Parish live streams & pre-recorded services

during the coronavirus (COVID-19) crisis

We’re really enjoying seeing the huge range of worship and teaching posted by our parishes. Some services are live. Some, like the Diocesan Church at Home service are ‘as live’, and others are pre-recorded. They’re all great and the list below is regularly updated to include all of the parish online content that we are aware of. Email communications@oxford.anglican.org to be included on the list. Want to create your own Church at Home service? Scroll down the page for some top tips and details of our new peer learning group.

Daily offices

Weekday and other

Sunday 8:00 am

St Mary’s Maidenhead – website
St Mary’s, Charlbury – Youtube
Great Missenden with Ballinger and Hampden – BCP Communion – Facebook

Sunday 9am

St James, Bierton – Said Communion – YouTube
All Saints Wokingham – Communion – Parish Website
St Mary’s, Amersham with All Saints’, Coleshill – Morning Prayer and Holy Communion on Zoom – details on parish website
Bucknell, Caversfield and Launton, Holy Communion by Zoom
St Matthew’s Harwell with All Saints’ Chilton – parish website
St Mary’s, Beaconsfield – Common Prayer Holy Communion – Facebook
Shill Valley and Broadshire Benefice – parish website
St Mary’s & Barley Hill Church – Common Worship – Zoom
SS Peter and Paul, Deddington, second Sunday of the month – BCP Communion – YouTube

Sunday 9:15 am

St Mary’s Maidenhead – website
St Michael’s, Sunninghill and All Saints, South Ascot – Family Service on Zoom. Email the Vicar for details.

Sunday 9:30 am

Buckingham Parish Church – Family Service: YouTube
St Paul’s Wokingham – Facebook
Warfield Church – Holy Communion – Facebook
St Michael’s, Easthampstead – Eucharist – YouTube
4U in Marlow – traditional Service – parish website
Holy Cross, Slapton – Facebook
Caversham, Thameside and Mapledurham – Morning Prayer – YouTube
St Mary’s, Pinces Risborough – Facebook
St Andrew’s, Oxford – All Age Worship – church website
Holy Trinity, Prestwood and st Mary Magdalen, Great Hampden – Morning Worship
St Laurence Winslow – Eucharist – Facebook
St Michael and All Angels’, Sandhurst – parish Communion – Facebook
St Michael’s, Tilehurst – Parish Website
Eton with Eton Wick, Boveney and Dorney (alternating with 11am one week, 930am the next): details on the website
Garsington, Cuddesdon and Horspath Zoom. Email rev.karen.charman@gmail.com for the link.
St Catherine’s, Towersey – parish website
St Margaret’s, Tylers Green – parish website

Sunday 9.45am

St Michael & All Angels Church, Hughenden – JC Club Online, for primary school aged children and the young at heart – Facebook YouTube

Sunday 10:00 am

St Mary, Buckland (for the whole Cherbury with Gainfield benefice) – YouTube
All Saints, Wokingham – YouTube
Cookham churches – YouTube
St Ebbe’s Oxford – YouTube
St Mary’s Kidlington – website
St James, Cowley, Oxford – Facebook
Little Missenden – Church website
Buckingham Parish Church – church website
St Peter’s and St Mark’s, Maidenhead – service – website
St Mary’s, Bletchley – Facebook
St Nicolas, Earley – YouTube
Iver Parish – Facebook
St Lawrence, Hungerford – YouTube
St Peter’s, Wootton – Website
St Anne’s and St Peter’s, High Wycombe – Facebook
Great Missenden – Facebook
All Saints Didcot – YouTube and Facebook
St Mary’s, Datchet and St Thomas, Colnbrook – YouTube
St Francis of Assisi, Terriers, High Wycombe – Facebook
All Saints, Dedworth, Windsor – YouTube
All Saints, Hitcham – Facebook
St Mary’s, Amersham with All Saints’, Coleshill – Holy Communion – details on parish website
Shelswell Benefice – Holy Communion – Facebook
Holy Trinity, Aylesburuy – HTA Kids – YouTube
St Peter’s, Loudwater – Morning Worship – YouTube
St Peter’s, Loudwater – All Star Kids’ Service – YouTube
St Mary’s, Beaconsfield – Facebook
Burford – parish website
St Mary’s, Great Chesham youth service – parish website
Great Chesham Emmanuel – YouTube
St John’s, Bellingdon, Great Chesham – YouTube
St John’s, Woodley – parish website
St Paul’s, Slough – YouTube
Greyfrairs Reading – family worship – YouTube
St Mary’s, Shaw – YouTube
Holy Trinity Headington Quarry – YouTube and Radio Cherwell
St Michael’s, Amersham on the Hill – Soundcloud
Christ the King, Milton Keynes – Facebook
St Mary’s, Aylesbury – YouTube
St Catherine’s, Tilehurst – Facebook
Aldermaston and Woolhampton – YouTube
St Mary’s, Iffley – Eucharist – parish website
St Matthew’s, Reading – parish website
Wallingford Benefice – YouTube
All Saints’, High Wycombe – Zoom – details on the parish website.

Sunday 10.15am

St Peter’s Caversham – Zoom – details on parish website

Sunday 10:30 am

Sunday 10.45am

St Nicolas, Taplow – parish website

Church of the Holy Spirit, Bedgrove – Facebook

Sunday 11am

The benefice of Twyford, Ruscombe and Hurst – YouTube
Warfield Church – Service of Worship and the Word – Facebook
4U Marlow – Contemporary service – parish website
Schorne Team – Facebook
St John the Baptist, Kingston Bagpuize – Zoom meeting
Swinbrook@11 – parish website
The Hermitage Team – alternate Sundays The Living Room informal service/morning prayer – Zoom – details on parish website
St James Downley – Zoom. Details on the parish website
St Mary’s & Barley Hill Church, Thame – contemporary worship – Zoom
Holy Trinity, Penn – Parish website
Eton with Eton Wick, Boveney and Dorney (alternating with 11am one week, 930am the next): details on the website
St Michael & All Angels Church, Hughenden – Parish worship, with Services of the Word and Holy Communion on alternating weeks – YouTube

Sunday 11.15am

St Andrew’s Oxford – church website

St Margaret’s, Mapledurham – church website

St Michael and All Angels’, Sandhurst – family service – Zoom – details on parish website

Sunday 11.45am

St Matthew’s, Reading – parish website

Sunday 12noon

New Windsor – Zoom gathering – details on parish website

Sunday 12.15pm

Hermitage Team – virtual coffee – Zoom – details on parish website

Sunday 4pm

Trinity@Four, Henley – parish website

RAF High Wycombe – YouTube – recorded and available later.

Sunday 5pm

Buckingham Parish Church, contemporary family service – church website
St Mary’s, Amersham with All Saints’ Coleshill – children’s story on Facebook – details on the parish website
Holy Trinity, Headington Quarry – YouTube or Radio Cherwell

Sunday 5.45pm

University College Oxford – Sung Evensong – college website
Merton College Oxford – college website

Sunday, 6pm

St Nicolas, Earley – YouTube
Great Missenden – Evening Prayer – Facebook
St Andrew’s, Caversham – YouTube
Bernwode Benefice – livestream Compline – parish website
Woodstock and Bladon – Evening Prayer – Facebook

Sunday 6.30pm

Greyfriars and New Hope Reading – church website

St Barnabas, Jericho and St Thomas the Martyr, Oxford – evening prayer on Zoom – details on parish website

Sunday 7pm

Great Chesham Emmanuel – YouTube

Sunday 8 pm

Holy Trinity Prestwood – night prayer/The Angelus – on the parish website

Sunday - pre-recorded

Steeple Aston with North Aston and Tackley – Worship at Home – YouTube

St Mary’s, Wexham – YouTube

St Peter and St Paul’s, Newport Pagnell – parish website

East Downland Benefice – parish website

St Michael and All Angels, Summertown – parish website

Great Chesham parish – parish website

St Giles and St Andrew’s, Stoke Poges – parish website

We know that if you’ve never done church online before, whether recorded or live-streamed, it can be bamboozling.

The Church of England has put together this helpful beginners guide to streaming.

Below we’ve published some FAQs, adapted from a range of sources. Got a top tip?… let us know.

New: Peer learning group

We’ve set up a private Facebook group for anyone who is directly involved in organising and running online church services (recorded and streamed). It’s a place to pose questions and support others. Join here.

Where should I start and what should I share?

For churches who are just getting started with film, perhaps start with a simple video of someone reading out this week’s prayers or readings. Maybe a message from the vicar, to say hello and to explain how the church is continuing to function. Remember, online worship doesn’t just have to fall to the ordained clergy – the church needs everyone’s gifts to flourish, particularly at this time.

When should I live-stream?

A sermon with an opportunity for discussion afterwards
A thought for the day from the vicar or a member of the church
A daily prayer
An update or a good news story
’Notices’ – read out the week’s notices and ask everyone to share their own news in the comment.

When should I use pre-recorded video?

The safer alternative to live streaming – particularly for churches that are new to making videos in general – is to pre-record your worship/prayers/reflection and to upload your video in your own time. This offers a more inclusive opportunity to add subtitles to your video, making it more accessible for many more viewers. It means you can make edits. You can trim out the long beginning section where you are recording, but nothing is happening on screen.

How can I keep people interested?

Crucially with online video, we know that people need to be interested within three seconds to decide whether they will keep watching. If all they see is an empty chair, while someone fiddles with the angle the camera is propped up at – it’s unlikely that they will stick with you! Another feature on Facebook and Youtube is the option to Premiere your video. If you choose this option the video will produce a post to let your followers know when the video will be premiering and then it will be published ‘as live’ and people can follow along with your pre-recorded service in real-time.

Why not team up with another parish?

It’s important not to rush into putting a video online if you’ve never done it before, or feel pressure to do so. While this is an excellent time to experiment and see what your phone is capable of, be aware that too much poor quality content from your church’s account could lead to you losing followers, rather than gaining and nourishing them.

There is so much content out there already. So, we are encouraging churches to ‘buddy up’ with another parish doing live and pre-recorded video well, and ask to share their worship and prayer videos until they are ready to share videos themselves. Perhaps this will lead to the fruitful sharing of resources between churches in the future!

Music mode in Zoom (aka original sound)

The Rama Vocal centre in Denmark has produced a short film about the benefits of switching to original sound in Zoom. The setting removes speech codecs and the difference it makes to the quality of audio for worship is incredible.

How to create a Zoom choir

Have you listened to the online Hallejulah Chorus from St Nicholas Taplow? It was fantastic as are these recordings from Taplow. So, the churchwarden, Tony Bridge has put together these guidelines for how to do it.

It was a bit of a journey getting the video done – I’m a professional Sound Editor, so I’m very used to audio software, but a novice at video and it was a steep learning curve! Plus, I was up against the deadline of Easter Sunday – so there’s a lot of rough edges, which I’m sure will get smoother over the coming weeks!

First, you need your backing track, which your singers will play on their phone, using earpieces, as we want to record just their voices at this point. If you’re doing an Acappella thing, then I guess a piano guide track is going to be useful. The singers record their video onto a second device with a camera, could be a laptop or iPad, singing along to the track. What comes out is just their voice, with no track.

Then everyone sends that video to the person who will put the videos together (see later for methods of transmission), syncing them all up to the original piano track. What I use for video editing is Cyberlink’s PowerDirector (around £100) and Adobe Premiere Pro (£20 per month) on PC. If you have a Mac, the one to go for is Final Cut Pro.

The main thing for the video editor to concentrate on at the start is planning. First, get everyone to record in the same orientation, either landscape or portrait, but they should be the same. In the Hallelujah, I didn’t think of that until later. The screen looks a bit random and haphazard now, with everyone at different sizes. I prefer landscape; it’s easier to make a nice layout with that. In all these Video Editors, you can use a convenient grid, so that you can place each video neatly. Look for the parameters Scale (to shrink each video down in size) and Position (to place each video around the screen). You might also want to use Crop.

Video is very resource-intensive. Although these programs promise up to 100 video tracks, this will depend on the power of your computer. Late in the process, I realised that I should make up the video in small chunks, sopranos only, make a finished video of just those, then move on to the altos, finalise them, and so on. Finally, bring all those chunks together as finished videos, and the computer will find it much easier to cope. This is where the planning comes in because you have to make sure that all the videos will be visible in the final assembly, not covering each other up!

Then there’s the sound! Because everyone is on their own, singing in front of their PC/iPad, the final result will have all the voices coming out of the middle, and the sound will be muddled up.

PowerDirector is weak in the sound department and doesn’t let you ‘spread’ the sound out (though they also make a companion program called AudioDirector, which does). I ended up stripping the audio from each video and treating the music in my audio editing software (which cost several thousand pounds a few years ago) and sending that back to PowerDirector. It’s still not ideal, but now you can hear individual voices coming from different ‘places’. Premiere Pro and Final Cut Pro are much more powerful in mixing audio, as in other departments.

Then you’ve got to get everyone comfortable with working with WeTransfer.com (which is the easiest for novice tech-users – simply go to the website and upload your file…), Dropbox or Google Drive. Video files will be too ‘heavy’ to send via normal emailing, and you’ll need these solutions to receive all the files. I found some people just gave up because of all the technical faff, and I spent several hours on the phone coaxing them along and easing them through the processes involved.

Phew! Sorry to go off on a Geek rant, you’ve probably gone to sleep by now! But I wish someone had told me before I started about some of the pitfalls. But if you can work through all this, it’s great when the final result comes out! I’m already working on the next one. Once you’ve got an idea of some of the pitfalls (I’m sure there will be more ahead!) things become more fun and rewarding.

Parish streams and pre-recorded services

Parish live streams & pre-recorded services

New: Peer learning group