Tiny Church Media Budget

If you're a small church looking to make an investment into technology to help with handling media, song presentation, and some form of PowerPoint, you may be wondering which way to go. After all, you have been through the using the old cantankerous PC that someone donated and you're tired of the clumsiness and technology hiccups that occurs, yet you feel that unless you have a big budget, you can't have something of high quality.

Not true!

There are some very cost effective solutions for your church to put some quality in what you do without requiring a technological genius running the equivalent of a Houston space operation center.

Your foundational media needs will typically comprise four areas:

Lyric presentation

Music/audio playback

DVD play

Speaker slides

For a church starting out, one of the best options to address these four foundational areas is a MacBook notebook computer with the iWork suite ($79). That's it. You can even get by with the basic MacBook for $1099 US and do all these things fairly well. 

Now, could you do this with a PC? Yes. But you would have to purchase additional software and perhaps go with additional options that in the end, may end up being a hodge-podge of software and hardware that can work, but probably won't work as smoothly as you would like it to in the end. And probably only save you a couple of dollars up front in trade for a lot of headaches in the end.

So let's talk about this solution. 

While many churches start out with PowerPoint for lyric presentation, you can use Keynote (Apple's equivalent to PowerPoint) that comes with the iWork suite. One advantage of Keynote is that the Hollywood quality transitions are very smooth so you can gently fade from one slide to the next. Keynote can also easily use nested slides so that when arranging a song list, you only have to move the first slide and all the other slides of the song come with it.

There is also an open source, free lyric presentation called OpenSong, which gives you not only lyric presentation, but also the ability to download lyrics from CCLI, and can print out guitar chords, etc. OpenSong runs on Macs as well as PC's. I don't know if OpenSong can handle video and I didn't find it intuitive but you might find it useful.

After either of these two solutions, I would jump to ProPresenter by Renewed Vision. One cool thing with ProPresenter is that you can take an audio track and match the words to the audio track so people can sing along. You can assign backgrounds as well so all the user has to do is press the play button and you get a full visual/audio presentation that can rival larger churches (if done right).

For audio and music playback, you have iTunes and QuickTime on a Mac which are amongst the easiest to use. I've used Windows Media Player on a PC and just found it to be messy and sometimes couldn't get it to do what I wanted it to do. With a $29 QuickTime Pro license, you can import and convert many types of media, both video and audio. I use Handbrake to rip a chapter from a DVD and then use QuickTime to crop the video to exactly what I want. Then I can drop the movie file on a Keynote or ProPresenter slide and you can smoothly launch it.

DVD playback is excellent on a Mac. It comes with high quality DVD player software that allows you to quickly sort through chapters. It handles playback gracefully, especially when connecting to an external projector. Most PC's come with a low-end, generic DVD player from a company that paid to have their software come pre-installed. Apple designed their DVD player to be an integrated component of the overall system and to provide a high quality user experience that has an intuitive controller, not some hokey looking interface that was designed by an offshore electronics company.

For speaker slides, I prefer Keynote. Again, smooth transitions for one. But even more importantly, Keynote discourages putting tons of text on a slide, which inexperienced presenters so love to do. Keynote is designed by people who understand visuals and presentations wasn't designed for engineering presentations as PowerPoint was originally. Keynote seems to want you to do things in a classy way whereas PowerPoint allows you to be as garish as you want.

Okay, so here is your tab:

MacBook - $1099

Video Adapter - $19 (for projector connectivity)

Apple remote - $19 (for Keynote and also Front Row media software_

iWork - $79

Total - $1,216 retail price.

Not bad for a media station that can run the top media software when you're ready as well as provide you with some additional tools that I'll cover in a another post that can really assist with your church's media needs.

Transitioning from Song to Keynote/PowerPoint

I was recently asked how do I transition between using ProPresenter (or whatever music tool you're using) and Keynote or PowerPoint for the speaker's slides so there isn't a hard transition?

(I don't advocate importing PowerPoint slides into other programs - I've seen too many problems with that although some may have found a working model. I find it's better to let those speaker presentation programs do their jobs and let the song presentation software do it's job. The philosophical approach to song presentation is usually quite different than screen support for a speaker.)

What I usually do is to create a theme graphic that I use as the desktop screen image as well as in ProPresenter and Keynote/PowerPoint. That way, as I switch from one application to the next, or just have nothing displayed, the theme graphic appears on screen. The theme graphic should follow the theme of the message or series for continuity. Even with that theme background, I may still use certain pictures and backgrounds during the worship singing but only for punctuated effect and return to the theme graphic so that connection is never lost.

ProPresenter Rocks!

I just did two back to back youth conferences using ProPresenter for the first time and the software really rocked! As the main guy to switch between Keynote, DVD, and ProPresenter, everything worked smoothly as it should have. The only glitches were operator error and experience will fix some of those. But both venues reported a much improved lyric presentation and asked me back for next year.

One of those conferences involved over 3,000 students with By the Tree, who led them in a weekend of worship. The band often just followed the Spirit in the songs that they often sung and at one point, I was switching between the choruses of two different songs that they were singing in an amazing mashup! And it was cool because the video guys used a luma key so I could present the lyrics in the bottom third of the screen over live IMAG video.

One funny story is that I had a DVD cued up in ProPresenter to play halfway into a service. The video started to play just fine along with the audio but after a minute, my wakeup software that automatically launches and plays iTunes came on and took over the audio. I had incorrectly set my alarm time so it was my fault completely. It's one of those caveats of using a computer that isn't totally dedicated for presentations.

Death by PowerPoint

I use PowerPoint all the time at work but when I'm in ministry and I see PowerPoint, it usually is a boredom enhancing tool.

The reasons?

Most speakers use PowerPoint as a way to keep their thoughts organized. And they want to share those notes with the rest of the world.

Uggh. Just talk to me.

Also, people put way too much text on the screens, use low grade graphics, and cheesy looking animations to get people's attention.

The best communicators today use very little PowerPoint at all except for putting up Scripture, showing a video clip or photo, or using it as a visual backdrop.

And if you use PowerPoint, or my personal preference for ministry, Keynote, using it in that fashion makes your points much more, well, poignant.

When you have to prepare a message, ask yourself this question "If there was one thing you wanted your audience to walk away with and apply to their life, what would it be?"

When you have that question answered, focus on that. Use PowerPoint or Keynote as a visual backdrop or to highlight one key thought or asking one question that you're spending time on answering.

Everything else you might talk about, although interesting and likely very important, may be a distraction from your message. Save it for another time.

For the really bold who want to dramatically improve their delivery, I highly suggest that you read "Communicating for a Change" by Andy Stanley and Lane Jones. 

Still in doubt? Go to Northpoint Church and watch or listen to Andy Stanley speak. He is one of the most gripping speakers I know and he doesn't use PowerPoint.

PS. Some of you may read this and question my Simple Church presentation in another post. The difference is that in a sermon, message, devotional, you're goal is life change, not information transmission. In my Simple Church presentation, the goal was information transmission.

Simple Church

I have become a big fan of the Simple Church concept because it helps churches to focus on the process of discipleship and not on creating or maintaining programs as a shotgun, hope something happens approach to discipleship. I'm not talking about the house church movement but what Rainer and Geiger talked about in their book, The Simple Church. You can read much of the book online here

What I did is use Keynote to create a QuickTime that you can click through to watch a presentation. The version on this website converted to flash so it doesn't allow for manual control that the QuickTime version does. There is no audio but it was all done without any special tools, plug-ins, etc. Just goes to show some of the cool things you can do with Apple technologies to get your point across in a high quality way.