Our latest offering is a resource appropriate to any time of the year but one that fits well in in the Advent season when we read of the angels communicating the truth of the Messiah entering our world. In Luke’s gospel we read of Gabriel announcing Mary’s blessing…

In the sixth month, God sent the angel Gabriel to Nazareth, a town in Galilee, 27 to a virgin pledged to be married to a man named Joseph, a descendant of David. The virgin’s name was Mary. The angel went to her and said, “Greetings, you who are highly favored! The Lord is with you.” 

Mary was greatly troubled at his words and wondered what kind of greeting this might be. But the angel said to her, “Do not be afraid, Mary, you have found favor with God. You will be with child and give birth to a son, and you are to give him the name Jesus. He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High. The Lord God will give him the throne of his father David, and he will reign over the house of Jacob forever; his kingdom will never end.”

“How will this be,” Mary asked the angel, “since I am a virgin?”

The angel answered, “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you. So the holy one to be born will be calleda the Son of God. Even Elizabeth your relative is going to have a child in her old age, and she who was said to be barren is in her sixth month. For nothing is impossible with God.”

“I am the Lord’s servant,” Mary answered. “May it be to me as you have said.” Then the angel left her.  (Luke 1:26-39)

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Here is the second of our Advent art offerings. The Lord appears swathed in the colors of royalty. This image would work best for announcements or short verses of scripture.

This background is appropriate for scripture or worship lyric presentation.  We watch and wait by a light that is dim now but will grow with our anticipation over the coming weeks. Blessings on its use.

Here is a nice watercolor like sunrise proclaiming the great work of His hands over the world. It is based on Psalm 19. This psalm is used as a responsive reading in many churches on the third Sunday in Lent.

With a light typeface you could use it behind praise lyrics or for displaying scripture. Another possibility is to fade the image in to begin worship or fade it out at the end of your praise time. Have fun with it and be blessed. As always, I’d love to hear from you if you use it.

Download it below.

Enjoy this week’s first background image for the third Sunday in Lent. The reading is based on John 2:13 – 25, the account of Jesus clearing the Temple courts. “To those who sold doves he said, ‘Get these out of here! How dare you turn my Father’s house into a market!’”

Download it here:

If you are enjoying these images and using in worship, I’d love to hear from you. Leave me a comment if you get a chance. You can always include a link for your church in the message so others can find you.

Here are three background images for Sunday Two in Lent. One of the readings is Genesis 22 and our reflection is on trusting God. In each of these images we see that God will provide the sacrifice necessary as long as our faith is correctly placed in him.

For many churches, the barrier to entry into the world of worship presentation software is twofold. First is the initial cost of the top line products offering the myriad lists of professional multimedia features. The second consideration is that even if the church is able to afford to the licensing cost of the software, the hardware costs in terms of computer upgrades or new purchases pushes the notion beyond the budget. MediaComplete, the company that develops and sells the Media Shout software package has taken note of both of these concerns and created an answer in their Media Shout express product. Sharing many of the features and design elements of the flagship product, Express lowers the cost to $229.00 and also lowers the hardware requirements in order to accommodate processors and video display cards that are a few generations old.

Express installed on a Windows Vista computer without issue and when first started, it fires a tutorial presentation that should have most people ready to go to work to in no time. A presentation in Express is referred to as a script with each of the discrete events that occur within it called the cues. You as the director build a worship sequence by creating and arranging the cues. Express has a simple layout that makes creation and conducting the worship service simple and fast.

The three windows that appear on screen are where you will conduct the majority of your work. As shown in image below, the Script you are building or running is shown on the left. The Monitor window contains what the audience is seeing projected through your video output. This concept takes some getting used to when you first start to use presentation software. You can be arranging and editing other cues without your work being seen on screen until you play (fire) the cue. This ability makes it possible to fire the church logo up on screen while the Pastor is speaking while building a new cue with the scripture that he just referred to in the background. In the lower right-hand corner is the Crew window that holds all of the tools you will use in building the script. Clean and simple, the way an interface should be.

Well, mostly clean. I’m not sure of the wisdom of continuing to use the Crew mnemonics. For one thing, it’s a bit too cutesy for a tool to be used by adults building worship sequences. It also makes me think twice to handle an operation. I have to read the name ‘Philo’ for example and then verbally work out the sound in my mind to discern that it is the Ffffffile manager. Most computer users intuitively understand what the File button, folder, etc. does. Why make them work harder?

Creating a script is a breeze. The new container allows you to drag all of the components from the Crew window into your script and arrange them with the mouse until you are satisfied. The monitor window gives you an opportunity to review the script in progress to ensure that all of your assumptions are working out the way you planned. Though you can’t read the cues, the set shown in the first half (up to the blue line) of the script are a looped set. Starting with the church logo, a set of text cues runs through the welcome messages and any announcements in a timed sequence. This can be played prior to worship as everyone is gathering in the sanctuary.

What Do I Give Up?

Besides the lower hardware requirements, Media Shout has reduced in other areas in order to offer this tool at such an attractive price. The question that you want to ask is whether or not you will miss the components that are not included. For example, Express includes the KJV, NIV, Message, and RV Bible versions rather than the 54 bibles included with the full package. The song library is reduced from 2800 songs to 280 meaning you will have to do a bit more typing at first to build up your Lyra library. There are limitations regarding live video feeds, types of audio sources, and cue transitions in the Express versions but in the environment of many churches, they will have little, if any, effect.

The Final Verdict

MediaComplete has hit a home run with the Express version of Media Shout. By lowering the bars, they have made a high quality tool available to many churches and ministries that had previously been barred from using presentation software. The feature set is fantastic and everything worked well. As I have written previously, Media Shout offers one of the easiest work interfaces. It is easy to learn and that makes it very useful in a volunteer environment where new people may need to be trained in building the scripts or operating the software on a rotating basis. Give this tool a look if you are in the market.

Media Shout V3 Express

MediaComplete

Express

Laying out lyrics on slides seems so simple. Take the words, type them out, and flash them up onto the screen. As churches all over the world discover on Sunday mornings, there is more to the development of a presentation than meets the eye. This is the first tip posting on the topic of using our presentation tools effectively and we might as well start with something obvious.

The structure of the text on our slides should match the structure of the song.

Let’s use the song ‘Draw Me Close’ as an example. If you know the song, lift your hands and sing it so you can get the cadence and phrasing of the tune in your mind. If your church doesn’t sing this one, watch the video so you can learn it before we go on.

When I prepare the lyric text for presentation, I must always keep two things in mind. Number one, it has to be readable and number two, some people are not going to know the song. Check your assumptions on the second truth; we cannot assume that everyone is going to be familiar with the song, its tune, and its phrasing. This means that the praise leader and the accompanying musicians are going to be in the position of teaching the song to some singers and they will rely on your design to help in this process.

The first verse of this song is pretty simple. A good sized font can be used and a fair amount of whitespace allowed making for a pleasing slide. Especially note how the lines of text match the melodic structure of the song. A reader can easily understand and learn the song by matching the breaks in the text with the melody line of the song.

Building slides with this focus is not a one time process. Typefaces, font size, and changes in the background and the slide template can all cause things to go awry. When you assemble your script, you must run through all the slides with a careful eye to ensure nothing has changed or shifted unexpectedly.

Here is an example of a subtle problem that we need to watch for. Notice how the chorus lines have been broken, moving the last word down to a new line. To a singer with an unfamiliar song, this creates a struggle in learning the song. Think about the tune for this chorus. When we sing ‘want’, we hold that that note until starting the next line. Someone new to the song may also expect a whole note on the ‘ever’ in the second line since we have broken the slide there. This would have been even more troublesome if the slide had been center aligned like the top slide.

This is an easy fix if we catch it. Make the font size a few points smaller or stretch the margins a bit so that the lyric line can stretch out.

The problem here is similar to the previous one. The third line is broken in an awkward place but reducing the font enough to fit all of the words on one line makes it unreadable. The fix is found in listening for an obvious musical break in the song and using that to structure your slide. Do you hear the melodic break in the third line? It happens right after ‘else’ giving us two clean lines: “’Cause nothing else – can take your place.” (We pray never to see the word “cuz” on a screen.)

The bridge lines create a little different issue. Should we compress all of this text on one slide or break the bridge (‘Help me find the way, bring me back to you.’) out onto another slide? A case can be made for both, but readability should win out and it can be improved by moving these lyrics onto their own slide. Because the pacing is so tight in this section of the song, careful selection of a transition will be very important here.

Hope you find this helpful. If you have some additional hints and helps to offer, leave a comment below.

Since authoring my articles in Your Church magazine, I have received questions spanning a number of topics. By far, the most common question is some form of “is such and such the right tool for our church to use?” If I were a vendor, my answer would be yes, FantastiWorship © is the tool for you without seriously taking into account the particulars of your situation. In answering these questions over the years I have assembled a list of ten questions that you should consider as you are making the decision to invest in worship software and, in some case, hardware to run that software.

1. What kind of hardware do you have?

Powerful software with all the bells and whistles capable of video feeds and complex blends and transitions between songs and videos is now available for the consumer. If you’re planning on running it on that Pentium IV that someone donated to the church a couple of years ago you are going to be sorely disappointed. Remember that programmers and designers work on state of the art computers so all of the features that they develop always work for them without hesitation. When you install this same software on hardware that barely meets the minimal standards, well you know what happens.

Video processing takes a lot of horsepower so the first question you need to ask is whether you posses or can afford to purchase the computer necessary to properly run the software you are interested in. Vendors offer packages for both the Windows and Mac platforms. While there is a school of thought that says the Mac is superior for video and graphical display (and everything else for that matter!) you must remember that joining the Apple community comes at a premium. The larger installed base of Windows computers makes the cost of entry for similar power much less expensive and easier to maintain.

2. Who will be operating the software during worship?

While many churches are blessed with staff and a corps of volunteers who serve in the worship ministries long term, many congregations rely on a revolving set of volunteers to perform the tasks necessary to a Sunday service. Worship software runs the gamut in complexity from simple to needs-a-professional-hand-at-the-controls to operate and this must be taken into consideration when shopping for software. In a relatively stable staff situation, the training investment needed to run the more complex tools will allow for the effective use of the product, dipping into all of the powerful options that the software has to offer.

On the other hand, if your volunteers tend to rotate and vary in technological acumen you will need to keep the presentation as simple as possible so that a new operator can be trained at a moments notice. Software that favors placing all of the screen images in front of the operator makes it much easier to follow a Spirit-led worship leader as she changes the verses of a praise song. One click video and Parental notification features go a long way to creating a smooth worship experience in this situation.

3. Who will be assembling the worship service script?

As important as the software operation is, the creation of the worship show or script is a factor that needs to be considered in the same light. A dedicated staff can be trained and develop an experience base in the creation idiosyncrasies of the software. Once trained, the staff can become productive and efficient in producing the script week after week. If you have a situation in which someone new will need to be trained often to create the scripts, the simpler software is going to be a better choice.

4. What is the culture of your church?

Have you taken the culture of your congregation into account in considering a software investment? An older or more conservative body may not be as receptive to modern, MTV style video presentation. If you are not going to be able to utilize the bells and whistles, why pay for them? Moving backgrounds, bolder graphics, and complex slide transitions are going to seem out of place behind the words of A Mighty Fortress just as a plain white or blue background would not contribute to My Redeemer Lives.

5. How many ministries within the church are going to want to use it?

Software is not an all-you-can-eat buffet in its pricing. The cost of software is in its licensing and you must be aware of the restrictions that come with each license. The software may be very restricted as in it can installed on one computer at a time. This will mean that all creation and presentation of the worship service will be limited to this machine. Other licenses will allow the purchaser to install the program on multiple computers for the purposes of separating the script creation and the presentation to two different venues. Notice that this does not mean that one copy can be used in the sanctuary on Sunday and the other used in the Youth Group on Friday night.

There is usually a volume discount when purchasing multiple licenses so the price will not be $BasePrice x #NumberOfComputers. For example, the base license for Media Shout includes two computers. To add two additional computers, there is a fixed cost that is less than the initial purchase. Vendors also offer a site license in many cases. This option allows you install the software on every computer at your site. This license does not give you carte blanche to extend the installations to every computer also owned by the staff.

6. What is your budget?

To prevent ‘feature creepitis’, your team should decide on the fixed budget that can be devoted to the worship software purchase. With this baseline in hand you can narrow down your search to only those packages that fit within your budget rather than letting the expansive feature sets of the tools guide your decision making. It’s kind of like buying a car. The salesman is going to put you in the most tricked out, option laden model he has that fits your basic parameters with the siren song that you can have it all for “just twenty five dollars more a month.” Good stewardship demands that we purchase tools that best fit the mission of our church and utilize them to fullest extent of their abilities. Overbuying a tool that contains features that we will never use is poor stewardship.

7. Have you factored in the peripheral costs?

Many years ago when I longed to move up from my Instamatic camera to an SLR, I searched the ads in photography magazines over and over before settling on the Pentax model that I wanted. Having finally saved up enough money, I went to my local camera store and set about making the purchase. Reality struck me right here as the salesman asked what lens I would like to purchase. Wait, the camera doesn’t come with a lens? Nope, and the film and the strap you want and the filters and bag and processing all cost more as well. It was a lesson that has served me well through the years. Using media in worship is similar in that there are peripheral costs that you must consider when making this sizable investment.

The list of extra expenses is varied. For example, even though the vendor supplied a library of lyrics with their package, you may discover that you are not singing these public domain hymns much anymore. In order to legally display the lyrics of today’s praise songs you need to be licensed and display that license as well as the composer’s name on your slides. Have you factored in the cost of this license? Those fancy graphics or life-lesson videos that attracted you in the first place? Not included in the package but can be purchased for just a few dollars more a month… You get the idea. By the way, have you priced out a replacement bulb for your new projector?

8. Do you have an alternative?

Is you church headed toward this automated solution because it has become the default experience of every other church in the area? Have you considered alternatives that include an unplugged worship experience? The hymnal in its various forms still holds an attraction for many churches and there is a sense of community that can only be found in sharing the books with your neighbors and singing praise along with them. There is also the option of the praise leader actually leading the accompaniment by “pre-singing” the verses for everyone else to follow. (If you don’t know what I’m referring to do, find some Third Day worship or some Pete Seeger (forget his politics for a minute) and watch how they skillfully teach the verse before singing it a second later.)

Before investing further in new software, have you tried using the tools you already have like PowerPoint or Keynote? While they are far from perfect for the flexible nature of a worship service, they can be made to function given enough attention. The advantage here is that many computers will already have these programs installed and many, many people know how to create presentations and use them. Sometimes a zero budget is a blessing.

9. Do you have a backup plan?

This is really part B of the question above. Computers crash, projector bulbs burn out, worship shows get corrupted, and people get sick on schedule only familiar to the angels. What is your plan for all of this wonderful technology the day the computer dies. Congregational worship can’t simply be canceled for a hardware malfunction. As a part of the process of shopping for the tools that you want to use, you should also have in your pocket a plan for that day when it does not work.

Having the plan is one thing. You should also practice it and have everything in place for seamless replacement on Sunday morning…in a hurry. Remember we are there to worship God, not commiserate with worship team.

10. Will it glorify God or yourself?

Remember what we are here for. Have the choices we’ve made and the worship experience we created glorified God or has it been a display meant to garner praise for our technical skills and talents? If the software or other aspects of the worship service become the focus rather than leading the congregation to the throne, it’s time to return to a piano or guitar and the voices of the people.

I hope you find this helpful. I’ll enjoy hearing what you think about the list and especially if there is a subject or thought that I missed.