Scottish Church Streams Services To iPads

A Scottish church has converted to Steve Jobs’ gospel of HTML5, and is now streaming its services in a form that iPads and iPhones can understand, as well as to Flash-capable devices.

St Andrew’s Parish Church in Bo’ness, West Lothian, believes it is the first to stream its services in real time to iPhones and iPads, and more than doubled its normal Sunday attendance with online participants. The church has had a Flash stream for a while, but added an iPhone-compatible stream for mobile devices for its service on 13 June.

Apple has been criticised for not supporting the widely-used Flash format for video on its iPad and iPhone devices, but chief executive Steve Jobs believes the HTML5 format is better, even prophesying doom for Flash.  Media-heavy sites have been adding Flash-free options to support the devices, following highly-successful early sales of the iPad.

Godcasts and Prayer Tweets

The Rev Albert Bogle (left) welcomed live watchers on Sunday, who included people in Germany as well as congregation member Neil MacLennan – who developed the function, and who watched the previous Sunday morning service sitting in his car on the Royal Mile in Edinburgh, as a test.

“I think it is amazing how the church is getting to that stage where local church is reaching out to people all over the world,” said Rev Bogle in his sermon, suggesting that technology could allow churches to reach a level of maturity proposed by St Paul in his letter to the Ephesians. “Through technology and the ability to travel, local churches can find themselves growing into a whole new dimension of living.”

Technology has been a stumbling block, with churches having to rely on central offices, even for functions like printing and photocopying, but can now take things into their own hands.

According to the church’s site and news reports, online members are treated as much as possible as part of the church: “We welcome all who join us in worship both physically and online to be part of our congregation.”

To be more inclusive, the church also plans to extend its mobile services to Nokia and Blackberry devices. Other activities designed to endear it to the technologically-inclined include placing sermons on iTunes as a regular “Godcast”.

Blessings from Apple

Around 198 people viewed the morning service live online, and 130 of them were using iPads or iPhones, according to Rev Bogle on the iTalker blog, which also reported an approving email from one of Apple’s senior directors, Mark Rogers, which said: “A nice project, yet again you are an early adopter of the technology, a great piece of innovation, hope all goes well.”

“This means that we more than doubled our physical congregation because of those who were looking in on the internet,” said Rev Bogle in the blog.

Churches overall have generally approved and use new technology – getting into printing early during the last information revolution in the 15th Century, for instance. The Pope has urged priests to adopt Web 2.0, although this year many religious people treated Facebook as a luxury to give up for Lent.

St Andrew’s multimedia is provided by Sanctus Media, a company which spun out of St Andrew’s church, and both the iPhone app and the sermon Godcasts are free.