How livestreaming transformed worship at Elevation Church

Summary

Church: Elevation Church | Charlotte, NC (Ballantyne campus broadcast hub)
Type: Protestant | 15+ locations
Products: Resi (a Pushpay company) livestreaming
Broadcast destinations: Facebook, YouTube, dedicated live services website

With 15+ locations and an international audience, Elevation Church turned livestreaming from a broadcast tool into a full worship experience.

KEY RESULTS

• 40,000+ people reached weekly through livestream broadcasts
• International audience spanning multiple continents
• Livestreaming extended beyond Sunday services into weekday devotional content
• Online viewers engage with volunteer prayer teams and real-time community interaction 

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The situation

If your church has one location, getting everyone in the same room is the goal. When you have fifteen, the question becomes: how do you create a consistent, meaningful worship experience no matter where someone is, even if “where they are” is another country?

That was the challenge facing Autumn English, Digital Director at Elevation Church. The church broadcasts from its Ballantyne, North Carolina campus to multiple platforms, but English didn’t want online viewers to feel like they were watching a recording. She wanted them to feel like they were in the room.

The shift required more than turning on a camera. It required rethinking what “church online” actually means.

The solution

Elevation Church invested in livestreaming not as a secondary channel, but as a worship experience in its own right. English is deliberate about that language: she calls every broadcast a “worship experience,” not a service stream.

• Holistic viewer experience: When online audiences started asking about worship songs, the team began adding artist names, song titles, and download links in real time. As English described it, “Paying attention to details like these made it a holistic experience that people wanted to be connected to.”
• Live hosts and talking points: Each broadcast has a dedicated host with prepared talking points for audience engagement. Different staff members rotate weekly, giving the online community a chance to know the broader team beyond the weekend teaching pastor.
• Real-time community interaction: Through their website, online viewers can connect with a volunteer to pray together or have the kind of conversations they’d have in a physical lobby. It’s not a passive viewing experience. It’s participatory.
• On-demand access: Beyond live weekend broadcasts, the church offers full worship experiences on demand so viewers can watch, pause, and revisit on their own schedule.
• Weekday content: Elevation extended beyond Sundays with “7@7,” a live devotional series featuring seven staff members over seven weeks, tied to Pastor Steven Furtick’s “Seven Mile Miracle” sermon series. English noted it was “a good opportunity for our efam to get to know more of our staff than just the faces they see on the weekend.”

The results

The numbers tell part of the story: 40,000+ people reached every week through livestream, with viewers tuning in from multiple continents. Elevation now describes itself as an international church, and livestreaming is the reason.

But the most powerful result is a story, not a statistic. A girl in Puerto Rico had been watching Elevation’s streams online. She asked her parents if she could travel to the United States to attend a student camp at the church. They agreed. While she was there, she was baptized.

That moment doesn’t happen inside four walls.

As English put it: “As churches we are called to reach as many people as we can, and that’s not always going to happen within four walls. Livestreaming helps get the message of the gospel out to people who don’t have the opportunity to experience church at a physical location.”