Choosing the Best Multimedia Tool

If you had a choice, you wouldn’t use a shoe to drive a nail into a board--it simply isn’t designed to do the task at hand. Yet, thousands of churches continue to use multimedia software that wasn’t designed for worship. Today’s church needs presentation media suited to meeting their unique requirements. Because the church is sharing life’s most important message, the tool chosen to deliver it should be as dynamic as the message itself.

There are several popular worship presentation software programs available to choose from, each designed to meet specific needs in the church. In deciding which one is the right one for your church, you should evaluate three critical capabilities needed to maximize multimedia as a tool in your service.

1. Flexibility
Perhaps Kent Morris, church media consultant, puts it best when he says, “Church services often flow in unplanned ways. Worship software allows complete freedom to follow the changes common in contemporary worship situations.”  

For many years, pastors, teachers and worship leaders who wanted to use media had to give information to the media team several days in advance in order for the multimedia to be prepared. A change to the plan had the potential to wreak havoc with the service. It was better to “stick with what we’ve got ready” than to try and make the changes. Those days are gone.  Technology, particularly worship technology, provides for the ability to make changes on the fly, thus putting the control of the flow of worship, Bible study and or teaching back with ministers, who have been called to lead, rather than with media team members, who have been called to serve.

When evaluating software for its flexibility, ask yourself a couple of questions.

First, in what areas of our service would we (the pastor or worship leader) like to have greater flexibility, and how quickly do we need to accomplish those changes?

Second, what activities are we most frustrated with as a media team because we cannot meet the needs of our service as it currently exists – or how we would like it to exist?

When you have answers to these two questions, you will be more prepared to evaluate a particular software’s flexibility and its ability to follow and flow with the type of changes your typically find in your service. You may not need as much flexibility as another church – or you may need maximum flexibility because you never know what is going to happen during your service. There are differences between software in this area, and knowing what you need will help you pick what is right for you.

2. Comprehensive Feature Set
One of the biggest (and perhaps hardest) lessons I have learned in multimedia is that just because you can do something doesn’t mean that you ought to do it.

Begin with a list of common activities that occur during your church’s various events.  Then, add to that list the things that you would like your software to be able to do. Once you have established the feature list that you “must have,” and perhaps have added in a few of the features that you would “like to have,” the next most important thing to evaluate is a software’s ability to do all of these features seamlessly without the projection screen flashing with “computer-eze.” Particularly in a worship setting, media should be used to enhance the experience, not detract from it. When technology appears on the screen, the environment is changed, and that is not a good thing. Some software is better at this than others. The more complete the feature list that can be accomplished in one program, the better, simply because when switching to another program (like Windows Media Player) to accomplish a task, there is an increased likelihood of technology appearing on the screen.

3. Volunteer-Friendly User Interface
While some churches have a staff team specifically tasked with producing and running the multimedia for all aspects of the church, it is more likely that your church uses volunteers to assist with this need. Media volunteers are great--they are highly motivated
to serve, and they have chosen to serve in this particular area most likely because of some gifted-ness in the area of technology. But there are some downsides to the media volunteer, too--they work with the program less often than a full-time staff person would; they may not be available on a regular basis for practices; they may be more likely to be flustered by changes; or maybe the person “running” the multimedia is entirely different from the person who “created” it.  Keeping these things in mind are imperative when choosing the software that will work best inside your environment.

That doesn’t mean you have to choose a simplistic program. Motivated volunteers will want to create the best media possible, so the program you choose needs to give volunteers visual clues to what is coming next, act like other programs they work with every day so there are fewer surprises, be consistent in how various types of media formats are added into the program, and give volunteers options in how they accomplish tasks so they can work with the program in a way that feels most comfortable for them.