When I was overseeing the integration of our new worship space at Fellowship Bible Church Dallas, I was intent on purchasing a broadcast character generator. I’ve used them in worship before and with them you can achieve clean keys on lower third graphics. However, as our opening neared, I was seeing an increased tendency for our pastor not to really finalize his sermon until Saturday night. With all the last minute changes we have on Sunday, I knew it would be over-taxing for my volunteer crew to make the required changes on a broadcast CG. A friend told me about Easy Worship. Until then I had always avoided “Worship Presentation” software because I thought it second rate to a CG. Clearly, a Broadcast character generator will do lots more than a worship presentation application, but the question is, which is the right tool for the job? Easy Worship has served our needs very well for almost a year, and it was clearly the right move for us. By the way, we saved about $22,000 by choosing this option).
In the past, I have also snubbed my nose at certain brands of audio equipment (we all have our brands we love to dis), but I have begun to look harder at these questions:
1. What is the application for which this gear is used?
2. What is my budget for this project?
3. What other areas of my church could be better served with the higher end gear?
4. Does a less expensive piece still accomplish the result I’m looking for and still deliver the quality I need?
There are several instances where I did not budge one inch, and demanded the absolute best equipment for a particular application, but there have been many times when a $200 piece did the job suitably, when $400 – $500 pieces were options.
Let’s be good stewards of God’s money, even if it means having to get over ourselves.
April 18, 2007 at 10:32 AM |
I know exactly what you are talking about. Our church launched in Jan 06 and in Dec 05 we had to buy all our equipment. I had a budget of $5500 for sound and media for the adult environment. One of our purchases was a Behringer sound board, it did the job. This year as we prepared to launch our Jr/Sr High environment we passed the Behringer board to them and replaced it with an Allen & Heath. I can’t even begin to tell you the difference in sound quality. Is it worth the 4-5x the cost of the Behringer – I really think so, but at the time it was not even a possibility. As for worship software we are currently using MediaShout on a custom built PC (by yours truly) and while I would love to move to ProPresenter and be all Mac (like the rest of the church staff) it just isn’t do able right now, so we make it work.
April 18, 2007 at 11:07 PM |
I’d love to be ll mac, too. In fact, I have joked that if Apple would come out with a Pro App CG it would actually complete my life. Until then I will probably be using Easy Worship or something like it. I’m actually considering using Keynote for our sermons since Easy Worship doesn’t have a good design interface for creating sermon slides. I hear that’s coming, though.