Welcome to part two of our ultimate guide to worship tech where we’ll cover all the tools you need for building a great rig for worship lighting and display.
We’ll be going over:
Lighting software
Lighting fixtures
Connectivity
Screen and Display
Once you’re done here, feel free to check out two other great guides we’ve created for you.
Before we get into the tech, I want to touch on a couple things.
We know there are differing opinions when it comes to church lighting. Here at Churchfront, we believe that all aspects of the worship ministry, even lighting, are important for crafting an environment that draws the congregation in.
As humans, we’re emotional creatures and we respond to our senses, sight being one of those. It’s important to seek excellence not only in sound, but also with lighting in order to reflect the tone or mood of the service.
Your church may not need all of the capabilities we talk about here, but you’ll definitely learn how to craft your worship with proper lighting and display.
Lighting for Ministry–Software
Lightkey
One of the most important pieces of your lighting rig is how you control it.
At our church, we use a Mac-based software called Lightkey for several reasons.
It’s user-friendly and easy to pick up–giving you full control of your lights.
It has a button-based cue and scene system, which allows you to change scenes for programming and customizing your lights with color and effects with ease.
Built on a subscription model, Lightkey is affordable and also provides seamless integration with Ableton Live.
Luminair
There are a lot of other options out there, such as Luminair (great for iOS devices), but we found that Lightkey is the perfect combination of ease-of-use, controllability, and customization.
Lighting for ministry–Fixtures
Ellipsodial lights
Moving on to the actual lights, we recommend ellipsoidal lights as your main spotlights. These work best to illuminate subjects like pastors or worship leaders. Of course, the number of spotlights will depend on how large your stage is, but you can easily customize your setup based on your needs.
The great thing about ellipsoidal lights for church production is that they grant you control over the beam of light, making for clean, bright lighting that focuses on what you want to highlight.
Backlights
We also recommend some backlights to support your spotlights.
A good rule of thumb is that you should have at least one backlight for every pair of spotlights in your worship stage setup. These go a long way to giving soft, warm ‘hair’ light that separate the subject from the background.
LED
If you want to continue building your lighting fixtures, our next recommendation would be LED lights. These help to fill out the sides and backlights, along with giving you the ability to color the stage for a number of different moods and aesthetics.
Haze machine
Lastly, we come to the haze machine.
We know these aren’t for everyone or for every church, but they’re great in combination with your LEDs–helping to create a very atmospheric effect. Depending on your church’s needs, you might want to consider one of these to add that extra bit to your service.
Connectivity
With all these lights, you’ll need a way to connect them so you have continuity and seamless transitions.
If you connect your lighting rig through DMX cabling, all of your fixtures can talk to each other through your choice lighting software. For your traditional incandescent light fixtures, you’ll need to connect them to a dimmer pack, which in turn receives DMX commands. On the other hand, intelligent LEDs have the ability to be daisy-chained via DMX and can receive commands together.
Once they’re all plugged in, setup your lighting software and you’re good to go!
Screen and Display
Every church needs a good way to showcase material, whether it’s sermon slides, worship lyrics or an announcement video. The screen, display, and how you implement your media are all just as important as your lighting ability.
No one wants to go to church and have to squint at a fuzzy screen, or stare at a display that’s too dark, or even worse: stare at the wrong lyrics while the tech team frantically searches for the correct slide.
That being said, we encourage you to get away from software like PowerPoint, Keynote, or Google Slides.
We get it, they’re convenient, but sometimes they really make it hard for the tech team to do their job. Shouldn’t the excellence of the worship service be worth investing in?
Propresenter
ProPresenter is the way to go for a couple reasons:
It allows you to split the signal between monitors and the display
It also provides seamless integration with Ableton Live for lyric automation.
At our church, we use a widescreen and short throw projector for our background. It’s budget-friendly and creates a great ambience.
Main Sreen
For the main screen, we mounted a 16x9 screen on trusses in the back-middle of the stage. We set up and tear down every week, but it works and allows our congregation to see easily.
We wish we could give you a number one solution to meet your needs for screen and display, but the truth is, all churches are different.
Each church will need to diagnose their needs:
Do you have a lot of natural light?
Do you have a large worship hall where the screens are placed far from the congregation?
Do you have room to mount a projector behind the screen?
These are all questions you’ll have to ask in order to tailor your setup to meet those needs.
In general, we recommend that you go for a clean, bright setup. That doesn’t mean you have to go out and break the bank on a huge LED wall display, but keep in mind that brighter equals more visibility, and visibility is always better.
Recap
If you’re interested in the tech we talked about today or if you need help with setting up and mastering the tech at your church, I’d love to connect. You can apply to work with us here.
We specialize in coming alongside worship leaders and tech team leaders and helping them build a thriving ministry from the ground up.
Give me a call and we’ll chat!