Recently my church focused all our energies  emphasizing our missions work in the church, in the community, and in the World.  As a part of that emphasis, we decided to take a wall outside our sanctuary and make it a three display video feature, along with a touch screen attached to a computer for online sign ups and to collect email addresses, etc.

Challenges

• We wanted the wall to be a plain wall the week before, then totally changed for Missions Sunday.  So all the installation work had to be done in one week.
• There was only about a 6 inch space behind the wall for running cables a good distance to the DVD players.
• There was no blocking in the wall for hanging LCD’s

Prep Work

• Our graphic artist designed a large scale image that would eventually become wallpaper, giving a context to our wall.
• I got dimensions of the wall and mocked it up using Google Sketchup.  As you can see, we went through a couple of versions of the graphics before we settled on one.

• I purchased the three televisions, (42″), and the mounts, three high quality HDMI cables, and three Panasonic Blue Ray players.  We considered using ProPresenter, or ProVideoPlayer, but ended up going with the Blue Rays to keep our costs down.
• We got our church electrician on our schedule for helping us during the installation week.
• I used a video monitor we had in storage and bought a source selector at radio shack for monitoring the DVD players without having to look at the televisions, since they are around a corner from the players.

Installation

• The Wallpaper was delivered and installed on a Monday, and the installer told us we would need to wait until Wednesday before mounting any televisions.
• Our electrician got our power and video cables tun on Wednesday.
• We hung televisions on the wall, connected power and video cabling. Note – We measured everything several times, and checked each other for accurate measurements.  Inaccurate measurements would mean nasty holes in the wallpaper.

• On Friday, we got our cables run for the computer to capture data, and got the touch screen powered up and working.

• Our process is fairly low tech.  We’re feeding the televisions with three Blue Ray players.
• Our video editor developed content and burned it to Blue Ray for us.  None of the videos have sound, since they would compete with each other.

Results

• The Missions wall made quite a buzz around the church and helped  to make Missions Sunday a huge success.
• Something that important to us, is that projects like this are scalable both in technology and in purpose.  The cables are run so that in the future we can deliver videos from a computer rather than the Blue Ray players.  Right now the plan is for this to be a missions wall only, but in the future, we could re-purpose the wall simply by changing the wallpaper and changing the content of the videos.
• Here’s some video of the wall I shot with my Flip camera.

While our contemporary worship venue is being renovated, we are having to do portable church.  So for six months we are setting sound, lights and video on Friday afternoons in our gym, then striking it right after church.  My hat goes off to people who do this indefinitely.  Here’s a video I made by using my time lapse program in my Iphone, then editing it in Final Cut Pro.

I’m always looking at other churches to see what they do well and what I can gain inspiration from.  Here’s a list of a few churches across the country who are doing superb webcasts.  Some of these inspire me because of the content, some by the simplicity of the player, some because of the beauty of the video, or the enhanced features of taking notes in the player.  Some of these webcasts are the product of self hosted, in-house work.  Others are the product of paid hosting services.  I’d love your thoughts on these and others you may like.

National Community Church, Washington DC

Gateway Church, Southlake, Texas

Granger Community Church, Granger, IN

Highland Park United Methodist Church, Dallas, TX

Prestonwood Baptist Church, Plano, TX

Seacoast Church, Mount Pleasant, SC

Mosaic Church, Pasadena, CA

Questions

1. Does your church webcast?

2. If so, do you pay for a service, or do it in-house?

Recently,  our tech , I.T. and communications staff met with one of the members of our church to discuss social networking strategy.  It was a good discussion ranging from Facebook, to Twitter, to blogs, to video sharing sites.  Several of the ministries at our church are getting Facebook pages and Twitter accounts, but no-one is really keeping their eye on the larger picture of what we’re messaging, what kind of consistency we have, and whether we’re really maximizing our impact.  A couple of highlights from the yesterday’s meeting:

1.  Consistency is saying one voice saying the same thing across all avenues of communication, and it is also repetition.

2.  You don’t need to look for additional work to start a social media strategy, just look for ways to share what you’re already doing.  If you’re already capturing video, then it’s not that much more to go ahead and podcast or webcast it, for example.  If you’re preparing a sermon, then why not blog about it to create buzz for the upcoming weekend.  Why not give the weekend’s scripture in advance so your body will be more prepared to hear what God has given you to give them? In other words, it doesn’t need to be something ELSE to do, but rather AS I do, how can I share?

There are so many options out there for content delivery and for communicating your church’s message, it’s a good idea to get your staff, and also some internet users in your church to develop a strategy of how you position your church,what is said, and how it is said.

I’ll post more on this later as we develop our own strategy, but let me leave you with some links to good resources.

Greg Atkinson – Hosts Church 2.0 conferences all of the country.  Please try to go one of these.

LifeChurch.tv – Innovators in applying web technologies to the mission of the church

Theater Church – As far as I know, these guys were some of the first to podcast a sermon.  Led by Mark Batterson who says “If it’s worth preaching, it’s worth podcasting”.

Many of you know that I recently left the Bible Church I worked at for 14 years, and started a new job at a large Methodist Church here in Dallas.  Since then, I have joked about becoming much more familiar with The Lord’s Prayer.  I just found this video online of a three year old singing this prayer. No joking – this has to be music to God’s ears.

I have been reading a website called Stuff Christians Like. It’s pretty funny stuff. Click here to discover what you should do the next time your church experiences a technical difficulty.

Recently, my friend Greg Atkinson experienced a total blog makeover.  If you alredy read his site, but use a reader it’s worth your while to actually visit his site.  Right now he’s giving away 30 social media icons, made by his friend and web developer Ben Jordan.

Mackie tt24 console

The other day I went to a friend’s church to help with their PA.  Their FOH system was bi-amped, but the subs were not sourced from an aux buss.  They were experiencing lots of problems with to much low end on everything.  Enter the DBX Driverack PA. I have used the Driverack 260, and didn’t care much for it. The audio quality is good, but the computer GUI is lacking.  The window is too small, and the software is not intuitive like the Ashley Protea, for example.  But the Driverack PA doesn’t even have serial control, which surprised me – but it was not a handi-cap.  As much as I disliked using the 260, I really enjoyed the PA version.  Here’s what we did at my friend’s church:

1.  We decided to source the subwoofer feed from an Aux buss.  Since we had limited drive lines, we took the system from stereo (which they did not care about) to mono.  So the left out was changed to the mono out of the Mackie TT24 console, and the right out was moved to Aux 12 out.  We put a curve on the output of aux 12 with the on-board 6 band EQ of the console.  The curve looked something like this:

It’s not the ideal curve – I’d like a steeper slope, and all I got was about 12dB per octave.  24 dB per octave would have been more like it, but we made do.

2.  The DBX Driverack PA was installed in the amp rack.  The Wizard feature on the driverack was very intuitive.   We connected a reference mic to the front panel input, and followed the easy instructions in the quick start guide.  The quick setup guide was all the documentation we used.  So we EQ’d the room and set up some notch filters. I added a crossover filter to the the input to keep the very lows out of the mains.

I would not have done some of these things if we were putting in a new installation, but working with a limited budget and the need to be pragmatic informed the decisions we made.

There’s more work to be done, specifically with the monitoring system on stage.  We’ll tackle that in the next couple of months.

Small steps.

I just used Tokbox today for the first time.  I met with a couple of tech director friends. One lives here in Dallas where I live, and the other is in Minnesota.   It was a very encouraging time, and we plan on doing it monthly.  Sort of a small tech/ leadership forum.

With resources like Talkbox and Skype, I encourage you to find others in your network who you can get advice from, unload on, and pray with.  Our jobs can tend to be pretty isolating, and having brothers and sisters to stand by you is not really optional. Ecclesiastes 4:9,10 says “Two are better than one, because they have a good return for their work: If one falls down, his friend can help him up. But pity the man who falls and has no one to help him up!”

Does your church play video announcements in your worship services?  I was on Gateway’s site the other day and was reminded of just how good their video announcements are. If you do video announcements, or are thinking about it, take a look at these.