle.org, okay? John.

- Lemme point them if everybody has their Chat bar open. If you look at the bottom it says Chat, you click on where it says Chat, it pulls up all the conversations that have been going on. And Lydia has posted the websites where you will find it. But here's what I wanna show you on that chat window, if you look at the right-hand bottom, there're three little dots. If you click on those three little dots, it says Save Chat. And if you click that it will save all of the chat that's been going on tonight to your computer. So you'll have those links, you'll have other questions, you'll have other comments that were made. And that's always available, whether you're on webinar or Zoom, to be able to save the chat to your computer so that you can reference. It'll usually be in your download folder, and you can go back read the chat and click on the link and it'll actually take you to pinnaclealabama.org.

- Great, thanks John.

- You can see all of these webinars.

- That's why we have you online tonight, to help us about virtual, how do we do this even better?

- So thank you.

- Well, I try. Okay folks, we've answered all the questions that I see posted at this point. Anyone else have questions you would like to ask? If you do, please put it in the Q&A box.

- [Mallory] He muted himself. He's muted.

- Okay, Jamie you're muted. Let's see if I can get you unmuted. Oops.

- Hey, about that.

- There you go. I don't know how you did that, but you did.

- Some of us are very talented, we can do things when we don't even know

- That was neat.

- we did. I was just saying that, I don't think y'all heard me. If you have questions, I believe we've answered all of them that we have posted. Please, we have a few minutes remaining here.

- Jamie we have a question about where those dots are. So I'm gonna share my screen and see if I can show them where they are.

- Okay.

- Let's see if it works this time. Are you are you seeing my, let me get my list back up here so I can attendees, I gotta get chat going. Where'd that go?

- That's why we have you here John.

- Let me see, I gotta find my Chat button. Well, where did it go?

- Malory help him out there now.

- [Mallory] You drag it over?

- Chat, there we go. Now I've found it. If you have your Chat window, it should look like that, you seen it now?

- [Mallory] Nope.

- Nope.

- Or did I put it on the other one? That it?

- [Mallory] Nope.

- Nope

- Do I have it?

- You still don't have it.

- Look, I'm sharing that window right there. Let me stop that share and start another one.

- There's one.

- Share screen and I want to share

- [Mallory] Move that over.

- No that's Q&A, there's my Chat right there. So I'm sharing desktop one, share and then it and then it went away. Now this is fun.

- This is why you have a tech person that helps you. Be sure that your Sunday morning class you have things, the bugs worked out here.

- That shows because there it is on that screen. Are you seeing my Chat window now?

- Nope.

- Still not seeing it, well, dang! Now?

- Nope.

- How about now?

- Nope.

- All right, I'll see if I can describe it. If you have your Chat window open, you should have the whole list of chats listed out there, who says what? If you go to the bottom right where you type a message, if you were going to have a chat, to the right of where you type the message, there's three dots in a little box. You see it Jamie on your Chat?

- Yes, and when you tap on it it says More.

- Okay, it should say Save Chat.

- Yeah, when you tap on it says, attendees can chat with no one, all parties.

- Okay, that's because you're the host, everybody else's should say Save chat.

- Save chat. Yes

- And once you click that, then it saves it.

- Okay.

- So but there's three little dots on your chat screen somewhere that gives you permission to do that. Sorry I can't show you.

- [Mallory] You put in a file

- All right, any other questions? I don't wanna keep 'em any longer than we have to, we've lost a bunch of them. Since some of em' already took vacation.

- That's it. We couldn't see their faces and they couldn't see ours, well they could see ours.

- Nope. but we couldn't see theirs, so they exit out. And that's why I like the Zoom meetings better than the Zoom webinars because I think people... And we're talking about the Sunday school class, if at all possible, and you covered this earlier, if at all possible to go with the meetings not the webinars because webinar, the panelists can see each other, but the participants cannot see each other.

- Lydia let me ask you a question, if you'll unmute. We'll do this one live, some of them still don't see the dots. Can you save the Chat and email it to them.

- [Lydia] I was about to suggest, I actually took a screenshot and I was gonna change my picture to be the picture of the dots. But yeah, if they want, I'll be more than happy if they just drop in the chat, if they drop their email, I will save the chat and email it to them.

- Okay. So folks, if you want the saved Chat, drop your email in the Chat box there and Lydia will email that to you. All right, there's one.

- Good.

- [Lydia] And honestly, if Neil wants to, I've got a few minutes afterwards, we could even troubleshoot some of her issues together possibly over a Zoom separately, if she wishes. So,

- Okay. I'll post my email and she can email with that but great questions everybody.

- Listen, if I can help any of you at anytime, I'm gonna give you my email address, I'll put it in the chat. So you'll have it but be glad for you to shoot me an email, reach out to me and we'll try to help you in any way we can. So there's my email address john@savethechurches.com. You can hit Mallory at the same thing if you want to hit a millennial up. Just mallory@savethechurches.com. She'll be glad to help you as well, she is resident techie. They help us get a lot of this done. So.

- All right.

- Thank you all for joining with us tonight, it's been fun, hope it's been helpful.

- Very good. We again, we thank you. It has been helpful John. I thank you for all the hands-on. Is a great job for trying to give us guidance and direction. Don't forget that this is being recorded and so you can encourage others if you want to come back and view this again, you can go back and view it. Lydia has posted the addresses there where you can do that. Remember Thursday night at 6:30, Alan Raughton will be sharing with us and see if I can find his session right off the back. I thought I had it here but I probably have already flipped but anyway, he'll be with us. He's going to be sharing How to Rebuild Effectively Teaching and Communication in your class. So that will be Thursday night and then Liz Sherrer will be sharing Saturday morning and then Joe Sherrer, Sunday afternoon along with the panelists. So hopefully you can join with us. Hey, and by the way, if you register, we will have your email address, and we can send you information later on if you would like, let us know on that as well, all right? Okay. I think that's it. Do we have one last question there that we did not take, let's look at this. Okay.

- Alisa just gave us her email address.

- All right, thank you. Can I offer a word of prayer as we close tonight? Let's pray together. Father, thank you so much for this opportunity of coming together and even if it is virtually Father of sharpening our skills to be better leaders, better servants in your church. Lord, would you bless and encourage each participant tonight? Would you help them to be able to retain the things that that they've gleaned from our time together? And Lord thank you for the panelists they were so faithful and being on with us tonight? Would you bless and encourage them. Father, guide us, directors us as during this very difficult time we seek to be faithful servants in your church, lead us by your Holy Spirit. For we ask this tonight in the precious name of Jesus, our Lord and Savior, amen.