My primary audience for this blog is Senior Pastors, but I know other pastors and church staff sneak a peek from time to time. Today, I want to say a brief word to Media Pastors. (You might want to forward this post to your staff member in charge of media.)

Over the last 10 months, I’ve had the opportunity to visit about a dozen churches. Every single one of them had some sort of screen or media presence during the service. I was surprised at how many times the image on the screen looked worse than the ‘live image’ I could see on the stage. This has led me to a “Rule for Screen Images” that I’d like to share:

Rule for Screen Images: The Image on the screen must be better than the live image. If it’s not, you don’t need the screen.

Screens should always complement and enhance the image attenders are seeing live with their own eyes. (They can also be used for special videos or song lyrics.) Unless I’m sitting in the first few rows of the auditorium, the screens should give me a better picture of the service than I can get by looking at the stage. They should give me a crystal clear image of the worship team or the speaker.

So why is the image on the screen so poor in most churches?  Here are my thoughts:

- Bad lighting. I don’t think most church leaders realize just how much lighting it takes for a clear image to be projected on a screen. Most of the churches I visited needed, at minimum, twice as much lighting as they had. My personal observation: if I can stand onstage and see the audience, then the light isn’t bright enough. Crude but true.

- Awkward camera angles. I’m not talking about the ‘cool camera angle’ you want on the drum solo; I’m talking about a camera angle that distorts the speaker by shooting him too high, too low, or with too much room on one side or the other. These awkward camera angles are usually the result of a remote camera or an untrained operator.

- Wide zoom or static camera. If the speaker walks off frame of a static camera shot or the camera is zoomed out too far, the screens become useless.

- Poor equipment. This is a broad one. Either your projector is too old, your camera is outdated or you aren’t using the equipment properly. Either way, the result is a poor image.

Senior Pastors and Media Pastors: let me challenge you to get the video tape of what is being projected on your screens, watch it on a regular sized television and then ask: If I had to watch this every week, would the quality be high enough?

I could write another post about how we waste money in the media area by investing in equipment we don’t need when we could get the same result by fully understanding and using the equipment we already own. So I’m not suggesting you go out and spend a bunch of money. Just get some smart people in a room and ask: How can we make a 1 – 5% improvement in our media area this week? Little steps taken consistently over time can make a huge difference.

Nelson

P.S. If you are media pastor and you’ve been trying to get your Senior Pastor to invest in improving your area, feel free to forward him this post!