Worship in HD

Scott McClellan from Collide recently posed the question, “Technology is…“, asking readers to fill in the blank.  Not one to stand back from debate, I threw my hat in the ring.  Technology is … not enough.

You may remember my recent post (oddly enough, in response to Scott’s interview response on technology in the church) talking about whether or not technology can “save the church.”  I said it then and I’ll say it now: It’s all about the message.

Technology is wonderful, it’s powerful, it’s transforming; but it’s not enough.  Technology has changed our way of life, how we see ourselves, how we see each other; but it’s not enough.  Technology draws crowds and helps us speak in ways we could not speak before, but it’s not enough.

Unless we get the message right, unless we understand what binds us together in this life, technology is just noise.  It’s static.  It’s a distraction from the truth.  It’s not enough.

I’m re-posting a GREAT blog post from Stephen Proctor at WorshipVJ.  We don’t do a lot with video here, at least not yet.  But most of us use and show video on our systems.  In general, this is all good stuff to know regarding compression and video formats.  Check it out…

Video Formatting for VJ-ing from grateful inconvenience on Vimeo.

When asked if “media and technology would save the Church from low attendance and irrelevance”, Scott McClellan from Collide Magazine thoughtfully responded “No”.  He then went on to say that “authenticity trumps gadgetry any day”.  I LOVE that statement.  But as much as I love his answer, I have to disagree with it.  Otherwise, this would be a boring post, right?  Now, it’s easy to criticize after-the-fact, I probably would not have responded as cleverly as Scott did to such a question.  But now that I’ve had time to think about it, I have to disagree - sort of.  My answer would be “Yes and No”.  “Oh, brother”, you might say.  Well, hear me out - I think Scott would agree.

I agree with Scott’s response (”No”), because our first and foremost responsibility as a “Church” is to be authentic, and to let that come across in every aspect of ministry.  Using technology is only secondary.  I personally think that even the technologists are still figuring out how to effectively use the myriad tools available today.  Technology should be used to enhance the worship experience, not to drive it.  At it’s core, worship is the same today as it was 200 and 2000 years ago.  It’s people gathering together and worshiping God in spirit and in truth, and embracing the claim that Jesus was who he said he was.  People will always find ways to communicate that message to others.  And that leads me to why the answer is also a resounding “Yes!”.

Now first of all, let me say that I’m not validating the question itself by answering “Yes”.  See my previous response to the question itself.  By saying “Yes”, I’m saying that technology can be used to help save the Church, insomuch as the Church now has an incredible tool to reach people that were previously unreachable, or simply not being reached.  We have incredible tools at our disposal that help us reach out to find people where they are.  Just look at what Lifechurch.tv has done with their online ministries.  They’ve leveraged technology to build the church - that is, the body of Christ.

In summary, I do love Scott’s response to the question.  I also think that technology can be used to reach people where many churches have failed, and win people to Christ.  Considering that the Church is the People, yes, I think it can help save the Church.  But only if the message is authentic…

Scott McClellan at Collide Magazine was recently asked by a reporter if he thought technology would “save the Church from low attendance and irrelevance“.  It’s interesting to me how the person asking the question reveals their presupposition - that the “Church” is indeed suffering from low attendance and irrelevance.  Oddly enough, the question itself is irrelevant, precisely because “Church” is now being identified as a thing - like a building, or a specific denomination.  Christ’s church was a band of rebels who met wherever they could, and the Gospel spread like wildfire.  It had nothing to do the tools that were used, but the message and how it was internalized.  If a “Church” experiences low attendance and/or irrelevance, then it has failed in its purpose and mission.  That has nothing to do with technology, and everything to do with the leadership.  The problem is that churches are run by people, and people fail.

Scott’s response was “No”.  What say you?  More to come…

1. Display Foldback - we have a stage projector in our system, and often we’d like to do different things on the two projectors.  Now we can.  Well, we will, anyway. This feature requires an outboard “black box” from Matrox which basically makes your computer only see one projector (but the image is twice as wide). We ordered the Matrox DualHead2Go, and once we get it in, I’ll let you know how it goes. My big concern is that currently we do some things outside of EasyWorship (videos, powerpoint, etc., for various reasons) - with the Matrox we may have problems doing that since it’s set up as a single second monitor from the PC. I’ll be watching this closely and plan to post how we overcome that obstacle (probably in the forum). One more note on the Matrox: we ordered the digital version since we’re running widescreen. Our new resolution to cover both projectors will be 2560×720.

2. Full Screen YouTube Videos - EasyWorship did a really good job integrating other media into their software, including YouTube content.  The built-in internet browser now connects to SongSelect lyric service, too.  Previous versions were a bit glitchy I felt, so this is a really nice upgrade.  Two things need to be noted about this: First, make sure you preview your content as YouTube traditionally is lacking on video quality.  Second, and more importantly, just because YouTube content is “available” and easy to show using EasyWorship, you still need to obtain permission when using YouTube videos.  People often think because the content is available it can be shared, but that’s not true (without permission).  That being said, EasyWorship has done a great job with it’s online feature and the interface updates for importing and using media (videos, graphics, audio, etc).  Adding a YouTube video to the service schedule is incredibly easy and it works really, really well (so far).

I’d love to hear your feedback on these or other features in EasyWorship 2009.  I’d like to extend this conversation to our forum, where I created a topic for this post.  See you there!

To piggyback on our past post, “Designing a Worship Service“, designing a worship service should happen with a dedicated, closed team of staff or volunteers (as the case may be).  There are four things I believe you need to do in order to effectively design your worship service:

1. Don’t only look to the future, you need to examine the past.  I think a meeting to design a worship service should start with this.  You need to look at what you’ve done before, how it was received, and whether or not you felt the desired goal was accomplished.  Start with the last month or just the last week.  Should you try that order again?  Should that new idea be a regular part of the service?  What went wrong?  What went right?  Let your past experiences guide your team in your pursuit of excellence.
2. Make sure to get the right people together.  Your team should be small, and should consist of people who control all aspects of the service.  Let your team members’ passion come forward, and let them each challenge the group to continually improve every aspect of the service.
3. Don’t leave God out of the equation.  It’s easy to be focused on the flow of creativity and ideas when putting together a worship service.  Don’t get me wrong, this is a time to be creative; but it is also a time to sense God’s leading in choosing songs, skits, videos, and all other aspects of the service.
4. Agree on a specific goal, an objective, for each service.  This may come from the sermon, or it may come from somewhere else like a powerful worship song, a touching video, or a compelling skit.  I believe you should design your service around that single, Main Idea .

Craig Groeschel shared this benediction at the 2008 Leadership Summit, and I thought I’d share it here.

May God bless you with discomfort…
At easy answers, half-truths,
and superficial relationships,
so that you may live deep within your heart.

May God bless you with anger…
At injustice, and exploitation of people,
so that you may work for justice, freedom and peace.

May God bless you with tears…
To shed for those who suffer from pain,
rejection, starvation and war
so that you may reach out your hand to comfort them
and turn their pain into joy.

And may God bless you with enough foolishness…
to  believe that you can make a difference in this world.
So that you can do
what others claim cannot be done.

Happy Thanksgiving.

I have a great team of volunteers who help to run our visuals.  But with volunteers often comes unique management challenges.  For instance, someone can understand how to use our system and can be very good at it, but they just don’t have a knack for choosing relevant backgrounds for a service.

I’m not sure if anyone else has this problem, but very quickly I learned that you can’t leave church worship background selection up to the individual running the program on a particular Sunday. Why? I’ve seen everything from Winter background graphics on hymns in Spring to Christmas background graphics in June (ok, maybe that’s a slight exaggeration). And now that we’ve moved to widescreen format, choosing the right worship backgrounds is even more difficult. That’s why I decided to review and approve each Sunday’s schedule. There are a few ways to do this:

1. Fortunately, EasyWorship allows you to load their software on other computers for a single church’s use. Thanks to technology, I can get emailed the schedule half done, select the backgrounds, and send it to whoever does the next Sunday – all from the comfort of my house.  But then I have to rely on someone remembering to email me the schedule.
2. My preference is remote access to the PC running EasyWorship.  On Friday or Saturday, I can access the PC quickly (we use LogMeIn) and review the backgrounds for Sunday.
3. The least tech-savvy method would be to check it Sunday morning before church.  Probably the easiest, too.  But it’s more fun to try to use technology, right?

How do you manage your “schedule”?

I read an interesting article from the Midnight Oil guys recently about the Main Idea.   The challenge they give is a good one: “What is the single, central theme derived from the scriptural text that is the driving concept for every element in the service?”

Do you do this?  You should be asking yourselves several questions when you put together a worship service (and yes, you should have a team who “puts together the service”):

• Why are we here?
• Why are we HERE?
• What do we feel God wants us to focus on today?
• How can we interweave that theme into every aspect of the service?  Announcements?  Worship songs?  Worship backgrounds?  Challenge?  Videos?

These ideas, these concepts, are what all great churches do, and they are all part of pursuing excellence.  A well-designed service is just that - well designed.  Of course, we need to leave room for God’s hand to work in and through us spontaneously, and He will.  But our worship should always be purposeful.

Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock, you’ve surely heard about the new version of ProPresenter, to be released shortly.  We run EasyWorship, but from what I’ve seen, ProPresenter 4 is the real deal.  I had the pleasure of visiting a church in Petaluma, CA, last week running ProPresenter (on a MAC) for 2 16:9 main screens and an environmental backdrop screen.  Justin, their technology director, told me ProPresenter is INCREDIBLE (his words, of course).

In any case, I wanted to list a few features of the new software here in a quick post, and encourage ALL PROPRESENTER users to contribute to our forum.  Let us know the pros and cons, stuff you’re looking forward to in the new version, and any other thoughts on the software.  Here’s the forum link: ProPresenter.  Some features on ProPresenter 4:

• Enhanced messaging window for messages, clocks, and “tokens”.  You can save messages that you use on a regular basis.  And dynamic data is managed by “tokens”, which are “placeholders for clocks, timers, and text”.
• Customizable video attributes where you can make small changes like color on the fly without editing your graphics.
• The new version also allows for templates in the presentation library, and it will resize text for various resolutions based on the template.
• You can import PowerPoint directly, now.  I didn’t realize this before, but EasyWorship had them beat on this one (till now, that is).
• Built-in stage display!! I LOVE this one.  You can customize a third output for the stage display.  Your singers/speakers can view different content than the congregation, all within ProPresenter.  Obviously, you would need a dedicated video card output for the stage display.  The Stage Display output is customizable.
• They are improving their original Song Automation capability to make it easier to use.

All in all, the more I hear about ProPresenter 4, the more I want to take it for a spin!  Users, let us know what you think at our forum!

And here’s the link to the ProPresenter site.