My primary goal with every church congregation I work with is simple: enhance the worship experience.
I want members to walk away from worship feeling like they’ve worshipped God. I want the people who work in the control room to walk in, confident in their abilities to deliver video and audio to the congregation with no mistakes. On the flip side, if my suggestions:
- complicate the process of delivering information to members during worship, then I’ve failed.
- cause more distractions during worship, then I’ve failed.
- increase the risk of mistakes during worship, then I’ve failed.
Bottom line: using technology to deliver audio and video to people in worship needs to improve the experience of worshipping God, not distract from it.
To that end, my #1 suggestion to improve the current worship experience in most churches is to use a piece of software called ProPresenter. Made by RenewedVision, ProPresenter is designed for churches, giving you the ability to QUICKLY display song lyrics, slides, Bible verses and more.
If you think Microsoft PowerPoint is enough, then you need to download a demo version of ProPresenter and try it. You’ll soon realize that ProPresenter is a MUCH BETTER display solution, much like Adobe Photoshop is far superior to Microsoft Paint.
Here are a few things I love about ProPresenter:
- Quickly find songs and Bible verses. I can have a Bible verse or a song from our copy of The Paperless Hymnal displayed within three seconds of you telling me the verse, song name, or song number. Three seconds.
- Easily display videos or animations. PowerPoint can do this, too, but in a much more complicated way.
- Change plans during worship. Want to add a song? Sing extra verses or skip verses? With PowerPoint, you’re stuck with what is loaded, but with ProPresenter, you’ve got the ability to add, change, or delete things from your playlist, even during your worship display.
- Remote control via smartphone. It’s more than just a fancy clicker – you can take control of ProPresenter with your smartphone, giving you the ability to find and display content as if you were sitting at the computer.
- NDI output. This is a fairly new feature that is a big deal for moving live video between computers. This allows you to digitally send the output of ProPresenter over your existing network to live streaming applications such as vMix, Wirecast, and OBS. No special video cards or video cables are needed.
These are just a few of the reasons I love ProPresenter. If this is something you’re interested in learning more about, I encourage you to watch some of their introductory tutorials on their website or, better yet, download the free demo version of the software and try it for yourself.