A hybrid church community 

Week by week we gather ‘onsite and online’ at Hillhead Baptist Church, a hybrid community of all ages and stages, yet one congregation doing our best to be one community. By Catriona Gorton 

I collect the card key from the hotel reception desk and unlock the hotel suite that is ‘the Room’ for Sunday worship. I am joined by our Tech Team, Pete, Kate, and Rex (1), who quickly set up the cameras, sound desk, microphones, speakers and laptops.  We log on to the hotel WiFi, and open the Zoom meeting, just in time to be joined by Tina, the mum of two very young boys who will be our co-host for the ‘Zoomers’.  Soon Ruth, who is working away, and leading our intercessions, joins us for a sound check.  Onsite, Liz sets up communion, and Helen prepares for Sunday School.  As the service begins, six-year-old Jonny lights a candle in the Room, and Mohammed, just home after a night shift, leads the Lord’s Prayer in Farsi on Zoom…  

Week by week, at eleven o’clock, we are gathered, ‘onsite and online’, a hybrid community of all ages and stages, yet one congregation doing our best to be one community, ‘across the nation and around the world.’   This is the church I have served for fourteen years, during which we have faced many challenges and experienced many changes.  This is a Christian community that seeks to be inclusive, and for whom justice and equity are important values. 

Zoom Church, ‘Zurch’ as we called it, was a deliberate choice made at the start of the March 2020 lockdown – it was important that our services were live and multi-voiced.  We wanted to be able to see each other – and to have the option of being ‘off camera’ if that was preferred by participants.  We stayed on Zoom for a full two years before we began our current hybrid services on Easter Sunday 2022.   

Moving forward, our priority is not ‘how can we be more sophisticated on Sunday?’ but ‘how can we be more connected beyond Sunday?’

It’s important to explain why we were much later than others in beginning off-line worship… Lockdown rules in Scotland were slightly different from those in England, and Glasgow was subjected to greater restrictions, and for longer, than elsewhere in Scotland. Also, since 2016, we have been worshipping in a hotel; rules around ‘conferences’ meant that we could not meet there at the time other churches returned to their buildings. 

More than any rules, this was about equity: no-one wanted to ‘go back’ until everyone could go back.  We had several people classed as Clinically Extremely Vulnerable, and who were shielding, and I was in the intermediate Clinically Vulnerable group.

However, nothing is ever simple, and we soon realised that the long-term impact of lockdowns on wellbeing, and the resultant social isolation, meant that our Zoom-only model wasn’t sustainable.  After careful consultation, we chose Easter Sunday 2022 to begin hybrid worship, with those onsite continuing to wear masks (this was no longer mandated, it was a pastoral decision aimed at inclusion).  It was only in September 2022 that we stopped asking people onsite to wear masks; a small number of people continue to do so, and that’s totally fine with us. 

More than any rules, this was about equity: no-one wanted to ‘go back’ until everyone could go back

What I found interesting was who chose to worship ‘in the Room’, ‘on Zoom’ or a mixture of the two and why...  Margery, in her early 80s said, “I just prefer to be on Zoom, my mobility isn’t so good now, it’s more comfortable”, whilst Ellie, a long-term carer, so unable to be onsite, keeps her camera turned off for privacy.  On the other hand, Suzy, a young professional ’all Zoomed out’ by work says, “I hate it!”  Then there is Ed, who is usually onsite but, when travelling with work, is sometimes online who says, 

“I love that I can connect wherever I am – even in a different time zone.”  

The importance for us of hybrid Sunday worship, is self-evident, however it is only one part of what it means to be a Hybrid Church.  Whilst we have evolved suitable ways of running hybrid meetings and taking votes/ballots, we are still working out how to develop the deep pastoral connections that will hold us together as a true community long term.

The fear is that, inadvertently, we might fragment into two parallel communities rather one body in hybrid expression.  

Moving forward, our priority is not ‘how can we be more sophisticated on Sunday?’ but ‘how can we be more connected beyond Sunday?’  Both informal face-to-face only gatherings for meals in homes or cafés, and picnics in public parks, and Zoom-only gatherings, such as our 21:00 fifteen-minute reflections for Advent, and three-hour Good Friday silent vigil, are all part of a commitment to hybrid in its wider form. 

It’s 12:45 on a typical Sunday, I have waved off the Zoomers whose break-out rooms have just closed, I have chatted to visitors in the Room, answered queries, and drunk my tea.  The Tech Team have packed up and gone; the stragglers are making their way out of the hotel, some to share lunch, others to head home or onto work… I gather my things, hand back the key cards at the hotel reception desk until next week, when we’ll do it all again…

Catriona Gorton was minister of Hillhead Baptist Church, Glasgow, from 2009 until summer 2023. 
From 1 September she is working bi-vocationally as Tutor for Ministerial Formation at Northern Baptist College and Transitional Minister at Union Street Baptist Church in Crewe.
Facebook: Hillhead Baptist Church