A Hybrid Prayer Room is a place where people can join to pray online or in person.
You may want to run a Hybrid Prayer Room if you have members of your community who want to join in with your prayer room, but can’t make it to the physical space.
St John’s Church, Crawley, UK encountered God in their hybrid prayer room:
“We wanted to provide a prayer space that was physical and in-person but also enabled people to engage online if they weren’t ready or able to come in person, following the Coronavirus Pandemic.
We focused on ways to create a hybrid room that was both creative and interactive for people in the prayer room and also engaging online.”
St John’s Church, Crawley
Tips from St John’s Church on creating a hybrid prayer room
- We purchased a 360-degree camera, to enable us to take a full 360 shot of our prayer space.
- Next, we set up the creative prayer stations around the camera, to make them clearly visible. We then took a 360 degree photo of the completed space.
- We signed up for a free account with SeekBeak, which enabled us to upload the photograph and add interactive ‘buttons’. This meant we could link to websites, text, audio files and other documents so that online participants could fully participate.
- To view the prayer room you could scroll around the space using the camera view.
- Online participants shared words, pictures, and prayers, on a Trello board. For safeguarding purposes, participants had to have an account on Trello and were invited to join the board.
- A key element of the online prayer space was to ensure it could be easy to access from our church website. SeekBeak allowed us to embed the 360 degree prayer room image onto our website.
- After the virtual element was set up, the prayer stations were moved further apart to give in-person space to pray.
- When people signed up to a prayer slot, both the link to the website and details of the physical prayer room were sent out in their sign-up email.