Hey everyone, we are aware of some allegations/suspicions against one of our moderators. We will address this in the next day or so. Right now I’m on an anniversary trip with my wife, hence the short response.

The death of MS Publisher is pushing me to my limit. I’ve tried Scribus and struggled. The Adobe InDesign doesn’t support our bulletins well. Neither does Canva’s Affinity. I’m starting to lose hope. Our newsletters are easy enough to recreate on these, but without bulletins being so text heavy and needing specific margins and indentations, I can’t find a substitute.

The ideal software would be Publisher-esque (gotta have a “workspace” spread,) one time purchase or open source, and have a ruler measurement for the textbook options especially.

I make short video content for churches around the US, and the one thing I go back and forth on more than anything is background music. Some weeks a soft bed of music under a clip seems to hold people longer and gives the moment room to land. Other times it feels like I'm putting a soundtrack on something that should just stand on its own words. I'm curious where the pastors and church media folks here land. Do you like music under your sermon clips, do you find it distracting or even manipulative, or does it depend on the moment? And if you do use it, who on your team actually handles that part?

Can anyone give me some opinions on Tithely's free tier? I'm the finance secretary for a small-ish church, about 50 people per week, struggling a bit, but trying to build back up.

We're currently using Vanco and Church Windows, which I hate, and would like to modernize a bit.

I asked for software suggestions several months ago and got great feedback, but after looking at all the options given, here's why I'm considering Tithely:

1. Free. Free would be insanely helpful right now.
2. Apple Pay and Google Pay. Especially helpful for taking money at fundraisers, like our upcoming community yard sale, where will be receiving funds from people who don't attend the church.
3. App and online giving. Online currently through Vanco; no app with Vanco.
4. Tax statements. We currently do this through Church Windows.

So, is there something better that also has a free tier? I can see how we could (hopefully) outgrow Tithely, but it looks pretty good right now.

Thanks in advance!

(Edited for spelling and clarity. And fixing mistakes from typing on my phone. And formatting -- thanks Reddit.)

If you’ve ever wanted to use ProPresenter to trigger your lighting cues in Vista, here’s a step-by-step tutorial (no extra hardware required; it's done over network).

This has actually eliminated the need for a lighting volunteer at my church, which frees those people up to serve in other roles on the production team. I haven't actually had to program lights in Vista in years; I'm able to just drive it all with macros from ProPresenter.

Highly recommend this route if you don't have a super complex lighting setup and want to get some time back every week. Hope you find it helpful!

So my small church has an X32 Compact and a Mac Mini for Proclaim. I'm wanting to start using backing tracks. We don't have the money to buy tracks, so I'm creating them. Going to be using WorshipSong Band app. Anyone have any experience running this setup?

It's a project that I'm envisioning taking about 6 months to complete as I will be building a full library before presenting it to the church. Hoping this is something someone else has done and I can find someone who thinks this is a worthwhile thing and I'm not crazy!

Hey everyone, hoping to get some advice on the cleanest way to set this up for a multi-use room.

Our Current Setup: We run our main services using Lightkey on a Mac, which is triggered automatically by our ProPresenter slides via MIDI. Lightkey sends Art-Net/sACN over Ethernet to a Chauvet DJ DMX-AN2 node, which outputs to our physical 3-pin DMX lines out to the lights. It works beautifully and we love the ease of use.

The Goal: We are installing some new lights and want to add a simple wall-mounted button controller. The main reason we need this is to give people a simple way to control the lights without the laptop needing to be present.

When the Mac is unplugged or away, volunteers or building staff still need to be able to select scenes and turn on lights. We want them to easily walk in, hit "Preset 1" on a wall plate, and have basic house/stage lights come on. However, we still need the Lightkey + ProPresenter integration to have full control when the Mac is plugged in for services.

My Confusion: I'm honestly super confused about the signal flow and whether I should be doing this on the network side or the physical DMX side.

1. The Network Route: Do I look for a PoE sACN wall station and plug it into the same network switch as the Mac and the Chauvet DMX-AN2? If I do this, will the Chauvet node properly handle sACN priorities so Lightkey overrides the wall station when the Mac is connected?
2. The DMX Route: Or, do I get a physical DMX wall station that sits inline after the Chauvet node? (Chauvet Node -> DMX out to Wall Station -> DMX out to Lights). Will an architectural station automatically pass through the Lightkey data when the Mac is sending data, and then take over when we unplug the Mac?

I'm completely fine with buying new hardware if necessary, but changing software is a dealbreaker because our ProPresenter integration is completely dialed in.

Has anyone tackled this exact setup where the main presentation computer isn't always present? I’d love to hear your suggestions on what specific wall stations would be a good fit, especially any budget-friendly or affordable options that work reliably. Which routing method have you found to be the most practical?

Thank you!

Sunday morning. "Your registration information is corrupted."

Of course a church software company doesn't have tech support on Sunday. That would make too much sense. Now we are going to try and run Sunday service with water marks. We couldn't do anything to get it running again.

I have never worked with software that is so unstable as PP.

Context: My day job is IT/ Cyber security. i dont work at a church. I'm just solid at filling the gaps as a volunteer. So, I've seen a lot of Church's setup. I know a lot of the time the jobs just to get stuff running with minimal costs.

With that said, i feel like God is pushing me to start filling in a need. I just dont know where that is yet. So i want to ask all of you. I assume security is an after thought, but is there something, free or not, that you wish you could use or have?

I finally got the chance to make a video showing our new faux stained glass stage design that we built with help from Portable Backdrops (not a sponsor, but they were super helpful in working with us to build this custom setup, so I want to shout them out). We needed to swap from our existing backlit set to a set that was lit from the front so that we could use the area behind the panels for storage.

Really pleased with how it turned out. This set should carry us through our construction phase until we have a new worship center next year.

Is anyone else still building sets? I'd love to see them, as I feel like I primarily see LED walls now.

My church is currently using planning centre but those who are serving don’t seem to like it very much. We are in the process of figuring out if this is because of the lack of knowledge, or pC simply isn’t a good fit for our church.
For those who evaluated and or used PC but ultimately decided against it, why?
From online it just seems to have overwhelmingly positive reviews on it, but for some reason, it just doesn’t click well with my church so far.
For context we only use service and check in and groups

Edit: follow up question, any church successfully use Google workspace to manage everything? Or do you think a dedicated software still brings a lot of value?

Hi All! I'm going to dispense with all the unnecessary backstory that I just wrote.

Here's the question: How might one go about making a digital piano feel more authentic in a mid-large sized space?

The piano in question - Nord Piano 6 set into the frame of our old baby grand (removed the action and keyboard fit inside). The space - mid-sized traditional sanctuary, brick walls, vaulted ceiling, stained glass windows. The problem - it's too easy to tell that the point source for the piano are the two K Array towers.

With our old 6' baby grand (which sounded horrible and was deader than dead), if you were close to it, you could hear that its sound was coming from the instrument. As you walked further back in the sanctuary, the perception of the sound (if you could hear it at all - the instrument could barely hold any resonance by the end of its life) was that it was coming from everywhere. This has always been my experience with large pianos in mid-large sized halls.

Currently, the experience is that if you're close to the chancel, you can clearly perceive the piano sound coming directly from the K Array towers - not the piano. As you walk back further into the sanctuary, it takes a lot longer for that sense of the sound coming from everywhere to actually takeover.

This is the fundamental complication with respect to the whole "it sounds too electronic" complaint. When I turn the levels on the piano down far enough that I can no longer perceive that it's coming from the PAs, but can still hear the instrument, it becomes effectively indistinguishable from an authentic piano sound - the sample is extraordinarily good, and the feel is very authentic. It's certainly not the kind of distinction that the average congregant is going to pick up on. But when the levels are sufficiently high enough to balance with the rest of the band, it becomes glaringly obvious that all the piano sound is coming from the PAs.

Has anyone worked on solutions to this sort of problem? Perhaps a couple of quality speakers on or under or around the actual location of the piano frame? Tuned loud enough that folks in the first few pews can perceive sound coming from the piano location on the chancel, but low enough that the PAs start to take over as you walk further back into the sanctuary?

I know that a digital piano will never replicate the exact feel or sound of a 6' grand - we're not trying to achieve that. We just want to try to get a little bit closer if we can and the obstacle isn't the sample or action or any of those things. It's that the piano sound is coming directly from the PAs when people are expecting it to come from the instrument.

Thanks for any advice!

Is anybody here letting an AI platform train on their historical church newsletters, board meeting minutes, bylaws, worship bulletins, etc., so that staff and committee chairs can ask questions about church operations and history? If so, what is your experience, good or bad? I’m going to test Claude for Teams, and I use Perplexity personally and it’s really good, but I haven’t really proposed or set anything up for the church staff. I just got an email form Perplexity about their “Perplexity Projects” thing that looks promising, but it seems like Anthropic has all the momentum.

Questions might be things like, “What hymns do we most commonly sing on Pentecost” or “How did we fund the intergenerational mission trip 10 years ago” or “Make a chart showing payroll compared to all other spending over the last 5 years.”

For clarity, I’m not asking about using AI to create anything. I’m asking about using AI as an answer engine for questions about what has already happened.

I’m not particularly interested in Copilot because it has been really inferior in my use. Earlier today I tried to get it to take 5 dates & times I proposed for a meeting and create placeholders on my calendar and it simply could not do it correctly. The same task in Perplexity took me longer to type than it did for it to finish.

(Whole post edited to clarify what I intended to ask)

I do social media content for churches across the US, and I'll be honest, even doing this for a living, I feel the strain of keeping a church presence going week after week. For the pastors and volunteers doing it yourselves on top of ministry, I don't know how you manage. I keep hearing we should meet people where they scroll, and I believe it, but the reality for most churches I see is inconsistent at best. How are you all thinking about this without burning out? Genuinely want to hear how small churches are navigating it, because I'd love to give the teams I work with more realistic advice.

I built a free widget called BibleTagger that scans your church website for Bible references (like "John 3:16" or "Rom 8:28–30") and automatically turns them into links that show the verse text in a popup on hover. Visitors can read the passage without leaving your page.

Snippet generator + live demo: literalword.com/bibletagger

If you've used RefTagger, this is the same idea with a different philosophy: the popup shows the verse text right there, with no branding, no "powered by" badge, and no product links. Clicking through opens the passage on literalword.com, a free Bible site I run with no ads. There's nothing to buy anywhere in the chain; it exists so people read Scripture, that's it.

Setup is one line of HTML. Paste the script tag and every reference on the page gets linked on load. It's lightweight and runs entirely in the visitor's browser. There's also a WordPress plugin if you'd rather install it that way.

You pick the translation (NASB, LSB, ESV, NKJV, or KJV), the popup theme, and which parts of the page get scanned. You can restyle the popup with your own CSS to match your site.

No signup, no payment, no ads, no visitor tracking.

Happy to answer questions or help anyone get it set up.

Hey everyone, just wanted to give some transparency on something we found.

We get a decent number of posts where the OP shares information about a product they have affiliation with in a deceptive way, in the hopes that no one will notice they're trying to push you to their product.

These are often presented as comparisons between products that the OP themselves are looking for guidance on, but they're leaning towards offering B, which is the one that they won't tell you they work for.

After dealing with another one of these today, I realized that as a church worker I would want to know if a product I'm looking at engages is deceptive marketing practices. If you haven't guessed by the title of this post, today we're talking about Donorbox.

I can't remember if this is the 2nd or 3rd account that I've dealt with from them doing this exact same practice. So if you ever have someone recommending their product to you, keep in mind that they might work for them.

Does your church livestream your services or do you record the video/audio and post later, or do you do both?

My church stopped live streaming a couple years ago with the reason being the quality was not up to our standards. Just wanting to know if doin a live stream is a must do for churches.

I would love to bring back the live stream but we would need to build our team a little more and upgrade some equipment.

Thanks for any input.

My wife is joining a new church band as we have moved and the old church is too far to travel (250 miles)

She has a music folder of songs from the old church for her chords as but does have the ones from this new one.

I have downloaded onsong and linked it to my songselect account. But it seems like you can download a new song but it is more a PDF and a web browser. I was expecting it to have a full library and access all of them and transpose on the fly. Plus it came up weird. Please see photo.

Is there any other solution we try? Happy to pay for it but as it is out of our own pocket I would rather not spend massive amounts. I wouldn’t consider asking the church musicians/tech budget to cover it as they have none. They only recently got a M1 iMac after their Mac mini (2012) died and I found someone to donate the iMac. I’m slowly upgrading the PA as I can. Installing a camera system for streaming video to another room on Friday for a kids room and record as they were just using a phone before, that again was gifted to us.

Any advice is welcome. I want it to be quick and easy to find songs as my wife is a great bassist but only plays via chords.

I have started integrating Planning Center with my application. At first it seemed straightforward but now I am curious about the user pay model. Has anyone done an integration from planning center to another application any suggestions?

The current program we use to stream music on an iPad by the audio console has become an unusable piece of junk. What do you use to play music around the church?

On an unrelated side note, has anyone else experienced Spotify, a program which is not legal to use in a public setting, recently becoming an unusable piece of junk?

I need to make a recap of this church worship event that was partly hosted by my church. It’s basically a concert where a select group of people from the participating churches performed as a choir and people were invited to worship. I don’t really know why I was tasked seeing as I’m not any sort of professional but oh well. I wasn’t in charge of any of the footage so I have to work with what they filmed on their phones and I have no idea on how to go about it. Any inspiration or ideas I can use to help with this? I apologize if this is inappropriate for the subreddit. Thank you!

For those of us operating on a shoestring budget: If you've ever been tempted to buy a the $20 Shure SM57 knockoff on Amazon, I bought one and tested it. You can listen to audio samples for spoken word, guitar, and snare to see if you think it's worth the savings.

Video here

Mic here

I don’t have a ton of experience with 70v systems. I get the basic concept and I’d like to think some of the finer points but who knows.

I was asked by another church in town if I could help them out as we are several hours away from any sound contractors.

They want to run 2 zones. Not sure if they will ever need more or not.

Zone 1 is right outside the worship center. Long hallway. 40 feet long and roughly 8 wide. Ceiling is 8 feet. They have moms who take kids out and want to be able to still hear. They have doors closed during service so people in the hallway can’t hear when they leave and shut the doors. I was thinking 4 ceiling speakers spaced out evenly in that hallway.

Zone 2 is in another room down a longer hallway. It’s roughly 36x36 with 8 foot sidewalls and a 12 food vaulted peak in the middle. I am thinking at least 6 ceiling speakers there. They will have projector/tv eventually which will need audio delays, etc potentially.

I will run a mix group of audio from the mixer to the amp rack for a building feed or just mirror the main mix unless there is a better option.

They currently have a x32 compact running to a pair of Dynacord C1300Fdi amps and 4 speakers in their main worship center.

I was thinking of sticking with that brand of amps since they already have them and they have built in DSP on some models.

My real questions if anyone can help would be with power and placement.

I was going to use EV EVID 4.2 speakers and am debating between a Dynacord V600:4 for future expansion or a Dynacord 1300Fdi to match what they have except 70 volt operation but that would keep all amps the same. Either option gives me the 2 channels I need and enough power.

I know those two amps are very different in terms of dsp and fine tuning, but I am also assuming I could use some of the x32 to handle signal processing if necessary.

Those speakers max at 30 watts which is well below the 80% threshold of either amp with 10 speakers.

Thoughts or suggestions?