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Dear SVBC family and friends:

Greetings to you all from the rest of the staff and myself. We miss you. We’re thinking of you and praying for you. We thank you for your notes of encouragement and messages of support. It has been a time of significant adjustment for everyone.

Thankfully, we had just set up livestreaming before the pandemic hit. We were in a good spot to transition to an online distribution. After our first Sunday, we added a split screen to include a sign language interpreter for the deaf community. We also upgraded our internet bandwidth.

However we have experienced technical difficulties the last two Sundays. Some of the problems came from our end. Our website crashed 2 weeks ago. We also had some recording and sound issues. Other problems came through the platforms we’re using – Church Online; Facebook, Youtube. Last Sunday, Church Online experienced an overload and Facebook crashed entirely as well. One of our platform providers notified us that they have gone from streaming a few hundred services to over 17000 last Sunday between 10 and Noon.

These factors have combined in different ways the last couple of weeks to cause the technical difficulties you experienced. We have been hard at work to try to minimize these issues. We have been in contact with our website provider and Church Online along with others. All have been adding servers, space, or systems to try to address this dramatic increase in load and demand.

To that end, we also have made the following changes that we hope will help this Sunday.
· We have moved the camera closer to the platform to improve the resolution of the video.
· We have added an emergency 4th option to view the livestream, which removes a couple of barriers to delivery at the expense of connect features.
· We have simplified the church website so that when you pull up the site, you will immediately see the livestream link. One click and it will direct you to our various feeds.
· We are cleaning up our YouTube channels and working to bring everything to one place.
· We are adding an Online Kids Church at 10 AM on Sundays that will play before the main service.

No one can guarantee that everything will work fine on Sunday AM. But, we are working hard in an attempt to keep us connected as a church family.

So we would ask you to pray for this Sunday. Pray for the technology to work. Pray for the service to proclaim the hope and help we find in God. Pray for those watching who don’t know Christ to receive Him this Sunday.

If things don’t work out well this Sunday, we have some alternate plans that we will move forward on. Either way, we will continue to work at staying connected during this time.

Thanks to all the staff and people working on this. Thank you for your patience and prayers.

Until we meet again! Pastor Tom