There are several reasons behind this decision. First and foremost, we want to connect more with you, no matter where you are in the world. Our desire is to open up more lines of communication to our church family, and to give our online audience access to more of the resources we offer in-person. With the Church Online platform, you'll be able to communicate better with us, your fellow attendees, and church leadership directly. You'll also be able to more easily access our online resources, and we as church leadership will be able to better adjust this platform to meet your needs.

Another reason for this move has to do with quality. As you may have noticed, YouTube can be a little grainy at times, and the audio/visual quality is just not that great. This is partially due to YouTube's heavy compression algorithm, which really lowers the quality of what we're putting into YouTube when you, the viewer, tune in. This new platform will allow us to deliver full-quality broadcast live, and will give us the opportunity to further improve our live stream.

There's one more reason, and it has to do with censorship. As we've seen in recent years, times are changing. Now more than ever, we as a church feel that it is necessary to have greater control over our broadcast. We want to ensure long-lasting, high-quality distribution of our services so that you'll have access to them for years to come. Unfortunately, we don't think this will always be possible on YouTube. We are concerned that this platform may continue to restrict our content in the future, and we know for a fact that we have less control over our content on this platform. There are other concerns we have regarding YouTube itself, and we'll address those below.

Nothing is inherently wrong with YouTube. In fact, we love using the platform! But it does have its limitations. For starters, YouTube limits the quality of our broadcasts. It compresses our signal, making the quality of the delivered broadcast a bit lower than what we're sending out. We're also running into a minor spam issue on YouTube. Recently, you may have noticed several random letters & numbers in the chat. These are likely generated by a bot (a piece of software created to automatically post certain things online), and can be harmful if clicked on. Moving platforms will likely eliminate this issue entirely.

Another thing to consider is advertisements. As you've probably noticed, YouTube has been significantly increasing its ad time across the platform. Our new platform will stream through Vimeo, which is completely ad free. We control our channel, and we won't place any ads on it. However, ads will continue to appear in all videos on our YouTube channel, including those we send over from Vimeo. YouTube doesn't give us any way around this.

These are just a few of the concerns we have over our long-term use of hte platform. Overall, nothing is wrong with YouTube. But we don't think it's the best fit for us.

We're so glad you asked! One of the main features we'll be adding will be an enhanced chat option. You can send in messages, converse with those around you, and connect with other members of the online audience. You'll also be more connected with our in-person audience, and you'll have the ability to send us messages & prayer requests directly. For now, these messages will be received & handled by the Media Director (Elijah) and other members of the worship team.

You'll also be more connected with our online tools, including the online communicator, connect card, Church Center app, and online giving. These materials can be accessed via the header links on our Church Online page. We'll continue rolling features out in the future, and we'd love to hear your suggestions! Feel free to send them to media@lzymtn.com.

You can start watching our live stream through Church Online beginning Sunday, February 6th. This first Sunday will be a "soft launch" of the service. Beginning Sunday, February 13th, we'll officially launch the service with all its new features.

Since this new platform represents a pretty significant change, we want to make sure we transition slowly so that everyone will be able to watch our live stream every Sunday. However, we may eventually phase out YouTube. For now, you're welcome to continue streaming on YouTube, but we'd suggest giving the new platform a try. You can easily access it on live.lzymtn.com. And if you have any trouble or need any help, please don't hesitate to contact us! You can email Elijah, our media director, at media@lzymtn.com.

Church Online works in your web browser. Most devices (including many smart TVs) have a web browser on them that will work for this. To access, simply go to lzymtn.com/stream on the device you'd like to use.

We know that some devices, TVs for example, don't always have a web browser. That's ok...We have other ways for you to watch it. You can find the Lazy Mountain Bible Church TV app on your Roku or Amazon Fire TV. Just search for us in your channel store! Our streams are also published to YouTube, but at a lower quality. If you'd like to participate in the Church Online chat, simply pull it up on your phone while you're watching on TV.

Our media director, Elijah, would be happy to answer any questions your may have! You can reach him at media@lzymtn.com, or via call/text at (907) 795-3610.