Projection in Church Services

In recent weeks I have been experimenting on the congregations in the Purley Circuit.

The experiments have for the most part been humane ;-)

So far I have used the projector at Hurst Green, Sanderstead, South Croydon, Coulsdon and used the provided projector at Warlingham. Next Sunday I am at Purley&Kenley and will use my own projector.

In all cases where I take the projector I run it myself, at Warlingham one of the congregation does it for you. I know several of these Churches are looking at getting their own kit and then the preacher will not need to operate it.

So far I am using the Impress package in a beta copy of OpenOffice.org v2 running on Windows XP for presentation while preparing it on my SunRay 1G. The notebook is very slow which means I have not been at all exciting, ie no transitions, no animations, no audio, no video (mind you I am wary of these things anyway).

A few improvements. Firstly, I have just got a wireless remote. The projector comes with one but it is very direction sensitive which means you can't reply on it during hymns etc where timing is critical and you have very limited possibilities for movement. The new remote looks good, it works from anywhere in our house. It also has a nice hide button although at present that does not work properly with Impress (hides and unhides but after that the slide does not change).

Secondly, yesterday at an all-age service in Coulsdon Methodist Church I used cartoons from the CartoonChurch.com (cheque is written and ready for the post and Dave has been very helpful by email). I actually used 3: They’re not drunk, Let’s stand and sing and Collection. I also handed out copiers of the Cartoon worksheet: Pentecost (tried it at home on my 11 year old who liked it) which I also referred to in the sermon. They worked well. For services where people are not sure what is going to happen (lots of visitors or a different style of service) I think a set of cartoons to be used when explaining things would be good (like the Let's stand and sing and Collection) for things like the Notices, the sharing of the peace, tea/coffee afterwards. Kind of this is not what to do. [Hopefull all those links will move me up the CartoonChurch referrers table <grin>.

My findings so far are:

Hymns: if your worship is fairly traditional or at least tends to follow the "book" when using choruses, then the Impress/Powerpoint solution is ok. I looks like songpro and the like are not designed for preacher operation. If you jump around choruses and don't repeat in planned ways then you will need a more flexible approach (extended desktop and some kind of control page like songpro oe latest powerpoint). I still plan to work towards the hymns microformat to separate the data from the presentation tool. I still will use Free/Open Source Software so will not be buying SongPro at present. I still like the idea of something like S5 but maybe more tailored to the more specific needs.

Liturgy: This is where I find the projector to be best. It makes the liturgy much more accessible to most people (you still need other solutions for the visually impaired - I would like to find a way to do that more neatly than needing to announce page numbers, yet would also like to avoid lots of printed copies). Projected Liturgy gets people looking in a better direction, it helps them all keep up and integrates the stage directions (with books they are very general, printed copies lose the helpful colouring).

Scripture Readings: Seems popular, I am not very comfortable with the large amounts of text, very useful if you want to use a specific translation which differs from the pew bibles.

Sermon: I am not yet using a lot of slides for the sermon. A few images and headings is about it so far. I expect this will gradually increase especially now I can advance to the next slide from anywhere in the Church.

Flexibility. I love the way we can arrive at church and find that something has happened that means something needs to change in the service and make that change immediately before the service (yesterday I had made a mixup on hymn numbers - got confused between Songs of Fellowship and Mission Praise - we were able to adjust things before the service after a quick chat with organist and choirmaster. With printed services that would have been a pain). The same for the prayers where it is easy to add something to reflect a situation you find out about at the last minute.

Still to do: I have not tried the wireless feature of the projector yet, that would ease setup in some places. Support for projector blanking would be good to get working.

Concerns: The projection must not become a distraction from what our worship is about and who it is directed to. What constitutes a distraction will (I suspect) depend a lot on the demographics of the congregation and their familiarity with projection. Maybe something like the video playing in a corner or as a background that is supported by SongPro would be good in some places but where I have been it would have completely taken over the congregations attention.

Another concern is how this is going to impact my goal of cycling to take services. So far I have not dared take the projector by bike (although others do it).

There are lots of interesting challenges ahead in this field, particularly for smaller churches and for those concerned with the commercialisation of worship.

Comments

[christopher]

I have found opensong.org is a good free open source projector project. It has a database that can be outputted into html for archival.

That is what we have decided to use.

thanks for the article a great read.