Atonement Digital Media Diaries #1

Welcome to the Atonement Digital Media Diaries!

My name is Alex. My official title here at Atonement is Digital Media Assistant.

This is my newest idea for a way to better communicate the cool things going on at Atonement from a behind-the-scenes (and biased toward tech) perspective! New posts will be on an “as I feel like it (or remember to make a post)” basis. I’ll shoot for a few times a month though.

So, what’s new and wonderful this week?

1. Spiritual Milk Instagram Reel

On Sept. 29, Pastor gave a sermon titled “The Mark of a God-Lived Life.” In it, he used, to a great extent, an analogy of milk being God’s Word, drawn from 1 Peter. 1:22-2:3. He added to this analogy using some toilet bowl cleaner. The toilet bowl cleaner represented false teaching. He made the point that if he put a couple drops of the toilet bowl cleaner into a cup of milk, you’d probably want to try to avoid drinking that cup of milk. You probably wouldn’t drop dead on the spot, but a constant diet of milk mixed with a bit of the cleaner could probably kill you. This little chunk from the sermon made for a perfect section to use as a one-minute sermon clip on social medias. I cut it down as best I could and uploaded it to our usual places; YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook. Here’s what the video looks like on YouTube. Honestly, I was expecting it to do better than our average content. For whatever reason, sermon clips tend to perform better on social media than just about any of the rest of the content we produce. Additionally, this one was simply quite visually interesting and had a lot going on. Again. I figured it’d do well. I didn’t expect it to do this well.

As of the time I’m writing this, the video has 67,462 plays, 2,223 likes, 401 comments, and 816 shares on Instagram alone.

• Edit: As of 10/18/2024, the reel is up to 83,759 views, 2,677 likes, 502 comments, and 1,041 shares.

That’s significantly better than any other content of ours has ever done. It’s by no means a massive viral video that everyone and their sister-in-law is talking about, but it’s certainly a solid performance. Now, it should be noted that probably about 25% of those comments are us replying to others. Additionally, probably 95% of that remaining 75% are people arguing with each other and/or complaining about us, our message, etc. in some way or another. Obviously this shouldn’t really be a surprise. I think we’ve all seen how the internet seems to be best at promoting arguments, hatred, etc. Not to mention that we are told that we will face rejection when sharing the Gospel. That 5% of comments that have been encouraging have been very refreshing, though. Plus, at the end of the day, we have no way of knowing exactly how the Holy Spirit will use those 67k+ views.

The reel has been up since October 4th and it’s showing very few signs of traction slowing down, so I expect the views, likes, comments are shares to keep growing for at least a while longer. Here’s the link if you’re interested in helping it grow even more.

2. Finishing our wireless mic antenna upgrades.

You may have noticed, over the course of the Spring and into the early summer, that preachers’ microphones were cutting out more and more. After lots and lots of research, tests, trying various “fixes,” firmware updates, etc, I can genuinely say I don’t know what on earth was happening. Nothing I was doing seemed to be helping and we clearly needed a solution. So, I got in touch with a teacher at Wisconsin Lutheran High School who’s in charge of their tech team and whom I had the pleasure of having for one class my senior year there. He let me borrow their directional antennas (yes, antennas is technically more correct than antennae when referring to the electronic type of antenna). Up until this point, we had been using the omnidirectional antennas that came with our equipment. What’s the difference? omnidirectional have a pickup pattern that’s essentially a big circle all the way around them. This is the most common type of antenna. Think the same kind of thing you’d see on an old car or radio. A directional antenna is, well, directional. It has what’s called a cardioid pickup pattern. You point it in the direction you want it to be most sensitive toward and it will reject more noise in the directions you want it to. This is, theoretically, perfect for our use case. We’ve got a long, straight sanctuary with the antennas placed in the very back. But. How did they work in practice?

Great. Yeah. They fixed the problem completely. No issues. No notes. After a couple weeks using Wisco’s just to make sure results were consistent, we went ahead and purchased two of our own. We had them temporarily mounted to mic stands up in the balcony. That was mid-August. Finally, this Tuesday we got around to getting them permanently mounted to the balcony. They came out looking pretty good if you ask me. All in all, happy to have another project completely crossed off the to-do list.

3. New choir mics are on the way!

Not a whole lot to say about this but it is very exciting (at least to me). We’re getting new choir microphones, plus an upgrade to our wireless system! I’ll have more to share once everything arrives. The main thing to know, though, is that this will make set-up and take-down for choir singing a whole lot easier. It will also hopefully make the microphones a lot less distracting, both while in use and not.

4. Constant updates to this website

Every week there’s a little more to see and do on our website. Just about everything we post on various platforms also makes its way here. In many ways, our website is the best place to find our sermons, Weekly encouragement, Bible Classes, and more! I spent a lot of time over the summer giving our site a bit of a refreshed look, and there are still quite a few new things coming. I know this might not be as exciting to you as it is to me, but if nothing else, I want you to know that there’s constant work being done to keep our digital front door looking tidy and up-to-date. If you haven’t recently, please do take a look around and see what you think. Please also don’t hesitate to let me know if you find any problems (you probably will – especially on mobile) or if you have any ideas for content you’d like to see added.

Thanks for reading!

Yeah, that’s basically what I’ve got. That Instagram Reel doing so well is pretty much what made me decide to make this. Plus it’s been a solid week for new things. I honestly feel like I’m forgetting something. Oh well. I can always add it later. While I’ve got you, I figure I might as well go ahead and plug a YouTube channel. I’ve started a new channel called Atonement Tech that’s specifically for the techy goings-ons at Atonement. So far I’ve only got a Covid-era blooper reel (that is very funny and you should watch it), but I do want to have more behind-the-scenes vloggy content up soon. Think of it as a video supplement to this blog. Here’s the link. Thanks again for reading! talk to ya soon! God bless!