Lake Erie Yearly Meeting

Gather Sundays at 10 AM EST to Worship online with LEYM

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For the health and protection of our LEYM Meeting community and to support the public health of the wider community in the face of the Coronavirus pandemic, LEYM is experimenting with providing online worship, using the Zoom conferencing service. We envision participation by Friends from across our LEYM affiliated meetings. We can accommodate up to 100 participants at a time. We will gather online at 10 AM on Firstday (Sunday) mornings. Many in our community are familiar with Zoom; some are not. Instructions for how to set up and join our Zoom Meeting are provided in this document: LEYM_Online_Worship_Advices.

Many have participated in meetings of various kinds on Zoom; few have participated in a meeting for worship on Zoom. To help establish and sustain the quality of worship, we have prepared some advices below.

Advices for Participating in Online Worship

• Enter the meeting in silence as you would for an in-person meeting for worship. Do not introduce yourself when you enter.
• Keep your device on mute unless you are speaking. Everyone will be muted by default upon entering, and the “host” has the ability to mute and unmute any participant. Background noise such as dogs barking or cell phones ringing can be very disruptive to the spirit of worship and make it hard to hear.

If you are led to speak:

• As always, allow some silence after any preceding message to allow it to settle in our hearts.
• Unmute your device.
• Introduce yourself, simply saying “This is <your name.> (Some may participate by phone, so it especially helps them.)
  • Pause briefly in case someone else has also started to speak. If so, wait for the clerk to recognize you. Otherwise, start speaking.
• Mute your device when you are done. (The host may do so if you forget.)
• Continuing in worship, the clerk will invite afterthoughts and joys and concerns as usual. Continue to follow the same advices for speaking.
• If you need to get the attention of the host or clerk for any reason, use the chat feature and choose to whom to address your message or use the raise hand feature. If you are using only a phone to connect, consider texting the host first; unmute and speak to the group, if necessary.

Lake Erie Yearly Meeting’s executive committee has discerned that we will hold our Representative Meeting that had been scheduled 4/3 & 4/4 in Pittsburgh via Zoom, the online meeting platform, to reduce #COVID19 exposure. More details to follow in coming days.

USING ZOOM

For those new to the tool, Zoom is a video meeting platform that is designed to work across many different types of devices (phone, smartphone, tablet, or desktop computer).

Before joining a Zoom meeting on a computer or mobile device, you can download the Zoom app from the Zoom Download Center at https://zoom.us/download . If you haven’t already installed it, you will be prompted to download and install Zoom when you click a join link shared via email. While it is quick to install, it is best to set up your system in advance of a meeting.

Here’s a link to a quick video and a detailed walk-through on how to join an online meeting on different available platforms: How Do I Join a Zoom Meeting

You can also join a test meeting to familiarize yourself with Zoom and try out your set-up here: Zoom Test –  https://zoom.us/test