Listen to the interview with Kevin, or the transcript is below.
Tim:
I thought it’d be a really good opportunity for us to have a chat with Kevin, who has been doing some media work for us for a few months. We introduced him a few months back and he’s been around with the camera and there’s been quite a few comments of what happens with it, where does it go, where’s stuff stored? So I thought it’d be easiest just to get Kevin up and he can tell you and we can tell you exactly what’s been going on. So there you go. So, Kevin, do you want to introduce yourself a little bit?
Kevin:
Yeah, let me just get my notes up. So I don’t know how many people know me, but, yeah, I’m Kevin. I’ve been here for like about a year. A year now. Yeah. Actually coming up to you. Yeah, yeah. So I’ve been basically kind of working, you can say in the background, I know you guys have seen me on the worship, but I’ve also been working in the background. So I do media, I do social media. I do social media management for the church. That’s why you see me taking photos, videos, et cetera, et cetera. And basically I kind of just want to show you what we do, where it goes, what’s it for. Kind of just breaking it all down, answering any questions that people have. Yeah, great.
Video 1 was shown
Tim: So I think when we were chatting, Kevin, how did you find Christchurch when you were looking for a church?
Kevin: Yeah, that’s pretty important, actually. So I found Christchurch through Facebook while I searched for a church on Google and I found the Facebook page. So I was basically one of those people that was kind of just looking around and honestly, I even said this to Tim. It’s very hard to find this church because it’s kind of backed up in a corner. You don’t actually know it’s a church. I mean, you had someone come in here asking if it’s a hospital, is that right?
Tim: Dr’s Surgery! Well, it is, but not the one you’re looking for! You can get a different type of healing.
Kevin: So, yeah, it’s kind of questions like that that we really want to tackle out in the online world. I know we have a presence here with amazing people. You guys have been great to me. Thank you very much for that. But what are we like when we’re tackling it online? What do we like when we’re focusing on the whole online Internet, social media side of things? That’s what we basically want to be tackling in this church. Because I believe that the future of kind of spreading the message is not verbally anymore, but it’s out there socially online, it’s out in the media. YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, all of that stuff is what you’re basically aiming for to actually get your message across. Do you want to talk about what Chris said?
Tim: Yeah. So when we met with Chris Burrows this week and talking about it, he came up with a really interesting thought, that when we look for a church, we look at the front of our church. That is our front window in the physical sense (Tim pointing to the front window), but actually for the majority of people under 40, this is now their front window (Tim held up his phone and pointed to it). This is their front window. People who come into a place new are not going to walk around and look for a church. They’re going to go online and type in churches in Luton or churches in Bushmead, and hopefully they will see some of what’s going on because it’s the best way to show people. And I know for a fact a lot of people have said to me who’ve come since COVID we’ve been watching you online first before we came through your doors.
They want to know what happens in church before walking through the doors, because the doors can be quite a barrier. I’m taking a bit of Kevin’s next question. So I was going to say, so why are we spending the time and effort on this then, Kevin?
Kevin: Yeah, so time and effort on this. The reason why we’re actually investing in it is because there is a massive outreach, there’s a massive calling to people who are online. I mean, for me, at my age, I’m 27, I look at a lot of online sermons, I follow a lot of churches, I see their content, whether they be here in the UK, America, Australia, whatever it is, I still love it, I still love watching it, I still love seeing it and I love seeing what other churches do. And that’s something that we kind of want to be doing here at church. We don’t want to be just secluded and kind of in our own little area and our own little zone. We want to spread as much as possible to the people of this community, of this place. Bushmead, Luton, UK. You never know where God is going to take us. So that’s basically what our plan is for the future of this church. So great. And we’re going to show you another video. Yeah.
Video 2 was shown
Tim: So one of the questions I’ve been asked a lot is what happens to the content that you’re taking, all the pictures, the videos that you’re taking, what happens to it?
Kevin: Okay, so my way of keeping things is obviously with all the content, with all the videos slash photos that we take here, they are stored securely. I believe there is this thing called SharePoint. We won’t get into the technicalities, but it is a secure platform where we keep all the church content. And I believe after a year we just delete them all because we don’t need it after a year, to be honest.So any photos of you guys, any videos of the church, et cetera, et cetera, just kept for a year securely on a church platform. And they don’t really go out anywhere apart from our own media sources. So that’s Instagram, Facebook, the website, YouTube for the sermons and stuff. Yeah.
Tim: And we don’t necessarily use all the photos because we have to be respectful of permissions that people are given. So one of the other questions I’ve had, Kevin, is what if I don’t want to be involved with this media? You know, again, I don’t want people to sort of be taking pictures of me. I don’t want to be recorded. How can we sort of opt out?
Kevin: Yeah, of course. I mean, I know not everyone is going to be comfortable with their photos being shared and videos and whatnot. And that’s totally fine. Like, you can literally just come up to any one of us. You can come up to Tim, you can come up to me, maybe any of the church leaders. You can let them know that this, this is not something that you’re interested in. This is not something that you want to be part of. And you can let us know and we’ll figure out a way where we will get you in. If you are in photos, I’m sure we’ll just delete them. That’s no worries at all. But yeah, those are the ways you can really just verbally tell us to be honest. Yeah, yeah, we want to respect you. We know not everybody’s comfortable with it and that’s absolutely fine. We understand that.
Tim: I think the next question was all about that. So we’ve done that. So how are we looking to develop this work now?
Kevin: Yeah, so we were discussing, me, Tim, Chris. We had a little meeting and we thought it would be wonderful to have a type of media team where people can take some of my burdens onto their shoulders. So we can have some people, you know, if you’re interested to take some photos, some videos, or even if you’re happy to be in front of the camera and talk like you saw me. Don’t worry, I took that take about three, four times before I uploaded it. So, yeah, doesn’t really matter. You got to just be comfortable, you got to just be happy, you got to be joyful. And you know, with this, there’s this type of content, it’s not all serious. We’re not, we’re not so like focused on getting it spiritually right, getting it biblically right. Of course, that is then importance. But when we’re in church, we’re trying to be happy, we’re trying to be joyful, we’re trying to laugh, we’re trying to love. And that’s what the content should be about. To show what church life is, to show who Jesus is, to show who God is. And that’s what we’re trying to really focus on now. Yeah, great, thank you very much. So we’ve got one more video to show you.
Video 3 was shown
Kevin: One of my favourite videos, by the way. Thank you, Noëlle, for starring in that. And I guess the last thing is how can we sort of encourage, how can we engage this. We follow us on social media, I guess, is that if you’re on social media, if you’re on social media, we currently have two platforms which are the Facebook and the Instagram and they’re both ChristchurchBushmead. So you can just follow us, you can literally just search up, I believe on Google and you should be able to find the Facebook. If you can search it up on the platform itself, it’d be great. And yeah, just hit us a follow, give us a like. And you probably see some updates on there as well, to be honest. Yeah, and share the content, please share the content that gets us higher in the algorithm.
Tim: And it’s been really interesting just as we come to a close to see the engagement that we’re now getting on these platforms has quadrupled, if not more, since you’ve started putting this stuff on. So that’s really positive and we’re getting good engagement with people asking questions about church. You know, what does this mean? What are you doing there? So it’s really positive that we actually seeing people engage with this content.
So thank you, Kevin. Any questions at all, Speak to Kevin. Speak to me as if you’ve got any concerns. I know some people have raised concerns about some of the stuff that’s been filmed. And we’ve spoken to Kevin and we said, right, we won’t film that anymore. We do listen, we do take that feedback on, but if you don’t want to be involved and the key thing is, let us know. We’ll make sure that anything that we’ve already got of you will be deleted and we’ll make sure that you’re not in anything in the future. But can I just pray for you, Kevin…