a Voice in the Wilderness

Today I want to interrupt my series on using PowerPoint in Worship to cover an OpenSource presentation sofware know as OpenSong[1]. As an open source program, it is free {yeah!}, which is very helpful for small churches trying to get started with overhead projection during the service. I have recently begun using this for the English Ministry at CKPC[2].

Two of the main things OpenSong handles for the church techie or worship leader is lyric/chord sheet management and the live presentation. At the heart of the application is the notion of a worship set. Within the worship set, you define Items.

Each item can be either a slide that you customize, a song or scripture. In the set you can define everything that needs to be projected. For each item, you can decide if you want the slide to print in the list. Depending on how you set this up, you will end up with a worship order that you can use for the Band, preacher, scripture reader and so on.

For the band, the lyric/chord sheets can be transposed into another key. Segments of the songs (verses, choruses, bridge etc) can be defined. For the presentation, you can easily define the order (v1 c, v2 c b c t for instance) of the segments of the songs. It is really easy to add or change songs on the fly, or change the order of the segments of the songs. You can define the “normal” order you perform the song, and override it for the current set.

Scripture is easily added - even on the fly. Last week we had a mission trip report. He read a scripture that was important to the trip, and by the time he finished reading the scripture I was able to have in on the screen.

We will have several announcement slides that loop before the service. You can define several “slides” within a slide, simply by adding 3 dashes on a line by itself. I will then have the slide print in the list and loop. Printing the announcements in the list enables the person doing announcements to have them without having to make another list.

Scriptures and other slides are added, and then several printouts can be made ahead of time. I will generally make one with the scripture, Apostle’s Creed and announcements typed out for those doing those. I will make another printout without the words for the Band, so they have a one sheet worship order. Then the Chord Sheets are printed for the band. Each band member will get their own copy. In the gallery, I have included PDF’s of these three printouts and the XML file I used for the set.

This software is so much more flexible and comprehensive than just PowerPoint alone. For a really small church, this package will fill most of the needs for organizing the worship service. To be honest, I may have trouble finishing the series…

Links in this article:
[1] http://www.opensong.org/
[2] http://ckpc4you.melick.net
[3] http://weblog.melick.net/wp-content/uploads/2008/06/sample-songs.pdf
[4] http://weblog.melick.net/wp-content/uploads/2008/06/sample-list-1.pdf
[5] http://weblog.melick.net/wp-content/uploads/2008/06/sample-list-2.pdf
[6] http://weblog.melick.net/wp-content/uploads/2008/06/sample