Where I live, today is Family Day. Starting in 2008, the provincial government of Ontario has recognized the third Monday in February as Family Day and it is considered a statutory holiday with a focus on allowing people to spend time with those they love. Most have the day off work, kids are out of school, communities provide activities for families to do together and there’s an opportunity to be reminded that time with family is important.

Now I’m all for time off and having my kids home with me for the day but my favourite part of Family Day is this recognition and encouragement to create space in our lives to focus on family.

Despite the wise warning of what happens when you assume, I’m going to make a couple of assumptions about people who are reading this blog. First, there are people in your life you love to spend time with. Second, you don’t have enough space in your life to spend as much time with them as you’d like.`

God created us for relationship, brings people into our lives who change our world and give us glimpses of what a complete, fulfilled life looks like. Some of these people are in our lives for a short time but, if we are fortunate, there are some who will be a part of our lives for years, even decades.

We are also up to our necks in a culture which is obsessed with busy, where saving time is valued to give us more time to chase other pursuits. Can you imagine another point in history where a whole industry would be built on helping to teach people to get things done? Our factory efficiency model of “more is better” has been adopted in almost every area of our lives, often at the expense of relational commitment, intimacy and community.

I remember the story of a successful businessman who was on holidays in a small fishing town. He came across a man sitting back on a chair in the sun, holding a drink in one hand. The man seemed to be quite satisfied with his current situation, enjoying his day on the beach. The businessman looked at the man and told him he was missing a great opportunity. There were lots of tourists in this small fishing town and it was hard to find a boat which could take the tourists out on a fishing trip. The businessman encouraged the man to take the opportunity and start his own business.

“Why would I want to do that?,” asked the man. “Well, if you were able to rent a boat, run a series of successful fishing trips and earn enough money, maybe you could buy your own boat!” The man seemed mildly intrigued. “And what about after I have one boat?” “Well,” said the businessman, “if you are able to run your business well with one boat and you begin to develop a great reputation among the tourists maybe you could purchase several boats, hire other captains and make more money by taking more tourists out on fishing trips.”

At this point, the man was getting inspired by this businessman’s strategy. “What would I be able to do next?” The businessman was full of great ideas. “After you have several boats in this little fishing town, you could then expand your company to other towns up and down the coast. In each town you’d be able to have several boats taking tourists out for fishing trips, with several boat captains helping you to earn more money.”

The man began to realize this was a pretty significant opportunity. “Well, after I have several boats in several towns, what would I be able to do next?” “What could you do next? After several years of running your business and expanding to several towns with your successful operation, maybe you would be fortunate enough to retire to this little town, sit on the beach in the sun with a drink and enjoy your life!”

Nobody is advocating laziness. Nobody is suggesting you should throw opportunities away. But, at this point in your life, are you pursuing a strategy which will allow you more space with those you love or are you pursuing more space with those you love? Read it again. Huge difference.

This is real life for me. Later this year I will be taking a three month sabbatical from my job as the worship director of my church. Not because I’m at the end of my rope, not because I need to escape, not because of some kind of moral failure. The elders at my church have enough wisdom to know that one of the secrets of endurance and faithfulness is space – space to rest, space to dream, space to love.

Do you have that? Do you have space to love? Is your life so jammed with opportunity, strategy, pursuing your future that you are neglecting the ones closest to you?

Look at your calendar. How much space is in your calendar for those you love? How much margin do you have to spend time with those who are closest to you? Have your circles of virtual friends attained more significance in your life than the neighbour you are called to love?

How do we fight this? Let me give three steps you can do today to help create space in your life for those you love -

1. Put it in your calendar
I’m not kidding. You do it with everything else, why not do it with your kids or your siblings or the best friend you haven’t actually seen in months? I have regular one-on-one times with each of my kids on their monthly birthday. My oldest daughter was born on October 7th so on or around the 7th of each month I do my best to have some meaningful one-on-one time with her. I find if I don’t schedule this, it can very easily get missed. Do I manage to make it happen every month? Not with all four kids, but I do way better than if it wasn’t scheduled at all.

2. Pick up the phone
Some of you know you need to stop reading this right now and call someone you love. Might be your brother, might be your mom, might be the best man from your wedding. Don’t go to the next post in Google Reader, don’t click away to Facebook. Stop. Pick up the phone, make the call. I don’t care if you don’t make it back to this blog post – just pick up the phone and give them a call!

3. Ask for help
God knows your heart. Ask Him to bring the goal of your life back in to focus. Go back to some of the core motivations that you have for pursuing the things that you are chasing and see how they fit with what your life actually looks like today. There may be things you need to stop doing, things you need to say no to. Ask God to reveal some of these things to you.

1 John 4:12 “No one has ever seen God; but if we love one another, God lives in us and his love is made complete in us.”

This post was inspired by the Luminous Project. Luminous is an event in Nashville for creatives on May 9-11, 2012. To find out more, check out luminousproject.com. You can use the promo code ‘luminousLOVE’ to get 30% off the ticket price.

If you’ve made it this far and want to stay connected with me and what I write on the blog, here are a few options -

• My worship leader’s toolkit blog series – www.chrisfromcanada.com/worshipleaderstoolkit
• Subscribe by RSS – www.chrisfromcanada.com/feed/
• Follow me on twitter – @chrisfromcanada

[This is a post from my worship leader's toolkit blog series. You can read the series intro and find links to the other posts here.]

Twitter started out for me as a bit of a goofy novelty. I was at a conference in early 2007 and we all jumped on board with new Twitter accounts as a way of interacting with one another and the speakers during the conference. I was already blogging here at chrisfromcanada.com so I thought it made sense to grab the @chrisfromcanada Twitter name.

It was fun while it lasted but I thought it was a bit of a trend which would only interest a small number of people. I was intrigued by the concept, thought Twitter was lots of fun to be a part of but couldn’t see how it might become a part of my daily life.

Those thoughts lasted about one day!

When I returned home from that conference, I tweeted that Twitter had been fun for a little while but I was giving it up. If you follow me on Twitter (@chrisfromcanada) you know that my decision did not last long. Nope. Within a few days, Twitter roped me back in and I’ve bought in to it hook, line and sinker ever since.

I will often get questions about how I use Twitter (I’ll outline some of the tools in this post), why I tweet so much (anywhere from 10 to 100 times per day) and how I track with the thousands of people I’m following. I’m going to gather up a bunch of my thoughts on Twitter and the tools I use in this post. If you haven’t given Twitter a shot, maybe this will inspire you. If you are already using Twitter, maybe you’ll find a suggestion or two in this post which will help take your tweeting to the next level.

Twitter Apps

Over time I’ve looked at a ridiculous number of Twitter apps (desktop and iOS) and for me the big winner is Tweetbot. The layout, speed, functionality and design of both the iPhone and iPad apps can’t be beat. Tweetbot actually makes Twitter more fun than it already is! Adding accounts is a breeze since Twitter is now embedded right in to the iOS and the app has all kinds of shortcuts to save you a couple of steps in your Twitter tasks.

Tweetbot is not free (and I’m not one to usually buy apps when there are free options available) but the quality and fun factor are totally worth the $2.99 price tag. You can get Tweetbot in the app store here for iPhone and here for iPad.

Apps like Tweetbot make it very easy to track Twitter lists, allowing you to break down the ones you are following into more manageable chunks. I have Twitter lists for everyone I know from my church on Twitter, other worship leaders I follow, pastors and other leaders that I find really inspiring, plus a list of people that I just like to keep up with on Twitter.

Buffer

Buffer is an incredible Twitter app which I discovered almost a year ago. Ever had a handful of links (maybe articles, quotes, interesting stuff on the web) you wanted to tweet but knew that if you send four or five tweets back-to-back it might annoy your followers? Buffer gives you a solution to this. Setup your account, tell Buffer what times during the day you’d like it to tweet for you and then input the links as scheduled tweets. Throughout the day, those tweets will be sent to your account automatically giving you a nice spread out pattern of posting.

You can use Buffer to post links to your blog posts, remind people of important events, send out interesting quotes, whatever you like.

Don’t want to always head to the Buffer site to send your tweets? Tools like the browser extensions, iPhone apps and send-by-email all make Buffer a really great “next level” tool for Twitter and it has become a crucial part of my Twitter strategy.

(If you click the Buffer links in this post and sign up, it’s a referral link so we’ll both get an extra slot in our Buffer – free!)

Hashtags

The real value in Twitter is the people. Technology and tools like Twitter really are only as good as the people who are using them. Thankfully, there are lots of people using Twitter – over 300 million accounts, right now. When you get that many people using the same tool to communicate, the value of the collaborative communication is incredibly high. Got a question? Someone on Twitter can answer it. Stuck with a software problem? Someone on Twitter can help you get unstuck. Looking for some new ideas? Someone on Twitter can give you inspiration.

The downside of a massive community group like Twitter is information overload. How can you possibly sift through all of the content which is produced by Twitter users every day? One really great way is by using hashtags both when you are tweeting and when you are searching.

Here are a few hashtags for worship leaders that I’ve found to be really helpful -

• #worshipset
  Worship leaders all around the world are posting their setlists from weekend worship services using this hashtag. You can get some great inspiration from looking at the songs that other worship leaders are doing in their churches. I will also use this hashtag if I have a song selection question that another worship leader on twitter may be able to answer.
  
  The Name Of Jesus, Everything Glorious, Facedown, As It Is In Heaven, Glorious #WorshipSet #Feb19 #LivingWater

  February 15, 2012 11:09 am via Tweet ButtonReplyRetweetFavorite

  

  @jgreenkee88

  Jeff G.
• #crtvmin
  This is short for “creative ministry” and is a great way to scan for new ideas as well as events or conferences related to church creativity.
  
  Gearing up 4 @seedsconference by listening 2 last years sessions online. So much insight on the crtv process. Love these guys! #crtvmin

  February 10, 2012 12:50 am via Twitter for MacReplyRetweetFavorite

  

  @thejonmorris

  Jon Morris
• #ctln
  Church Technical Leaders Network is a great way to get connected to anyone serving in audio, video, lighting in church world. This hashtag has been a huge help to me and others as we’ve been planning the Reconnect Tech Conference. You’ll often see job postings listed with this hashtag, as well -
  
  I'm looking for an Assistant Technical Director. Details here: http://t.co/BoGnlSk3 #CTLN

  February 15, 2012 2:49 pm via TweetDeckReplyRetweetFavorite

  

  @wwakefield

  Wes Wakefield

Posting tweets using these hashtags and also searching those hashtags can give you some really great information. Of course there are also hashtags for specific events, conferences, online discussions, etc.

As far as free tools go, it’s hard to find anything as valuable as Twitter. I can’t tell you how many real life friendships have been initiated and sustained because of Twitter. It is so much more than the “Look at what I’m having for lunch!” social network.

If you’re on Twitter, are we connected? Go ahead and follow me @chrisfromcanada so I can follow back and keep up with you. Are you a Twitter dropout? I’d love to hear about it. How are you using Twitter?

 

[This is a post from my worship leader's toolkit blog series. You can read the series intro and find links to the other posts here.]

One of the great mysteries when it comes to artists is that we tend to be fairly scatterbrained yet at the same time thrive within an orderly environment. Artists generally try to push against any kind of structure but the irony is that great art is often produced within constraints and boundaries. A classic example of this for worship leaders is when it comes to note taking, filing and sorting.

Stop me if you’ve heard or said anything like this in the last little while:

I wish I could remember that song idea!

You know that guy I was talking to? You know.. the guy! What was his name?

The other day I had this great idea for a couple of songs that would work really well for Easter/Christmas/baptism/etc.

These are all familiar to me because I’ve said them all – several times! After trying lots of different ways of tracking ideas – notes in my pocket, moleskine, iPhone audio notes, email, a combination of all of the above! – I finally relented and decided that I need to find one solution which could capture, store and file all kinds of notes for me and make it really easy to find the info when I need it.

Enter Evernote!

It may be confusing to figure out at first but if your system of remembering is a combination of email, voice notes, Excel sheets, sticky tabs, writing on your hand and hope, you need Evernote! I won’t explain everything there is to know (you should read Evernote Essentials for that) but I think of Evernote as an online filing cabinet – there are several drawers depending on the context (home, work, family, etc) and each drawer has multiple folders (ie. inside the family “drawer” I have “folders” for gift ideas, home projects, vacation spots, etc).

Evernote calls these folders notebooks and notebooks can be arranged together in any kind of grouping you like. Notebooks can be tagged, indexed and searched for whatever information they contain. You can upload text, web pages, photos and images, audio recordings – if you can get it online, you can get it in Evernote!

So how do I use Evernote? Let me show you three quick ways that I love using Evernote which have helped me out huge.

1. Evernote Web Clipper

No matter what web browser you are using, there is an extension or bookmarklet you can install which will allow you to “clip” content from a website and send it straight to your Evernote account. I love to use this if I find something online which might be helpful for a worship service or series that’s coming up. Here’s an example -

I might be checking out some ideas online and come across this website which features prayers for Easter. Because it’s early February, I’m not in final planning mode for Easter yet but I know that in a few weeks I’m going to be looking for some prayers for our Palm Sunday, Good Friday and Easter Sunday services.

Rather than bookmarking this site, I’m going to clip this site in my Evernote account using the little web clipper icon in the top right corner -

See what I did there? When I click Clip article the text from this page will be uploaded right to my Evernote account and because I’ve selected the Easter notebook (see it selected right under the title of the webpage – Easter prayers, contemporary and traditional) this info will end up there and when I’m ready to start looking through Easter ideas, I’ll find it!

 

2. Evernote iPhone App

The iPhone app for Evernote is a thing of beauty. From my phone, I can access and search all of my notes but the real value of the app is being able to add photos to my Evernote account right from my phone. If I see something in a store, at a church or while I’m walking outside and I want to add it to one of my notebooks, the iPhone app makes it crazy easy to snap a quick photo and upload it straight to Evernote.

One of the craziest features of Evernote is that it can search handwritten text. Stop. Read that again. Evernote can search handwritten text. We are living in the future.

Ever tried searching through pages and pages of handwritten notes from a workshop or conference? After taking notes, I get a good photo on my phone, upload to Evernote and I’ve immediately got a searchable record of notes from that session. Incredible!

It’s not just photos which can be added from the iPhone app. You can add text and audio recordings, too. Next time you open Evernote on your computer, those notes are linked up right where you left them!

3. Evernote by Twitter

My next post in this Worship Leader’s Toolkit series is about Twitter and how useful it can be for worship leaders and I love how Evernote is integrated with Twitter. How do you set it up? Follow the @myen account and when you want to add a note to your Evernote account simply send a direct message to @myen and include the content of your note.

My default notebook in Evernote is “ideas” and any tweet sent this way goes directly into that notebook. This is a great way for me to get quick, on the run ideas into Evernote for review later. I go over my ideas notebook every couple of weeks just to refresh my memory and see if there’s anything in that notebook to help as an inspiration with what I’m working on at that moment.

————–

So there you go. Artists, you need some help in the brain area. Let Evernote be your help! It can seem very daunting (like an elephant!) in the beginning but start slowly and trust that it will be worth the effort. It will save your butt time and time again and the value of having all of your notes gathered in ONE place is invaluable.

If you are interested in really giving Evernote a shot, you should check out this ebook called Evernote Essentials. It was written by Brett Kelly and he did such a great job explaining Evernote to new users that he was actually hired by the company as an employee. If you do buy the ebook that that link, it is an affiliate so thank you for doing that. The cost to you is the same whether you go through my affiliate link or not but I hope you decide to give Evernote a try. I know it has saved me on many occasions!

How do you use Evernote? What are some of the things it helps you with? Leave a comment and share what you’ve learned!

 

This spring, Chris Tomlin, Paul Baloche & Michael W. Smith are each coming to Canada for their own concert tours. Three great artists, three separate tours, three incredible opportunities. Chris Tomlin will be here in March, Paul Baloche will tour Canada in April and Michael W. Smith will go coast-to-coast in May. So what are we going to do about it? Contest! Giveaway! Free tickets!

Who doesn’t love a great contest? Who doesn’t love free tickets? Who doesn’t love giveaways?

For information, dates, cities and details head over to Unite Productions to see a full list of the Chris Tomlin, Paul Baloche and Michael W. Smith Canadian concert tour dates – www.uniteinworship.com

So here’s how this is going to work..

• You must enter a comment at the bottom of this post letting me know your preferred first, second and third choice for tickets if you win. If your name is picked first, you get your first choice. If your name is picked second, you get your second choice unless your first choice is still available. If your name is picked third, you get your third choice unless your first or second choices are still available. Clear as mud? Awesome!
• After you enter the post, make sure you click the big green “Do it!” button on the giveaway widget below. Post the comment, click the button in the widget and then go ahead and use the widget to tweet and like the post for additional entries. You can also follow me on twitter for one more entry.
• Tweeting and liking the post can happen once per day over the course of the contest and each day will count as a new entry in the contest. Only one blog post comment will count as an entry.
• The contest is open now and winners will be announced on Wednesday, February 8.
• The prizes are provided by our good friends at Unite Productions and they will arrange details for you as far as getting tickets for the correct show.

So.. leave a comment below, come back to the widget here and submit your entries:

a Rafflecopter giveaway

Good luck!

If you are a worship leader and new to the blog, you may be interested in reading through a series of posts I’m just wrapping up focused on different tools and resources to help you do your job better. In this series I talk about books, online tools and different resources I use every week – some every day! – to help me in my job.

The Worship Leader’s Toolkit series can be found here – www.chrisfromcanada.com/worshipleaderstoolkit

The speed at which you think is not the speed at which you act.

The speed at which you act is not the speed at which you are.

I’m enjoying some time of slowing down, re-thinking some of the ways I act, re-acting some of the ways I am. Thankful for this opportunity.

I led worship with some great friends at a conference this week and the quote above came from the speaker. Is your life too quick that you didn’t even read the quote? Read it again. I’ll wait.

What’s happening too quickly in your life?

Last year our staff team attended a satellite location of the Elephant Room and I thought it was great. I loved the concepts, I loved the participants and I loved how it went. I blogged my way through each of the sessions and you can read the recaps here -

• Preaching to Build the Attendance vs. Preaching to Build the Attendees: Matt Chandler and Steven Furtick
• Culture in the Church vs. Church in the Culture: Mark Driscoll and Perry Noble
• Compassion Amplifies the Gospel vs. Compassion Distorts the Gospel: Mark Driscoll and David Platt
• Unity: Can’t We All Get Along? vs. Discernment: My Way or the Highway: Steven Furtick and James MacDonald
• Multi-Site: Personality Cult vs. God’s Greater Glory: Perry Noble and Matt Chandler
• Love the Gospel vs. Share the Gospel: Greg Laurie and Mark Driscoll
• Elephant Room Takeaways

Elephant Room Round 2 is on its way and there is still time to register. Watch this video to get a feel of how it will go -

The Elephant Room is happening in Chicago on Wednesday, January 25 and there are locations all over the US (and one in Canada!) that you can attend. Registration and more info here – www.theelephantroom.com/registration-locations/

As I’ve told you before, 2011 was a big year for me when it came to reading. I set out at the beginning of the year to make reading a real priority and gathered books (physical and digital) I wanted to get through.

“Pursuing Christ. Creating Art.” by Gary Molander was not originally on my list but towards the end of the year I had heard so many great things about it, I decided I needed to include it on my reading list. I was not.. not.. NOT disappointed. To be honest, once I started reading, I could not put it down! (Actually, to be accurate, once I started reading I couldn’t close my Kindle app.)

The more I read, the more excited I got. The more I read, the more I wanted friends of mine to read it. The more I read, notes and quotes were posted on twitter and facebook. Thanks to the beauty of social media, Gary and I were able to connect that day over twitter (him, @garymo, me, @chrisfromcanada) and I made sure he knew I thought the book was really important and I wanted more people to read it.

PURSUING CHRIST. CREATING ART. is written for people who are living in the intersection of the Christian faith, and the creation of art. By their nature, artists look at a life of faith differently, and that unique journey warrants an exploration of what it means to be a Christ-follower and an artist. The book intentionally veers away from tips and techniques and formulas, while concentrating on the journey, the mystery, and the heart.

Thanks to Gary’s generosity, I have got three copies of “Pursuing Christ. Creating Art.” to give away to my blog readers. Not only will you get the book but Gary has offered to autograph them personally for you so you can brag to all your friends!

Enter below – the contest is open now and I’ll announce the winners on Thursday, January 19. Some of these entries can be done once per day so make sure you’ve got as many chances as possible to be one of the winners!

a Rafflecopter giveaway

If you’re seeing the mobile version of this site, the giveaway widget may not show up. As a first step, leave a comment below to enter the giveaway and then come back to this page to see the other ways you are able to enter the contest.

[This is a post from my worship leader's toolkit blog series. You can read the series intro and find links to the other posts here.]

Hopefully you’ve been tracking with this series and beginning to see how many of these resources are working together to help you as you research, resource, communicate, plan and lead on Sunday morning. Blogging is helpful for connecting with other worship leaders, Planning Center is great for planning and communicating, ProPresenter is a great tool for running the visual side of Sunday morning – of course there are lots of tools which can accomplish these things but I’ve tried to share with you some of the reasons why I use the ones I do.

WorshipHouse Media is a great site which aggregates media content from lots of different producers in one place – motion backgrounds, worship intro videos, mini teaching videos, animated Bible text videos, whatever you’re looking for when it comes to visual content as part of your worship service, you’ll want to see what WorshipHouse Media has to offer.

The site is setup the way you’d expect – you can search by title or theme or producer or scan through various media types. There’s a list of what’s popular and at certain times of year media will be featured for Christmas or Easter, etc depending on the season.

The real beauty of WorshipHouse Media is that it isn’t only in-house videos produced by WHM staff which are available through the site. Video producers from media companies and churches all around the world are producing videos which are available at a really reasonable cost at WorshipHouse.

You may not have anyone in your church who can do any kind of video production, you may not have any media staff at your church but with a small budget allocated to purchasing videos every year you can have the benefit of great media to go along with your presentation on Sunday morning.

Visual communication is vital in our culture – remember, people coming to your church receive most of their information (for better or worse) from a screen. Computers, TVs, movies, phones, tablets – people are used to receiving and processing information on a screen.

If you are using videos as part of what you do on Sunday morning, WorshipHouse Media is a great aggregator for you. If you don’t use videos, have a look. You probably don’t want to jump right in to the deep end but talk with your pastor, present him with a well thought-out idea of how you’d like to use a video as part of your worship package, the songs that would be combined with it, how the video would be introduced and how you hope it would impact people in the congregation. If you’ve developed a level of trust with your pastor, hopefully you’ll be able to talk through the idea and try some of these new things.

Check it out – www.worshiphousemedia.com

[This is a post from my worship leader's toolkit blog series. You can read the series intro and find links to the other posts here.]

We are living in the age of the app. Hardware is no longer restricted by knobs and buttons but only by the app store it’s connected to and the developers who are doing their best to extend its ability. Almost every genre of software has been transformed by apps over the last few years – Angry Birds, Dropbox, Flipboard, YouVersion to name a few!

It’s no different when it comes to apps for worship leaders. Lots of software services out there (including some that I’ve talked about in this series) will have their own app. The power of these services has been extended to millions of devices – whether they’re iOS, Android, Blackberry, whatever – all around the world.

There are several apps that I use on my iPhone or iPad almost every day. YouVersion is my default Bible reader. Flipboard and Zite get read while I’m drinking my morning coffee. My wife opens Weather HD before turning on the TV for the forecast. Not to mention Tweetbot, Kindle, Instagram.. and on and on it goes.

One app which has become a staple gives me and my band a ton of control when it comes to running click tracks on Sunday morning. SoundCue for iPad does everything and more I would expect an app like this to do and I wanted to share it with you as part of this blog series.

You may or may not run click tracks with your band on a Sunday morning but if you do one of the first questions is always “How are we going to play clicks?” I remember my touring band days when we would run click tracks off CD on a portable CD player that our drummer would control. Not ideal – lots of skipping, scratched CDs, etc – but it allowed us to try some pretty great things that not many other bands were doing 10 or 12 years ago.

The point of this post isn’t to explain how click tracks work or what you need to get setup but if you are running clicks, you need to give SoundCue a look.

A couple of months ago I put together a quick walkthrough video of this app as a thank you to the developers. They were kind enough to give me a review copy of the app and I thought it was definitely worth sharing:

The only update that I’d give since recording that video is that moving songs from iTunes to my iPad wirelessly with iOS 5 is definitely easier so you’ve got three really easy ways of getting click tracks off your computer in to SoundCue – email it to yourself as an attachment, add it to a shared Dropbox folder or sync with iTunes.

SoundCue is a little pricier than most apps out there (as I’m writing this it’s $14.99 in the Canadian iTunes app store) but if you are a regular user of click tracks with your worship band and you’re looking for something better than the iTunes interface, this is a great option.

You can get more info on SoundCue over at their website – www.soundcueapp.com

[This is a post from my worship leader's toolkit blog series. You can read the series intro and find links to the other posts here.]

Okay so today’s post is covering a resource that is pretty new to me but I am convinced that ProPresenter is the best choice out there when it comes to projection and managing the visual side of Sunday morning.

Moving to ProPresenter is a recent change for us but one we’ve been planning for a long time. You may be using Powerpoint or software from another visual worship company but if you’re able to make the investment in ProPresenter, it is a decision you will not regret.

We have been using other software for the past 5 years and had become frustrated with the number of band-aids and “just do this” quick fixes we were having to do to make sure that we could pull off our projection on Sunday morning. Once our presentations started freezing for no good reason and the software was crashing on a pretty new computer, we knew it was time to make a change.

There are way too many features to recap in this blog post and honestly one of the best features of ProPresenter is the amount of support provided by developers and the user community. Just have a look at how some of the features of ProPresenter 5 are laid out on this page and how each one is given lots of explanation - http://www.renewedvision.com/propresenter.php?page=pro5

I’m ready to assume that if you’re in the market for projection software and ProPresenter is an option for you, you know what you’re doing when it comes to media, videos, motion backgrounds, etc so there’s not much value in me explaining the basics but let me hilight three features in ProPresenter 5 that I am loving and which I think you will find really helpful.

Song Arrangements
We have rehearsal on Thursday night and one of the things we do is work out song arrangements – get a good feel of how we’re going to do verses, choruses, bridges for each of our songs. These aren’t set in stone and there is always freedom to go outside of the arrangement on Sunday morning but doing this gets everyone – singers, band, projection – on the same page with where we’re going next.

With the song arrangement feature, all it takes is a bit of drag-and-drop to get the arrangement in place for that service. The slides in the song will adjust themselves according to the arrangement that you’ve laid out. If anything, you’ll come back Sunday morning after your rehearsal and will remember how the arrangement of that song went during rehearsal. Awesome!

Fill in Blank & Bullets
One of the factors in wanting to move away from our previous software solution was that we had to import Powerpoint into the presentation for our pastor’s message slides. This meant another workflow for formatting, another level of file management and another piece of software that our projection volunteers had to know. Enter ProPresenter with a solution to allow us to get rid of Powerpoint!

Filling in blanks and creating bullet slides are really the only uses we had for Powerpoint and in ProPresenter 5 those are taken care of. By moving to this new software we are simplifying our preparation workflow and keeping our entire presentation local to one software solution. This is good!

Planning Center Online Integration
If you’ve been reading this series from the beginning, you know that I am a big fan of Planning Center Online and ProPresenter 5 takes it to the next level by integrating my PCO plans right into their software. If you are a PCO user, you have got to see how easy this is to implement. Talk about making your Sunday morning preparation easier – all of your planning, scheduling and managing your service and visual media in one place!

Watch this video to get an idea of how easy this is:

Again, the feature list on ProPresenter is huge and if you’ve placed a priority on the visual aspect of Sunday morning at your church you’ll definitely want to have it on your list as a possible solution.

You can find lots more info on ProPresenter and order directly from their website – www.propresenter.com