Asia-Pacific Media Seminar Highlights The Art Of Worship

World Mission Communications, Asia-Pacific conducted a preliminary seminar on the use of audio-visual media in worship last Saturday at the regional communication center in Manila, Philippines.   WMC-AP invited a hand-picked test group consisting of one pastor and five church media team members from a couple different churches. The goal was to conduct a one-day seminar offering hands-on training with a little bit of theory and inspiration along the way. One focus of the seminar was to present and train the participants using ONLY free or opensource software. This way churches with limited resources are still able to put the training into practice without having to pay high prices for commercial software.

Session One dealt with communication theory and the development of attractive and effective presentation slides, including the techniques that work well compared to those that are not effective when developing slides for worship lyrics, announcements, scripture, and sermon illustrations.  Four hands-on tutorials were taught using GIMPshop (a free, Photoshop like software) in which the participants created the attached slides

Session Two dealt with the use of video in worship services, explaining when video use is effective to enhance and complement the service. Participants also learned about the process of developing short videos -- from brianstorming to exporting the final project -- for use as announcement presentations and also for use as sermon illustrations.   Theory was followed by more practice, using Windows MovieMaker (free with Windows XP/Vista) in which participants edited preshot footage and photos together following a script and simple storyboard

The participants were very positive about the seminar providing feedback such as

"Seminar was great! Very informative. Keep it up!

"All churches from our district would definitely benefit from this workshop. Will be happy to help you promote this....God bless you tremendously.

"It was very good and useful information for our church.

WMC-AP will be refining this content and repeating it as often as possible.  If your local church, district or field could benefit from a seminar like this -- or any other media-related seminar -- please contact Daniel Pape at info@wmc-ap.org.   

this post was filed under Press Releases on Aug 19, 2008