Worship Presentation Software
A worship presentation program is a specialised presentation program designed for displaying images (primarily song lyrics) during some forms of Christian worship. Some programs also include other features to help plan the service or schedule participants.
Churches adopting a contemporary worship style often project song lyrics for congregational singing. Originally, overhead projectors were most frequently used, but video projectors have become commonplace as they increased in performance and decreased in price.
A resulting need was for a software package to produce the images for display. Originally, general purpose presentation programs such as PowerPoint were used, but these were found to be of limited value, primarily because of the need to display lyrics of a selection from a large number of songs.
Worship presentation programs were developed by a number of vendors to solve this problem. A common feature is a database which stores the song lyrics and enables them to be easily retrieved and projected. This may keep records for copyright licensing. Other features in current programs include the ability to display bible texts (often from a number of translations) and PowerPoint slides (often used for notices and sermon illustrations), as well as use graphics or video clips as a background. Another common feature is the ability to play DVDs or show live video from a camera.
Although these software packages may be used by the person leading the service or speaking, larger churches generally have a computer operator to control what is projected.
There are many programs available both commercially and as shareware including EasyWorship, SongPro and Worship, Inc. for Windows, as well as MediaShout, ProPresenter, and Proclaim for both Macintosh and Windows. Free cross-platform alternatives, which operate on both of these systems as well as Linux, include OpenLP.
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Famous quotes containing the words worship and/or presentation:
“Freedom of speech is of no use to a man who has nothing to say and freedom of worship is of no use to a man who has lost his God.”
—Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882–1945)
“He uses his folly like a stalking-horse, and under the presentation of that he shoots his wit.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)