Save Time Organizing Your Ministry and Volunteers

This blog could save you several hours each week! What I am going to tell you about isn't free, but it is worth every penny. It's an online tool called "Planning Center" (http://www.planningcenteronline.com) and it is an online volunteer organization tool. We first met the Planning Center team at the Arts conference at Willowcreek church several years ago. We were early adopters in their tool and we have watched it grow into a super powerful volunteer organization tool that we simply can not live without. Before planning center, scheduling volunteers was a tedious chore. Emails back and forth just to find out that our Alto has a weekend road trip planned made a friday afternoon headache a regular occurrence for our worship pastor.

Planning center allows our volunteers to "block-out" dates they aren't available, and for our worship leader to select volunteers from a list of people and the system does the emailing and scheduling conflict resolution automatically. That is just the tip of the iceberg! How do you setup your music each week so that your singers can hear the rehearsal tracks? Do you spend time burning CD's? Not with planning center. Songs that are added to the schedule are automatically added to the online media player for singers to listen to from anywhere via the web.

Listen, this blog isn't long enough to explain all the very very cool and useful features of this tool. I don't work for planning center, I was not asked to endorse their product. I am simply a user that can testify to the usefulness and value of the tool because it saves us countless hours every week and there is no way we will go back to not using this tool. Here is a video from the planning center channel off of vimeo!

 

Stage Design Idea - Crunched Screen Lighting Texture

Let me just say, this wasn't our original idea. We were searching for new stage design ideas and found this idea online where other churches were using crunched screen for a lighting surface. I just wanted to tell you this really works and it is stupid simple. And most importantly, since the point of this blog is great worship enhancements ON A BUDGET, this fits that bill perfectly as well! Go to your local Home Depot and pick up some screen cheap to get these great results. We are blessed to have great lighting, but you can use any par can with enough watts to light this to get a fresh look for your stage. In our case, the only other tools we needed to make it work was a staple gun to staple the screen to the back walls.

To get started PUT ON GLOVES! Metal screen will poke holes in your skin! Unroll the screen off the roll and just start at one end and start balling it up. Important, if the length you are trying to fill is 10 feet, then unroll 12 feet or so, because when you crumple it and stretch it back out the crumples will take up some of the length. Be safe and unroll more than you need, because you can always trim the excess. There is no precise method to the rolling, just ball it up and then stretch it back out to unfold it. The only important factor is to crumple it consistently, you want a uniform look across the stage.

The lights are installed from the bottom. This creates a great shadow effect within all the pockets where the screen in blocking the light. 

Overall effect on our youth stage. We have red lights mounted to the floor for shadows, and a blue led mounted on the ceiling shining directly on the screen. 

Back wall of our main stage. The lights are mounted above the crumpled screen. See picture below, the red wall behind the singers is crumpled screen, and we put strips of crumpled screen in-between the projector screens to fill in some dead space.

Free Fonts

How many of you use the set of default fonts that come with the software and never change? Well why don't you try out some new fonts from a free font site called dafont.com. Once you go to the site, enter a description of the font you're going for in the search box in the upper right corner. For example, if you're looking for a "grunge" font, then put the word grunge in the search box and click the button. Once the list of candidate fonts come up, you can actually enter a sample of your text in the "custom preview" box and the dafont site will show you your custom text in the various fonts so you can see your text in context and choose the right font for your project. I have used this site for years and have greatly expanded my font library.

Here is how to install the font for a few of the main operating systems. I would make sure you close all software applications before installing new fonts so that they will be sure to show up after you install them.


Windows 7/Vista: Right-click on the font files > "Install"
Windows XP: Put the font files into C:\Windows\Fonts
Mac OS X: Double-click the font file > "Install font" button. Other OS...

What other free font sources have you guys found?

Painting Walls and Ceiling Tiles Changed Our Whole Stage

So we wanted a different look for our stage that was built about 10 years ago.  We didn't have a huge budget to make it happen, but we had plenty of help! Our dated stage had back walls that were all white and we had the white ceiling tiles like you see below. This picture shows the before and after that this blog will tell you about. The ceiling tiles on the left of the photo is the before, and the ceiling tiles on the right is after. So how did we do it?

Well, I'm not gonna lie, it was a lot of work. I said we didn't have a lot of money, but we had plenty of free labor. First we had to get the tiles down. 

STEP 1: GET THE EQUIPMENT TO TAKE DOWN THE TILES

We had scaffolding so that part was free, but if you need scaffolding you can call a local rental company and ask if you can get them to donate it for a weekend, or even better ask them for a genie lift! 

STEP 2: MARK THE TILE LOCATIONS

Now, don't just go pull the tiles down, it is very important that the tiles get marked so you will remember their location. Some of the tiles are custom cut for the square they are in, and it would be bad if you lost track of that. 

STEP 3: PAINT THE TILES AND WALLS

Let the fun begin! Carefully laying the tiles out on plastic sheeting that we picked up from the local home depot, we had rollers and gallons of flat black paint and we painted, and painted, and painted. Depending on how many tiles you have to paint, do it in shifts so you don't get burned out doing it all with the same folks. This is important because if people get bored they will get complacent and do sloppy work! 

STEP 4: REPLACE THE TILES

Now comes the payoff! Check out the photos below to see the black walls in the back of the stage, and the newly painted ceiling tiles back in place. Our plan was to also paint the tile rails and the light fixtures at some other time, but when we started putting the tiles back up, it looked so good we loved it!

Hope this helps you guys! This blog is dedicated to having an impact for Christ's kingdom and being good stewards with the funds that God gave us! 

Free HD Video Site

Just finished putting together a vimeo site for free video backgrounds! I called it "Worship MacGyver" (go figure) and you can access it here (http://video.worshipmacgyver.com). As worship leaders on a budget we have to be very resourceful in finding the elements we need to create an awesome worship experience and be good stewards with what God provides us. This new video channel is dedicated to pulling together resources from talent around the web to provide us the resources we need to create awesome worship experiences on a budget! All of the videos in this channel are HD at least 720p. Most are loopable so they can be used for song support. There are several countdowns and song support videos as well. Most importantly all videos uploaded or shared to this group must be free! Hope you enjoy. If you have some other great worship video resources comment on this post.