In the middle of your next service, ask yourself this question: What is on the projection screens (or LCD’s) and why is it there?

Often habit becomes tradition, tradition becomes concrete and sometimes concrete just gets in the way. If you have live video there, is it necessary? If you have slides or still imagery there could you have an animated background?

My point here is to look at what’s there and how could you enhance or build on the communication that is already happening on the stage. It’s quite possible that you could do something very easily, using the equipment, software and hardware you already have.

Secret Tip: OpenSong …. it hides a multitude of sin if you’re currently in the Powerpoint realm and can’t afford to purchase any presentation packages, we still use it because we love it, and it’s free!

2. Take The Service Live Streaming …. on Twitter

140 characters has proved to be enough space to preach the gospel, deliver the news or simply interact with other individuals in recent times. How could you use it in your service?

I’m encouraging my Senior Pastor to use it, much like Hillsong’s Senior Pastor is, to communicate to his congregation and to promote transparency. On a larger church wide aspect I’m using my church’s twitter to keep congregation members updated on Church news and events, and we’re looking at how we can microblog on the message being preached so church members can look back at some notes or so members away, or people viewing on the internet stream can catch the notes or scripture references.

Secret Tip: Tweetlater.com is a blessing. You setup the tweets across the week and let them go! Hootsuite looks good as well.

3. Take The Service Live Streaming …. on ustream.tv

Ustream.tv is a free service for streaming video and/or audio to the internet. I use it to stream our video feed to our website, and we’re currently investigating a more fruitful way of doing this, including talking about a web only service playing music that we have written. I’m also a volunteer at the Christian Community Radio Station here on the Gold Coast and just this weekend we’ve set up an audio only stream, that uses Adobe Flash Media Encoder 3, and ManyCam to stream the radio service across the internet. (We’re a few cables away from a permanent install on that one).

If you have a video mixing desk and you’re wondering how to get it to ustream.tv, you simply need a analogue video/audio to DV converter, I use one from Canopus.

Secret Tip: ManyCam edits, or creates, your video feed that you send to Ustream, or FME3 then onto Ustream. It’s a welcome friend in the Internet video world and lets you do all the ‘cool’ things you might not be able to with your current video setup.

4. Have A Look At Your EQ

I was shoved behind the sound desk 7 years ago and I’ve been freaking out ever since. Well, until Andrew Ironside did a master class in Sound Engineering for my team and some other local sound guys recently and opened my eyes to the beauty of a graphic equalizer. We’re extremely blessed at SURFCiTY to use a Yamaha M7CL powering Nexo Geo S8 speakers and woofers. The truth is that EQ skills can be applied to any sound desk, just to varying degrees.

If you don’t know EQ, find someone who does, if you do know EQ, listen to a CD and ask yourself how you can make that sound, do you want to create that sound? what did you like and dislike about that sound? Try taking your senior pastor, worship or music pastor through the same purpose. Make sure that the people behind the sound desk are working with and for the musicians, singers and leadership. The last thing a church needs is disunity between the communicators and the people that can make the communicators be heard.

Secret Tip: This Frequency Ranges PDF will make your life that little bit better, and put some understanding to all of those numbers on you sound desk.

5. Got Light?

Chances are your stage is already sufficiently lit, if not then get on to that sooner rather than later. After you have done the necessary lighting look around at what’s left and see how creative you can be.

Example 1: The old and no longer used overhead projector, yes that thing you tried so long to get rid of! How could you use it in your next service? I’ve printed out a word with black background on a transparency before and projected a word on to a wall. Or could it wash colour somewhere for you?

Example 2: Down-lights are rather cheap and easy to wire up, could you hang a few from a ceiling or rack and make some impromptu look-a-like Christmas lighting.

Example 3: Left over cans from an upgrade or what-not. Put a gel over them and splash them up a wall or a truss, put some colour where there was none before.

Secret Tip: Lighting has often been seen as the divide between the emergent church and the boring church. Don’t let christianese or common thought get in the way of you taking light into dark places and putting colour into life. Lighting could possibly be the easiest, coolest and most effective change you’ve made in quite a while.

Lately, Matt and I have been talking and Twittering about a variety of things and last Saturday, I made the trip to Schweitzer United Methodist Church. I love visiting churches, especially when I can get a behind the scenes tour, which I definitely did at Schweitzer.

They have 4 services: 2 modern, 1 traditional and 1 blended. On Saturday night is one of the modern services and I arrived in time to watch the band practice and look over Matt’s shoulder as he cleaned up the songs in ProPresenter.

One thing I love about ProPresenter is the countdown that ran all during practice to let everyone know how much time there was until the pre-service meeting. At 5, all of us, the band, the sound and media guys, the associate pastor and Matt and I went and discussed the details of the upcoming service. (I actually just sat there and listened.) Every element was previously mapped out and the details of who does what and when they do it was nailed down in this meeting.

During the service, I hung out in the media room with Matt’s uber volunteer, Will and watched as he ran ProPresenter. ProPresenter has a sweet interface and it would be fun for us to get to where we can transition over to that. It was a good service.

Afterwards, Matt and I went to Galloway Station and had a great dinner on the patio.

It was fun to compare notes and learn a thing or two. Matt is a busy guy, he is the Media Director at Schweitzer and now transitioning into the role of College Pastor. (not sure of exact title).  They have some cool toys there for video and audio editing and mostly a Mac shop, in that regard.

We talked a little bit about our future goals and desires and it will be interesting to see how things shake out.  God is moving among things that we are each doing and it’s fun to see how we cross paths and intermingle among each other in the church tech world.

If you are ever in Springfield, stop by and say hi to Matt, he is very accomodating and he’s doing some cool stuff!

Thanks Matt, for your time and just letting me experience Schweitzer!  I’ll drop by again someday.

Off and on in the past, I have heard talk of wanting to create a church tech community within Twitter, a place where we can share ideas, ask for help or whatever, but it has never formed into anything that I know of. However, lately there has been discussion about #hashtags.

Hashtags are a community-driven convention for adding additional context and metadata to your tweets. They’re like tags on Flickr, only added inline to your post. You create a hashtag simply by prefixing a word with a hash symbol: #hashtag.

Hashtags were developed as a means to create “groupings” on Twitter, without having to change the basic service. The hash symbol is a convention borrowed primarily from IRC channels, and later from Jaiku’s channels.

More info from the site:

A good rule of thumb to follow is to focus on your update first, and only if it quantitatively adds value, to append one-three hashtags. There are no hard and fast rules, but Twitter should continue to be about answering the simple question: “What are you doing” rather than “What tags apply to what you’re doing?”

Over the last several days, a few of us tossed around ideas for what hashtag to use and at one point, we were considering one that was 11 or 12 characters long. My point was that out of 140 characters, 11 or 12 was a big hit to take, so we continued discussing. Somebody then suggested #citrt, to unofficially tie into the Church IT Roundtable that has been created and many of us participate in. It’s brief and to the point, so that is what we agreed on.

So, if you are part of the Twitter community, join in our church IT conversation by first of all following the user named hashtags, then they will follow you. At that point, just start slapping #citrt on the end of your tweet. To track it without participating, go here to the #citrt page and you can listen in on the conversation. You can also go to TerraMinds or TweetScan to search on anything within Twitter.

I don’t know if this is going to last, but I’m willing to give it a shot. So, check out Twitter, follow me, follow hashtags and join in the conversation.  You will quickly be following others and they will follow you. There’s a great group of church IT people out here, so come join us.

Links:

• Twitter
• #hashtags
• Terraminds
• TweetScan
• Twitter Fan Wiki
• Twitter Fan Wiki / Hashtags
• hashtags
• jimwalton