This article was last checked in June 2026. Online tools and privacy rules
change. Confirm the current position with the Office of the Australian
Information Commissioner and your denomination's safe ministry guidance before
you act on what you read here.
During the lockdowns, almost every church that could get online did. Years on,
in-person worship has largely returned, and the honest question is no longer how
to move church onto a screen but whether the screen still has a place at all. For
a small church it does, though a smaller place than the lockdown years suggested.
This article covers where online tools genuinely help and the few decisions worth
getting right. It is not a step-by-step Zoom guide, and it is not a guide to
livestreaming your Sunday service.
What online tools are actually good for
The useful question is not "how do we get the church online" but "who are we
trying to keep connected". For a small church, the sustainable use of a tool like
Zoom is connecting specific people, not running a broadcast. The member who is
housebound or unwell. The family that has moved an hour away but still belongs.
The midweek prayer or Bible study group that gathers more easily on a screen on a
cold night than across town.
This is pastoral care, not technology. Keeping someone in the life of the church
when they cannot be there in body is the same work as a visit or a phone call, in
a different form. Australian churches already do this. Some Uniting congregations
hold a weekly online gathering, and the practice sits naturally with ministry
among older members who have stopped driving. Named that way, the tool stops
being a leftover lockdown habit and becomes one more way to look after people.
Livestreaming the service is a bigger commitment than it looks
Watching the Sunday service from home is a real Australian habit, and it did not
disappear with the restrictions. But it sits mostly with larger, better-resourced
churches that can produce a stream worth watching, and the evidence that small
churches sustain one is thin.
Two costs are easy to underestimate. The first is people. A stream that holds
anyone's attention needs decent sound, someone to run it every week, and the
patience to fix it when it fails. Australian church leaders reported real
exhaustion through the pandemic (National Church Life Survey, 2021), and the
volunteer technology teams that formed to keep churches online burned out
quickly. The skills involved are not the ones most church volunteers signed up
for. The second is the awkward truth about who a stream is meant to serve. More
than a third of church attenders are aged over 70 (National Church Life Survey,
2021), and Australians aged 75 and over are the age group most excluded from
digital life (Australian Digital Inclusion Index, 2025). The people a Sunday
stream would most help are often the least able to use it.
For most small churches, then, connecting people in beats broadcasting out. A
short video call an older member can actually join, or a tablet a visitor carries
round to them, will usually do more than a camera at the back of the room. If you
still want to stream the service, treat it as its own decision with its own
budget, not something to bolt on.
Two things to get right, and where to start
If you do use video, two small decisions save trouble later.
First, pick a free tool that fits how long you meet. Zoom's free plan cuts group
meetings off at 40 minutes, while Google Meet and Microsoft Teams allow 60 on
their free tiers. If your group runs longer, or you host several meetings a week,
one paid Zoom account (a modest monthly fee per host) removes the limit and is
simpler than restarting mid-prayer.
Second, get consent before you record or stream anything. Most small churches sit
below the turnover threshold where the Privacy Act applies, but that is not the
whole story. Since June 2025 an individual can take a serious invasion of privacy
to court, so recording someone without asking is now a real risk as well as a
discourtesy. And if children appear, child-safe practice asks for written
parental consent and a visible notice that the gathering is being recorded. The
simplest rule is to tell people first and ask.
A good place to start is small: one regular online touchpoint for one person who
cannot be there in body. Before you record, read the
Office of the Australian Information Commissioner on
privacy and consent, and check your safe ministry guidance and the
National Principles for Child Safe Organisations
on online environments.