During the first lockdown I delivered the final part of a pre-recorded guest service preach from our back garden. Normally this would have been impossible because of the plane noise overhead, but with flights grounded, it was so quiet you could even hear the birds. This was an opportunity to see what difference preaching online made to the gospel impact of the message. JCC East Grinstead provided a fair comparison because not only had I preached many evangelistic messages there before in person, but I’d also done several previous Easter Sundays for them. Typically, at a guest service at JCC, we’d have had about 400 in attendance and maybe 12, 13 or 14 public responses for salvation after my invitation to receive Christ. This time, with hosts Dan and Hannah Baptist (pictured) online we had many more watching but fewer salvation responses. Only three people followed Dan and Hannah into a zoom chat room after my gospel preach had ended with a salvation prayer. This was the same difference others had reported to me. As someone described it: “On the plus side, the content is now more accessible, but in terms of the conviction of the Holy Spirit and the sense of the presence of God in the room, it’s not the same intensity when you’re online. So the positive is that we are reaching more people and sowing more seed, but the downside is that we are not reaping as high a percentage as we were, previously, in person.” So I guess I came away with mixed feelings. I was initially disappointed with the response, but I now appreciate that others have experienced the same phenomenon. Dan Baptist told me a few days afterwards that more than 1000 people watched via Facebook. And that is just one platform, it doesn’t take into account You Tube and other platforms that the service could be viewed from. There were about 250 likes on FB. Dan could personally see non-Christians who had accessed the service, like for example the captain of his rugby club. Another story came from one of the JCC Trustees, who reported that he’d shared the link with a friend. The friend was so impacted by the service, that the friend (called “Elvis”) came over to the Trustees’ house afterwards to say that “my faith is coming alive”.