My first fully free Church Services

Today was the day for the first fully free Church services that I have taken part.

Actually, not quite true. I mean the first fully free services that included computer projection.

As I have mentioned before my laptop computer now has a fully functioning Ubuntu 5.10 installation (released in the last few days).

So today in the first service (Raunds Methodist Church at 10:30am) we had

• the notices displayed before and after using OpenOffice 2.0 Impress from a PowerPoint file sent by Peter.
• all the songs/hymns projected using OpenOffice 2.0 Impress
• the order of service with
  • prayers
  • cartoons
  • scripture readings

We used the Methodist Worship Books for Holy Communion as I ran out of time to sort out the projection of that.

To create the service the laptop was connected to the internet through our IPCOP firewall. Besides Ubuntu I used

• the latest OpenOffice 2.0 pre-release (not sure which one cos Ubuntu handles all that)
• Firefox to visit websites for the
  • cartoons
  • scripture texts
  • files to be transferred from my SunRay (recieved by email and on floppy disk as the laptop does not have a floppy disk drive) by connecting to Leonardo on the home Intranet.

Interestingly enough I did a quick comparison check by booting the laptop into Windows XP SP2 and connecting it to the projector and using the Powerpoint from my bundled Office 2003. My findings:

• Windows handles the projector much less well. For some reason when I set the laptop display to the same resolution as the projector (1024x768) the laptop display is wrong (it shows 1.2 times the 1024 desktop using 1280 pixels or something, anyway I get the right hand 1/4 of the screen twice.
• I thought I would get around this by using an extended desktop over the laptop and projector screen and the support for that in powerpoint. But then my wireless kensington control (just next/previous slide and screen blanker) did not advance to next slide.

Generally I found I get a much better screen output using Ubuntu which happily sets both laptop and external monitor to 1024x768. As I tend to be controlling the presentation myself I find it quite ok to have the laptop display exactly the same as the projector, I can then stand quite a way from it and still read it.

The Kensington Pocket Presenter works well, I can advance slides from almost anywhere in the church sanctuary (providing it is not directly hidden behind one of the small iron columns). Amusingly some members of the congregation don't know how the projector knows when to advance. On the other hand when there are small mistakes, like when I get carried away trying to clap at the right time (I am useless at clapping in time) and so either forget to move on or accidently press the button, there are now a number of people who look for me cracking up and trying to hide ;-)

I also used the projector for the afternoon service when we were fortunate to have the Rev Inderjit Bhogal (a former President of the Methodist Conference). While using Impress (or powerpoint) is not as flexible as using something like SongPro (where you can jump around songs etc during the service) it is very handy to be able to adjust the order of the service in the few minutes beforehand.

Looking at what is coming up I think I shall use the projector at Ringstead Shared Church next Sunday as it is Holy Communion and it will allow me to use a more modern liturgy than we have in books. I'll need to make time this week to go and check for fit for the projector and size of the screen.

While there is no way I am going to be using a projector for all services there are some advantages:

• Singing is better as people are looking up (but still looking for the best way to provide context in a hymn so you can see what is coming up on the next page).
• Liturgy is better as you don't have to tell people where you are at in a book (or have visitors who understandably get lost).
• For sermons it is great to have the scripture texts up there so that people don't have to remember from earlier in the service. There is a lot more I could do with this, but just having a passage on the screen seemed to me to be helpful.
• I am a fan of the cartoons from Cartoon Church (I think I used 3 this morning). If you have not bought a licence for this for your church then I really recommend it.

At Raunds the flexible furnishings work well. It means we can have the platform nearer the middle of the church which gets it away from the projector screen and allows the projector to be hidden underneath the altar table. When we need more seating we can move the altar back and have the projector in place of one of the chairs in the front row. Ideally we would like a permanently mounted projector. That either needs sideways keystone correction so it could mount under the edge of the balcony or a very powerful lens to allow the projector to go the full length from the back.

We have a long way to go before we could afford this everywhere, but being able to run the whole thing without spending any money on software makes a huge difference to the cost (of the hardware as well as software). It also ensures that we can do the whole thing fully ethically and legally.

Comments

[Dave]

I'm really glad the cartoons are continuing to prove useful - and thanks for the link.

Small point - I think there is an errant bracket in the link at the end there.

[DaveW]

Dave, fixed. Thanks.

[tim]

I'm very interested in this area of experience. Please continue providing articles (as opportunity presents) on free software and churches.

I was wondering how you worked out the dual video (or whether). When I last evaluated the Windows version of OpenOffice for a church, there was no dual-monitor support. I'm a linux guy personally, so more on dual-display in linux is good.

I'm rather fond of the various Sword Project variants for scripture lookup and general bible study aids. http://crosswire.org/, though I'm also keen on http://biblegateway.org

I've also been looking at OpenLP for Windows/Linux. This seems to be a pretty good free alternative as well, but I haven't a good system for testing it.

Tim

[Andrew Ziem]

OpenOffice.org 2.1 (due December 2006) adds support for multiple monitors. It's already available for testing. See here for more info:
http://www.oooforum.org/forum/viewtopic.phtml?t=45966