Paul Clifford

Imagine if a month ago you'd said, "We're closing down our church building for a month or so, and we will do all our ministry online." People would have told you that it was a horrible idea. In the span of a week, things in America look quite different. Churches are now asking: "How best can we do all our ministry online now that the church build is closed for a month or so?"

ProPresenter is the industry standard for church presentation software. If a church uses something other than PowerPoint, it's most likely ProPresenter. That's not to say that it's perfect. As with most things, there is always room for improvement. Nowhere is that more obvious than in the implementation of ProPresenter 6 for Windows.

You might read blog posts that insist that live streaming is going to kill the local church. To paraphrase Mark Twain, the death of the local church has been greatly exaggerated. In addressing upcoming church trends, Carey Nieuwhof mentions that after his church started a live stream they ended up with more online attendees than in-person attendees.  Live streaming didn't kill the church, but it did make them pause to consider how best to reach those online attendees.

Worship software can seem complex to those who don't regularly use it, so some advocate for staff to do most of the heavy lifting and give the simple task of running it to volunteers. Other churches have a lot of success in running ProPresenter with volunteers doing everything. So, how should you approach the issue of running ProPresenter with volunteers? Let's look at both sides.

If your church uses ProPresenter, you might wonder which computer system is best.  Whether a church plant just getting started, or an established church looking to upgrade your computer systems, this article aims at helping your church be a good steward of its resources by choosing the best computer system to run ProPresenter.

One of the most common live-streaming questions people have when they're first getting started is "what do I need?" Often the chorus of "just use your phone" drowns out the advice from people who know the limitations of that advice. In most circumstances, a single phone in the back of the sanctuary isn't going to do as good a job as a camcorder connected to an encoder. Normally, the steps from a single phone to a multi-camera live-stream, with graphics, are like a maze. You can go a long way down a single path only to find that you've hit a dead-end and have to turn around and start over again. Not so with the SlingStudio Multi-Camera Live Streaming Platform from the folks at Dish Network. Its major strength is that it eliminates the dead ends.

Everywhere you look, churches are ditching projectors for either TVs or LED walls to use for their church displays. These share one important advantage over projectors that make them attractive to churches: They are bright and they don’t require regular lamp changes, which often cost hundreds of dollars or more.

Facebook's free live streaming services have opened up a world of opportunity for churches to reach out to their audience through live video content. Churches love the number of people who are able to watch their Facebook live videos, however, there are problems with accurately tracking the number of attendees. Often these numbers are even inflated and may rarely include new people which can be bad news for churches. So what is this service actually providing and is it worth it?