The following email was sent out recently in the Bay Area Christian Church’s community, and we thought that we’d extend some of the useful tips and tricks with you! Check out this friendly note provided to us by our sister congregation.

Discover creative ways to encourage others and to motivate them toward acts of compassion, doing beautiful works as expressions of love. 

- Hebrews 10:24 TPT

For the last few weeks, God has guided us to find creative ways to stay connected with each other. It has been refreshing to virtually connect face-to-face and have midweek services using Zoom, the video conference software tool. 

As with every form of electronic communication, it is important that we educate ourselves on security and safety. There have been reports of uninvited guests to Zoom meetings sharing inappropriate content (Zoom bombing) or files when users post their Zoom link publicly.

We have not had any of these experiences nor do we expect that we will. However, here are some simple Zoom "Best Practices" we developed to ensure that our digital midweeks, Bible talks, discipleship groups, game nights, and watch parties are safe, secure and inspiring.

Zoom Best Practices

Do not post Zoom meeting links or IDs publicly. Only use email, text or closed group messaging like GroupMe to communicate the meeting info, including midweeks.

Do not use your personal Zoom ID for meetings. Instead, use the random ID generated by Zoom for your meeting. This makes every meeting you set up a different Zoom ID.

Do not set up recurring meetings. When you do this, the meeting ID is reused so people who scan for IDs could potentially find it active and wait for that meeting. Setting up every midweek or recurring meeting individually means that every meeting gets a unique ID.

Update your default settings for meetings with the following:

1. Change screen sharing to “Host Only” so only the host can share their screen

2. Disable “File Transfer” so no digital virus sharing. This is the only way people would be able to share a virus or ransomware.

3. Disable “Join Before Host” so people can’t join or find IDs by scanning.

4. Disable “Allow Removed Participants to Rejoin” so booted attendees can’t join back in.

We hope you continue to use and grow in these digital tools as we learn to build our relationships while we in shelter-in-place and beyond.

Thank you,

BACC Digital Team