Something I've noticed as a worship leader is that while performance is not everything, presentation definitely counts. If you've seen some of the videos put out by professional worship bands (Hillsong Young & Free, Bethel, Jesus Culture, etc), you've noticed that there is a certain quality in their presentation. However, most of our churches don't have the equipment or finances to hire our own set builders, lighting designers, & graphics assistants. So how do we work with what we have, staying within our budgets and still creating quality presentations?
One way is changing up the way we show lyrics slides. If you own a software licensed with your church like Media Shout or ProPresenter, you've probably used both stills (picture backgrounds) & motion clips for your worship lyrics. And if you've just started using it, you'll see that the features, particularly on ProPresenter, are great! But, five months later you realize you've been using the same backgrounds, fonts, and usually the same songs. How can we mix things up at this point?
Three words: Hand Drawn Lyrics. Or really any font that looks hand drawn. Here's an example:
This summer, we took our students up to Yosemite for camp. One thing that really up-ed our worship game was these "hand drawn lyrics". Rather than the regular black-and-white Arial 55-pt font on a projector screen, we gave the students some new lyric slides. Now this isn't the magic key to creating a worship atmosphere, but this is one step towards the goal.
After trying this out for ourselves & seeing how much change it made to the overall worship presentation, we decided to share this with each of you. Try this on a Sunday morning or youth mid-week service & let us know how it affects your worship experience!
Here are some links to a few songs we've done these lyric slides to:
If you would like to book us for a workshop session on creating an atmosphere of worship and/or stepping up your presentation game, contact us!
