Church Event Planning the Altar Live Way

Altar Live is an online church platform designed for faith communities to stream and host interactive and engaging events and services. Our simple, intuitive platform gathers your people together online where they can worship together in watch parties, freely socialize at virtual tables together, and find private places to pray with each other.

Altar Live is based around three major components: Events, Meetings, and Rooms.

Church event planning in Altar Live is different from using other platforms in many ways, but one major one is that you can have synchronous events in the same community...meaning that you can have 2, 3, or more events happening at the same time!

Events are different from Meetings and Rooms in that there is always some sort of streaming component, whether that is a livestream, a simulated live stream, or a pre-recorded video.

Let’s break down how to create both one-time and recurring events on Altar Live.

Planning a church event: The Basics

Who can create an Event? 

Like in physical buildings, church event planning is often done by the church leaders, administrators and other officials. In Altar Live, church event planning is done the same way: through our Admins. 

Church Event planning on Altar Live is similar to planning an event on First off, only members with admin access can create, edit, or delete events in your community. And, during this process, you can always hit the back button to go to a previous step. You can also click save as draft to come back to your creation later. It appears as a draft only to admins, and is invisible to everyone else.

How To Create an Event

Church event planning doesn’t have to be complicated. On Altar Live, it only takes a few simple steps. The first thing you want to do is, log in to your community dashboard, and click create an event. You will now see all 5 steps needed to create this event.

Start with a name, and a small description of the event itself, which will display on your Community Landing Page and will let your members know what your event is all about.

Choose the date, starting, and ending times for your event.

Note that when your church event planning, the start time is not when your event itself starts, but when your pre-recorded video or your live stream actually starts. Your people are more than welcome to arrive at the event before the start time!

You can also make this event a recurring event on a daily, weekly, or custom schedule.

Click featured event at the bottom to make this event get top billing on your Community Landing Page. This will be one of the first things your members see when they log in to your page.

Choosing Your Team 

If you’re church event planning, you need a solid team to help everything run smoothly. Hosting an Event on Altar Live is no exception. On the Altar Live platform, you can easily choose your team in the middle of the church event planning process. 

 You can pick your team by going to your team page, where you can add your hospitality team as Greeters or Hosts.

The Hospitality Team can greet non-logged in viewers with a preset greeting, and they can chat with both general viewers as well as logged in members. This team is vital to engagement in your church!

You can also give your greeters host privileges, which gives them the ability to start and end the service, as well as move the service between the Lobby view and the pew view. Clicking next will give you options to set permissions on who can join your event. Selecting Anyone allows anyone with a link to join the service. Selecting All Members makes your event private and only allows those who have created an account with your community in Altar Live.

Choosing Selected Members only allows those which you have selected beforehand to be in the meeting. This is useful for small group gatherings, Bible studies, and any general meetings.

Live stream Options

For online church event planning, live stream options are definitely a necessity. Next, you will link your stream. Altar Live supports two main types of streams: live or simulated live; and pre-recorded.Pre-recorded videos can be paused and skimmed like a YouTube video. Live events happen in real time and typically cannot be paused, rewound, or fast-forwarded. Simulated live events are pre-recorded, but are streamed like live events, much like a YouTube premiere. Connecting streams is the same for each provider: Click the icon of your provider and paste your stream or video link.

Altar Live has the ability to handle custom RTMP links, which can link your streaming software and allow you to multicast to your Facebook and Youtube channels. For more specific information on stream setups, click the links on the page. 

Once your stream is set up, click next to set up any pre-event slides you would like to be displayed. These are typically used as announcements for your church for those that show up early to the event. The speed of slide rotation can be chosen, and your images or videos can easily be uploaded.

Clicking next will take you to your very last option: rooms. Watch our other tutorial videos to see how to utilize rooms effectively, but think of these as larger breakout areas than the normal 4 seats in a row or a table. Type your room name and a short description of your room, as well as the maximum number of people that can join your room.

Now that your event is ready to go, you can either save it as a draft to come back to later, or publish the event.

Your event has been successfully created, and you can come back to edit it whenever needed. 

Final Thoughts 

Church event planning doesn’t have to be a long, complicated process. With a church platform like Altar Live, anyone can easily create an engaging online church service that has the ability to bring people together regardless of location. The Altar Live team is honored to be able to provide video conferencing software, consulting & training for churches, and reach every person on the other side of the screen and create community online.