In

In this episode, I talk with my friend, Pastor Russell Smith, of Covenant First Presbyterian Church, about how he has dealt with challenges to build community amid stay home orders. We discuss the use of Facebook Live and other resources to connect the church services to the congregation members at home.


Sam Schutte 0:00
On tonight’s show, we have Russell Smith Russel is the pastor of Covenant First Presbyterian Church in downtown Cincinnati. And Russell is joining us again on this podcast to discuss using technology for virtual church services in the COVID-19 era. Russell, welcome to the show.

Russell Smith 0:16
Hey, Sam, thanks for having me back.

Sam Schutte 0:18
Absolutely. It’s great to talk with you again. So I guess just to kind of sync people’s memory back up, you were our guest on the show for episode number two. This is probably as we’re recording around episode number 30. And you’re the pastor of like I said, covenant First Presbyterian Church downtown. Maybe briefly, just refresh folks memory about your organization as it is downtown there.

Russell Smith 0:41
Sure. We are a historic old congregation in a great big, old, historic building been there. We’ve been in existence since 1790. We’ve been in that building since 1875. very traditional congregation and traditional particularly In our worship style worship presentation, we still have an organ acquire classical style music. We sing hymns from a hymnal, so not a congregation that you would necessarily think of as really technologically on point. You know, it’s very old school. Of course, when we talked last, you were interested in the night owl Bible study that we had done, where we had started up a online Bible study using Facebook and using that as a way to conduct a virtual Bible study that that could be open to anyone in the country or any one in the world. And that that did produce some really interesting results. And that’s what we were talking about last time.

Sam Schutte 1:44
Exactly. And I thought it’d be good to reconnect just because I was talking to someone who had listened to that episode, and actually shared that episode, as he said, which was about Facebook Live streaming, with some other pastors in the Midwest here in Indianapolis. Plus, that all of a sudden is you know, in your business, since you’re a lot of your business and your you know, your services rely on large gatherings of people, that’s pretty difficult an area where we have social distancing, and all of these sort of shutdowns. And so some of those pastors are really struggling to figure out all these tools all of a sudden, and whereas you’re sort of a little bit ahead of the game. So that’s why I thought it would be interesting to sort of dive back into this and talk about where you’re at now, and, and maybe it’ll be helpful for folks who, even if they’re, you know, whether they’re public speakers, or any other kind of industries outside of religious organizations, that they might be able to figure out some of these challenges. So maybe a first question to ask, before we get into sort of some of the technology stuff. Can you talk a little bit about, you know, how your church decided, I think at the time, you know, initially, it was sort of an optional thing. And then maybe it became a non optional thing at a certain point of, you know, not only In person services, what was that decision process? Like? And how did you all struggle with that?

Russell Smith 3:05
Oh, yeah, I mean, that was a fascinating. It’s been a fascinating process. And we’re still kind of living this out. Right now as we’re recording this that every week there’s there’s something new, there’s a change as we’ve been watching. These things develop, of course, in late February, early March, that’s when things really started to heat up here. And and people were starting to get anxious and start start paying attention to this. Believe the governor started talking about people trying to voluntarily stay at home not not gathering large groups sometime in early March. And I remember one of the things we have to understand is the Presbyterian Church is a church that’s ruled by elders, we elect elders to run the church. So we’ve got a board of, of elders that the congregation elects. And, yeah, I’ve got nine elders, that they’re all different. work in different fields, different industries, they’re volunteers that help run the church. And they’re the ultimate decision making body. And so I’ve just had to stay in touch with them all throughout this. And and so I’ve been in constant communication with them. And so the I guess the first week we we did something different. It was one of those early weeks in March, when the initial pronouncement came out. No gatherings larger than 100. Now, that’s right at the size of our average Sunday attendance is 100 to 110. And, we’re in a very, very large space, we were in a space that could seat potentially on the ground floor, potentially 600. But it’s, designed as an amphitheater, so, you know, it’s, still a little bit more intimate than then then then it sounds. So what we did that Sunday was We encouraged people to stay home and we were going to start live streaming, we had not been live streaming anything up to that point. And what we had done is we had, we have for a very long time, had a Facebook page and have been very robustly using that as a communications device to the congregation. So we’ve got a lot of Facebook followers, a lot of people that know to look on Facebook for information, and that played to our advantage. So what we did was we just live streamed on Facebook, and that first Sunday, I just put my laptop up in the pulpit and had a nice profile view of me and then I picked up the laptop and turned it around when the choir was singing. We asked everybody to try to explore the space and spread out we had maybe half our usual worship attendance that Sunday and it you know, it worked for Well, and, you know, some people logged on and followed at home. And that worked really well. Well, by the next week, they were already cutting it down to no more than 50. The, the government was, you know, the Ohio Governor was really encouraging people to stay home. And you know, I had an email, consult with all our elders just to make a quick vote and, and the majority said, No, let’s just live stream. So that was the first Sunday that we just went to live stream exclusively. And our choir at that point still decided they were going to come in and, and lead worship musically. So we had a choir of about nine people, and we space them out. And this is where it got kind of interesting because because of our space and because we decided to livestream and not have congregation members there in the sanctuary, I made a strategic choice that I was going to approach this the way I approach the night owl study, which is DIRECT address to the camera. A lot of churches have been doing livestream in this scenario where it’s just set up the camera and run worship like normal, and try to try to make it look like a TV broadcast of a normal worship service. Now, there are other churches that have gone a completely different direction and broadcast from the pastor’s home and made it very intimate. Like that. And that’s, that’s pretty cool. We decided we were going to do it from the sanctuary, try to capture the feel of the sanctuary, but do it as directed dress, to the, to the camera to the person at home. So so we tried to get the intimacy of speaking directly to the person and yet also the comfort of seeing that scene. The sanctuary seeing the space. And that was an turned out to be a really good choice for us. It just feels so much more intimate. I’ve got a lot of really good feedback from folks. They really like the DIRECT address, rather than having it seem like it’s just a video of everything. Everything is business as usual. It’s just a video of any old Sunday.

Sam Schutte 8:24
Yeah, cuz i saw i watched your service on Sunday. And I thought it was interesting how, you know, and I guess, I don’t know if I if I immediately it really stuck out to me per se that you were doing that DIRECT address method, but I think it made but you’re right. I mean, it kind of is. It seemed very natural, I guess. So it wasn’t like I you know what I mean, I’m not a videographer to notice that perhaps but, but it was nice that you were talking to them. And basically as you went through that, that service, you know yourself and I don’t know if it’s your music director, maybe who was there up there with you as well. Or if he’s an assistant pastor, maybe Actually, he’s one of our music scholars. He’s, uh,

Russell Smith 9:02
you know, he’s a student that, you know, as part of our music team and and he volunteered to come in and be the soloist that morning and and I just put him to work

Sam Schutte 9:14
What’s his name?

Russell Smith 9:16
That’s Miles Tolliver, a really really good guy.

Sam Schutte 9:21
Yeah What an amazing voice and so and he was you know you always sort of swap position in front of the camera he would he would sing and then you would kind of slide back in and say you know your your portion or your whatever was next. And then I think it was interesting too that you would cut out to I guess pre recorded bits of someone from your, from your church doing a reading or something like that sitting in their chair at home. Which was cool because I’m interested in the technology of how you’re how you’re sort of editing and staging all this live, but I thought it was also just really cool field because you know, that lets people see it. Everybody’s sitting at home. There they are. They’re sitting home. And I don’t know, it has a neat vibe to it, I feel like.

Russell Smith 10:05
Yeah, and that was, that was part of the development of it. So that that first week when it was all live stream, nobody in the sanctuary we didn’t do that. I had the choir there, I had all the choir members doing different parts of the worship service. And, kept putting different choir members up so we could maintain social distancing, but putting them up in different parts of the service to, to lead worship. The next week, my choir director and I consulted and we felt like that was too many people in the space. And we really need to convey the message, social distancing. So we sent the choir home the next week. And so I was scrambling trying to figure out because part of what was so important to me, is that community, and conveying that sense of community, we’re in this together, you know, I wanted the the space The camera because that’s one of the things that really draws people, we’ve got a beautiful sanctuary. And it’s just one of those touch points that that really people emotionally connect with. But it’s also I want people to emotionally connect with one another. We’re trying to build community. This isn’t my show. This is all of us as the community trying to do this. And so I was just scrambling and that’s when it hit on me. Okay, well, maybe I can have video elements of the worship, have someone pre recorded scripture, have someone pre record a call to worship someone pre record that, you know, a little mission presentation. And and so we did that, that next week, and it worked great. And then, you know, you saw last week’s worship service where it we ratcheted that up a little bit and added a few other little elements. And yeah, it just flowed really, really well.

Sam Schutte 11:57
So it sounds like you know, folks are trying to figure how to, what they should focus on to make a six success. You know, one thing number one is, is to consider doing the director dress format, because then you’re you’re directing engaging your audience members. Second is, you know, to remember that sense of community and try to not just make it a monologue of a guy stand in front of the camera, you know, other faces with other messages and other locales, other locations can be good, but how did you How are you doing that? You know, if we look specifically at cutting on the pre recorded, you know, what wants to start to finish workflow that are people know, how are they getting that video to you? What are they recording it on? And then how are you kind of mixing not all in and what are you using for that?

Russell Smith 12:41
Sure. Well, first, you know, again, this was this is a learning and growth process. I’m trying new things every week. And so, for the first couple of weeks, I just did a live stream on Facebook using Facebook’s live stream interface. Hmm. And then when I wanted to Cut in video, I knew I need to do something different. So what I used was OBS, which is a free downloadable streaming software. And you know it’s one of the commonly used ones out there by people who do live streaming and it’s used a lot by video gamers I found out and I and I had downloaded OBS back when I started doing the night owl study and and realized it worked pretty well. But the the laptop I was using at the time just didn’t have the horsepower to be running OBS and be running Facebook, and I had a lot of skipping. And of course now I have a new laptop. I can thank you very good friend of mine who pointed me to a great place to get a new Mac.

Sam Schutte 13:49
Yeah, our good friend Brian Burke at SellYourMac was able to help help you out there.

Russell Smith 13:55
Yes, Brian was terrific in that very good friend who pointed me there was a guy named Sam Schutte.

Sam Schutte 14:01
I always have the connections

Russell Smith 14:02
you got the connections man it’s beautiful it’s marvelous it’s a wonderful thing to watch it work

So with this new Mac now I’ve got the horsepower to use OBS but i’d stopped using it for the Night Owl Study because I didn’t really need it was it was it was more tech than I needed for the Night Owl Study the night I will study I just go on I do my thing. And I’m done. So I went back to play around and and the wonderful thing about the era in which we live you can learn anything using a little tool called YouTube. There are so many instructional videos and everybody in their brother is putting out little helpful hints just little little steps to help you along the way and I found someone that that showed me how to how to incorporate video using OBS you the other issue with OBS is by adding that extra piece of tech that that also creates a lag between the audio and the video. And so I had to puzzle out how to how to solve that. And again, there’s plenty of instructional stuff on the internet, lots of people that that just have, you know, all you have to do is type in the specific thing how do you solve audio video lag issues and OBS and you’ll find a bunch of websites that can talk you through that and you know, that’s that’s pretty much how I do my my technical training is one step at a time. What do I need right now and and go find the answer. So I got those issues resolved and, and the nice thing is by by teasing out how do I how do I incorporate video into OBS? Suddenly, I figured out a whole bunch of other stuff. It’s like oh, this is what the transitions tool in OBS is for. OBS has two Windows, the screen of what you’re queuing up in the screen of what’s playing, and you click transition. And that transitions you and that’s like,

Sam Schutte 16:09
a fade or a wipe or something between is what you mean?

Russell Smith 16:11
yeah, you can you can choose a couple of from a couple of different types of transitions. So So I finally figured out Oh, that’s what that tool is for. Then they’ve got another window for all these scenes, I had never understood what all the scenes were for. And then I that’s when things just started to fall into place. For me, it’s like, oh, you can have multiple scenes, and you can transition from one to the other. And that’s how I set up a worship service. Well, if I could have multiple scenes, I can have more than just video. As I’m looking at the loading into the videos. It gives me all kinds of things I can load in, oh, I can load in images as well. And so that’s when I used another tool that I’ve used in other parts of ministry. I just went out to Canva canva.com to great very simple graphics design program. And you know, with lots of templates, lots of fonts, you can upload photos, you can create and design all kinds of things from brochures, business cards, to social media posts. And I used it for social media graphics for my blog, back in the day. And so I just went to Canva created some screens for our hymns and an intro screen. And so that we could have an intro screen while the organ was playing. And and then, you know, when we got to the hymns, we’re still doing hymns. Like I said, we’re old school, we just put up a screen that’s got a photo of one of our stained glass windows, again, trying to help people connect to the space and the verses of the hymns and yeah, that the interesting thing there was figuring out how to queue those things up because you have to play around with the software a little bit because As each scene, you have to either turn on or turn off your microphone and, and all this stuff, you know, there. There are some interesting little quirks in OBS, but but it all started to fall into place. Once once you get a few things in place, that’s when exponentially you start to figure things out. And you start to get creative about what are the possibilities with software?

Sam Schutte 18:24
Yeah, and so, so it sounds like, you know, certainly that would be like the third piece of advice is, you know, get OBS Make sure your laptop can support it. Obviously, that’s the important thing. And maybe we can include a couple links in the show notes here to some of the videos if there’s a couple of videos you remember that have been most helpful out there. We could link to those four people and and basically sort of create a storyboard it sounds like for what you want your content to be if you want you know, some live some recorded some, you know, images of lyrics, I guess on the on the screen, you know, during other certain portions and you know, I suppose you’ve got to experiment. Some I know, there are certain, something I’ve seen people use before, as are certain Facebook groups. Or you could even create your own Facebook group that, you know, is sort of a dummy group. And you stream specifically just to that to test right. So you’re not streaming to political count, you’re streaming to this sort of secret group, to make sure that everything works well, and all that sort of stuff. Um, so that might be something that people can do to sort of practice a little bit as well

Russell Smith 19:29
And that, that that is a great point as well that you had learned a long time ago on the night owl study. You can actually just screen to yourself, you can when when you are streaming on Facebook, you can set it up as stream only me and so that it will, it will be on your timeline, but it will stream only to you and it’s locked down and then then you can go and you can see okay, how did the audio video Videos sync up. How did everything flow? Did I feel good? Good about it. But but raise a point, a very good point, rehearsing it, rehearsing it, because you’ve got so many moving parts. If you’re, I mean, you’re essentially becoming a television producer. And so if you’re trying to produce this on the fly, you really need to rehearse, rehearse, rehearse. And so, you know, one of the things I did was, I set everything up in OBS, and then I went down the Saturday before that first Sunday, and I just ran through every transition, every link tested the microphone, made sure tested the videos that were submitted. And you know, it does allow you to adjust the sound a little bit. So I tried to adjust the sound levels so that it was all relatively at the same, same volume and and I rehearsed everything and critically, making sure that the the bandwidth at church for our wireless, you know, our wireless network would be able to support the live streaming that is critical that you’ve got to make sure that you’ve got enough bandwidth, or otherwise, you get stop, start, stop start, and it’s just, it’s a mess.

Sam Schutte 21:21
Yeah. And, you know, you see that I think a lot of times when folks, especially recently, when I’ve watched people that are trying to transition to doing things live, it just, you know, they’ll end up in a space that has very, you know, insufficient bandwidth, and it can just be a real mess. Because, you know, the person who’s who’s speaking live, they don’t even know there’s a problem. So they just keep going. And, you know, people whatever can get very frustrated. How did you I mean, how did you validate that? How do you know how did you know that you had enough bandwidth? Did you you know, before you got started Well,

Russell Smith 21:55
I mean, fortunately, we had, we had done some pretty good Massive upgrades at church so I I pretty well knew but you know pretty much just by testing I tested I did a dry run

Sam Schutte 22:09
so I guess I was asking how many how do you do test that you watched it on your phone as you were recording and made sure looked okay I guess is that what you mean

Russell Smith 22:18
right yeah I ran through everything sent it to my own Facebook page viewable only by me and then after I was done recording the the run through I went back to my Facebook page and just watched the results I got gotcha and I kind of had to do that to to adjust the microphones audio video delay you know, you can you can delay the audio feed by so many microseconds and you know, I had to keep tweaking that again and again so I didn’t look like a bad dubbed foreign film.

Sam Schutte 22:53
Interesting. Is there a and are there certain like video quality levels you can try to target to sort of fit under your bandwidth limit, they have to sort of adjust as well.

Russell Smith 23:02
Yeah, a lot of those tutorials give you the numbers, I don’t know, the numbers off the top of my head, I just kind of looked at them in the tutorials made the tweaks didn’t commit them to memory because, you know, I’m still learning all this stuff. You know, there are certain parameters that make it a little bit easier. And like I said, when when you look up those tutorials or info pages, or YouTube, instructional videos, wherever you find that information, it’s readily available out there.

Sam Schutte 23:37
Sure, I guess what is the reaction from your, you know, your members of your church and such? What is the reaction been? What kind of comments I’m curious if it’s been, you know, this is obviously something that millennials and such are very used to and you fit right right in it on tik tok or whatever, right? But what about some of the older folks that are less used to viewing things live and stuff streaming and all that what’s kind of the reaction been?

Russell Smith 24:02
Overall the reaction has been very positive. We’ve not gotten any negative comments about what we’ve done. Of course, for many of our older people it is aroused, pretty strong emotion. And some of that emotion is just the sadness of the scenario that we’re in. And and I’ve actually had people tell me that they’ve been in tears, watching the service, wishing they could be there in the sanctuary and with everybody, and, and to great degree. I think that is, that’s one of the reasons I am so insistent that at least I and the organist get down there to do it from the sanctuary to keep giving people that touch point, you know, there’s something about these special spaces that touch us very, very deeply. And, and, and you want people to keep having that, that sense of lifeline. I do believe it gives them a glimmer of hope. You know what I mean? It’s not, you know, it’s not like the glimmer of hope of, oh, we’re gonna have a vaccine soon. It’s just that little, you know, it’s the, it’s these little touches of hope. I think that will help us get through this. And anything that we can do to give that little touch of hope. And you know, and that goes back to the videos again, you see someone that you’re missing, that gives you that little touch of hope one of the additions we did this past Sunday. I don’t know if you viewed the worship service all the way to the end, but I have a customary benediction that I give. And every week, it’s the same thing and it’s become one of those is kind of a distinctive benediction is one that I picked up from a pastor but but just become something that’s kind of a mark for our congregation. Well, this this week, I had asked different members of the church each to contribute a video line of that, and one of my members edited all that into a montage and So that’s how we close the worship service. And people just loved it. You know, they love seeing all these people pronounce a blessing that, you know, these people that they’re longing to see in person face to face pronouncing this blessing back to them. I think the other neat piece of this is we have a lot of our I call them alumni, people who were here in Cincinnati, but have since moved away and moved to other cities. And a lot of them have tuned back in to our live stream, either because their church isn’t doing it or their church is doing it at a different time. And and these folks have reconnected back with us. And that’s been really really special.

Sam Schutte 26:44
Yeah, very cool. You know, and I guess, you know, those little tiny pieces of hope, as you said, are I mean, I think that can be so important to people because I mean, this isolation that we’re all experiencing is can be so off putting and so, so scary, right? You know, as a bottom line, I mean, it’s, it’s not something we are built for. We are, I think as, as a species meant to congregate and, and, and deal with our friends you know, I guess, you know, what other advice or thoughts do you have on you know, how can people remain hopeful in this in this time? How can if they find themselves growing despondent, you know, what, what avenues can they follow to, to get more hope? Well,

Russell Smith 27:27
as a spiritual leader, you know, of course, I think our best surest recourse of hope is, is the spiritual journey, you know, and that’s, I’m a pastor of a Christian church, you know, I’m going to tell people, you know, draw closer to Christ, in prayer, and in, in trust, and in all of these things, but, you know, the spiritual journey is certainly a thing that helps cultivate hope, you know, that’s going to come In different packages for different folks, I was talking to our choir director just today and she was telling me that what she is doing, you know, they, they just moved to a new house, they’ve got a lot more yard, she’s spending a lot of time outdoors in the yard. And I’ve talked to a couple of people that you know, spending time outdoors, you can still social distance because you’ve got green space, and you’re spending time in the goodness of God’s creation is is something that that can rekindle hope, I think also gratitude that gratitude is a basic spiritual discipline. You know, we still have so much to be grateful for there is still some so much good news. There are so many good things that are happening when you look at the people that are out there trying to do good people that are out there trying to help people out there who are trying to alleviate suffering. people out there who are doing their best to try to brighten one another’s days. All in the name of of love, there are lots of things that we can be grateful for and if we focus and emphasize gratitude, that that is something that certainly brings hope you know, and you know, I guess we could also look to the that instinct within the desire to serve, you’ll want to kindle hope in yourself, go do something for somebody. My, my running mantra right now is pick up the phone and call somebody, you talk to somebody that you haven’t talked to call a family member, text, a loved one, text a friend, that is something simple and basic that you can do to, to just check in on somebody that is helping them and and that can can help Kindle hope. And then of course, everybody has their own kind of things that they have to do for self care whether it’s physical exercise or getting time unplugging from technology, and just Sitting and being still, for a few minutes or reading a good book, all of these things can be tools and instruments that you know, again, I’m a pastor, I ultimately think they’re instruments in God’s hands to, to bring hope and encouragement to people. And then I’ll wrap up the hope piece you as you know, I’m from South Carolina, South Carolina. One famously has two state mottos the one that everyone knows I don’t even know the other state motto, but the one that everybody knows is Doom Sparrow Sparrow, while I breathe, I hope and I think that that is a really good thing to remember that while while we yet have breath, there is still awesome.

Sam Schutte 30:47
Now well said. So. If there’s folks out there that want to figure out how to get more into this new way of you know, we’ll call it doing business if you’re if you’re a pastor. How can they reach out if they have questions? How can they reach you? What’s your contact information?

Russell Smith 31:05
Sure.

Yeah, probably the easiest thing to do is to email me at Covefirstpastor@yahoo.com that’s. Yeah, you can try calling the calling us at church you can look us up come first church org and you know our our church number is there you can leave a message for me at the office there as well but emails probably going to be the best way to get hold of me be glad to help as best as I can. And you know, but one thing you know it can be very intimidating. You take a look at some of these large churches and they have these slick production numbers. Don’t be intimidated by that at all, because the the one we’re not in competition with the large church We’re all kind of on the same team trying to bring people closer to Christ as we are in the church. But, but the other piece is, the big thing you’ve got is your relationships with your people. And, and, and what we’re just trying to do is to use the technology to continue to foster the relationships. And the relationships are what counts, not the bells and whistles, use the technology to foster relationships. Don’t think the technology is going to be a magic thing that’s going to suddenly bring in bazillions of people. But technology is an incredibly useful tool to help you keep building the relationships that you have, and may or possibly open the door to new relationships.

Sam Schutte 32:50
Yeah, absolutely. And so if folks want to sort of also watch real time, what you’re doing to gain ideas from that and stuff when or the time or you’re doing these live streams on your Facebook page. And I guess also what is your Facebook page name so people can find it?

Russell Smith 33:05
Sure. Well, we are Covenant First Presbyterian Church. So that’s Yeah, just look us up on Facebook. We do the live stream at 10:30. On Sundays usually we start about 10, 10:22 10:23 we have an organ Prelude and we have that whole thing going well, you know, that’s a live organ Prelude, we’ve got a pretty majestic instrument, and we want that to be used and so we’ve got the title screen up and the organ Prelude going for those first seven or eight minutes. And then the worship surface proper goes live, right around 10:30 though I have been putting the video on our YouTube page as well, and you know, and that is one of the one of the things I think if if I had this to do over again, I would probably just live streams Straight to YouTube. Instead of Facebook, you know, I went to Facebook because we already had a lot of people there. And I thought it would be easier, but we’ve have a lot of people that are not on Facebook. And and I’m learning that there are plenty of people that are just completely checked out of Facebook and don’t want anything to do with it. Whereas YouTube kind of has more of a universal access people treat it like a search engine more than, than anything. And I think I probably would have done live stream straight to YouTube. That is one of the downsides of the OBS software, you can only stream from it to one platform, you have to pick or choose some of the commercial, you know, live stream people. You know, there are a bunch of providers out there who will create your live stream for you, and they can send it out to multiple platforms. That’s something we’re probably going to experiment With and look at once we get on the other side of this COVID-19 thing, right,

Sam Schutte 35:06
very cool well so folks out there, hope you’ll reach out to Russell if you are needing help with this and also check out what he’s doing and watch some of his live streams because he’s really out of town. I mean, I think like I said, I was pretty impressed watching it on Sunday because you know, it’s one of those things it looks like you’re paying someone thousands of dollars to do because it does cost it can cost a lot to hire, you know, a professional service to do this for you. So you’re doing a fantastic job, sort of with your own elbow grease doing it yourself. And and Russell, as always great to chat with you and catch up with you what you’ve been doing.

Russell Smith 35:43
Well, thank you so much, Sam. I do have to say though, I’m not doing it all myself. I have congregation members who are short recording videos, I’ve got an assistant who is now making the Canva things for me, we’ve got a music team. So I mean it is a team effort. I’m just kind of pulling it together, but But I said, Yeah, thank you for thank you for the encouragement.

Sam Schutte 36:05
Absolutely. Yeah. And thanks and we’ll talk to you again soon.

Russell Smith 36:08
That sounds great. Bye bye.

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