The challenge of founding a new church can be overwhelming. Yet, in a year, Pastor Joshua Shank and his wife, Aimee, have significantly grown Youngstown Metro Church in Boardman, Ohio, steadily increasing attendance at their primary Sunday night service. This dynamic church is reaching the 20-something and 30-something generation. The mission of Youngstown Metro Church and Pastor Shank is worship outreach to the 104,000 people in the greater Youngstown area who are 18 to 34 years old.

With the help of the congregation, Youngstown Metro Church has created an identity for themselves within the Youngstown Metro area. The church created two outreach teams--one that focuses on handing out high-impact flyers at all the local hangouts and hotspots, and one that focuses on the distribution of door hangers on key streets and apartment complexes that are known to house a high concentration of people in their 20s and 30s.

“I thought that the one-way services were about as interactive as a movie, with little to no congregation participation,” he said. “I wanted to turn the worship experience into an interactive worship experience.”

After Pastor Shank spoke with a Turning Technologies staff member, he felt their wireless response pads and interactive PowerPoint software could help him meet his goal of creating an interactive worship experience. With 75 IR (infrared) ResponseCards and a copy of TurningPoint 2006, Joshua began planning how to incorporate an audience response system into his services.

TurningPoint’s audience response system integrates 100 percent into Microsoft PowerPoint and allows audiences to participate in presentations or lectures by submitting responses to interactive questions using a ResponseCard keypad. TurningPoint adds a

simple toolbar to your existing PowerPoint application, and all of the functionality that you need to run an interactive session can be accessed from this toolbar.

As an intermediate PowerPoint user, Pastor Shank was already familiar with presentation development. Yet the possibilities with TurningPoint encouraged him to re-think how he delivered sermons. Instead of a testing approach, he uses questions to understand how his congregation is feeling.

“The key is to craft good questions,” he said.

Using this system, your PowerPoint presentations become powerful data collection and assessment tools that collect real-time audience responses and dramatically improve productivity and results. You can author, deliver, assess and report without ever leaving PowerPoint.

In addition to PowerPoint, TurningPoint transforms all of Microsoft Office from a one-way presentation tool to a two-way, dynamic, live-group response data collection and reporting tool. MS Office integration results in minimal learning curve and dramatic ease of use. The user has the option to view results from the PowerPoint presentation or use "Report Wizards," which automatically convert data from the PowerPoint presentation into Microsoft Excel and Word. TurningPoint also offers a Ranking Wizard, which allows the user to easily create "lists" of items, issues, priorities or goals and rank them against specific criteria, supporting either static scale or paired comparison.

In developing each week's sermon, Pastor Shank considers what his congregation is interpreting, creates a unique question, and has learned to anticipate both the expected and unexpected responses.

For example, he may ask the congregation, "How often do you feel guilty?" The questions and answers are subjective, focused on each individual. However, the results create a sense of community through the congregation.

“This allows all of the church members to see that they are not the only person going through something," said Pastor Shank. “It has helped to deal with some of the isolation people feel.”

Turning Technologies' audience response system proved to be a tool that could help Pastor Shank achieve his goal of turning the worship experience into an interactive

worship experience. Working with this technology has changed his approach to his sermons, making him think interactively.

Additionally, it changed how his congregation responded to his message.

“The interactive slides pull you back into everything that's going on,” said Pastor Shank. “Participation is close to 100 percent, and even the chronic sleepers stayed with the interactive questions.”