Being Presbyterian

I made my church’s website. I know, it needs some updating; I’ll get around to that soon. When I made it, I thought congregation members would refer to it often. Daily. It would be their sole source of information for what was happening in the church. I cleverly embedded a Google calendar in the ‘Events’ page, I regularly changed images on the front page, and even created individual pages for special events.

Those days are gone.

People didn’t send me content, and I didn’t have time to fish for it. Nobody said anything about the site. I grew apathetic, the site stagnated, and still no one said a word, either out of politeness or because no one used it; my money’s on the latter. I have come to realize that my church—like many churches—just needs a very basic website, a simple, informative presence on the web. Maybe I’ll post something about that.

Recently the church received a generous monetary gift. I learned the session decided to invest in some technology. OK, cool, I thought.

They wanted to buy a flat-screen television and put it up on the wall in the narthex (which I just learned is the name of the room where people enter the church). It would display upcoming events, announcements and pictures on a looped PowerPoint show. It would be called the Video Information Screen.

I shook my head, bitterly remembering the website. “Are people really going to use that?” I wondered aloud to my wife. “I don’t think the church is there yet. And who are they going to get to do it every week?”

My skepticism softened a little when an elder asked me to help with buying the equipment (flattery will do that), but I remained unconvinced. We bought a 32″ LCD television, wall mount, and HDMI cable ($850) and a 13″ notebook with a copy of Microsoft Office ($1150). Because I live next door to the church, the elder asked if the equipment could stay at my house until we could set it up. Maybe you could see if you could get it up and running for the person who’s going to be doing it? he said. No problem, I figured I would be doing that anyway.

I fooled around with it for a few days, and thought, heck, I might as well make the first PowerPoint show. I got a copy of the announcements from the church administrator, asked my wife (a minister at the church) if there was anything she wanted to add.

In the end I had about 13 slides, and I kept them simple: I bought some good quality stock photos (istock.com) that made sense with the content, knowing they could be recycled for recurring events, and used minimal text. I set each slide to run between 10-15 seconds and added simple cross-fade transition, adding other animations sparingly. Right now it takes me an hour or two on a Friday or Saturday night. There are plans to show some other folks what to do to spread the workload a bit.

I’ve done 4 of them now and the feedback has been great: people love it (not necessarily my slideshows, but having a Video Information Screen). And they are actually emailing me content for it. They see themselves and people they know in the pictures every Sunday. It’s tangible and is helping (I think and hope) to build community. Maybe the congregation isn’t ‘website’ oriented, and that’s great, but I’m happy they found another technology to help the church communicate.

You can check out a typical slideshow below (using www.slideshare.com)

Matt Donnelly works in the Communications Office of The Presbyterian Church in Canada. You can reach him at communications@presbyterian.ca.