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In the past, many churches have relied on commercial programs such as PowerPoint for displaying song lyrics, announcements, and sermon illustrations. In the last few years however, things have begun to change dramatically. A variety of software products have now been developed specifically for church use. When it comes to worship, many of these programs capitalize on the weakpoints of PowerPoint. The church market is significant. Digital projector sales reports indicate that the church market is the fastest growing group for this type of equipment (see K'News August 30th).

As projector prices have dropped, church equipment sales have soared. With over 400,000 churches in the U.S. alone, this is not a trivial segment. A key part of the worship of most churches is their musical program. A typical church will involve their members in singing hundreds of songs per year. Many of the churches with digital projectors use them to display song lyrics on the screen for the whole group to follow.

Churches that use PowerPoint end up devoting lots of staff or volunteer time just in typing in the lyric text to songs and formatting them for slide shows. If the leaders want to change a song selection at the last minute then they may find it difficult to find and insert the new song, even if they had it previously converted into a slide. Most of the worship software products come preloaded with hundreds of songs. Not only are the songs already formatted but they are usually in a database that allows quick retrieval and display - even if the worship leaders want to change the song during the service. Many worship software packages are specifically set up for dual screen display. One screen goes to the digital projector and the control screen is only seen by the operator The operator can search out a song, set it up for display and make the change without the church members ever being distracted from the worship service.

Years ago, a church could buy a set of songbooks and expect to use them for years without a lot of changes. Today, members quickly learn of new songs through the religious music market. As music leaders incorporate these songs into their worship they find that their song books are quickly obsolete. Digital projectors allow worship leaders to bring the new songs to their churches without spending a lot of money on new songbooks. Such savings can help offset the cost of the video equipment To be fair, many churches handle new songs by choosing the less expensive route of using overhead projectors and transparencies. Although more expensive, worship software offers a variety of advantages over overhead projectors. An important feature of most of these software packages is the way that they handle the copyrights of the song lyric owners. Modern songs are most often copyrighted. Churches that want to use them are bound legally to pay the royalty fees. Many of the worship software packages are

set to automatically track and prepare records for meeting these obligations through organizations such as CCLI. PowerPoint has no feature to compare with this.

Worship software packages are usually set up to handle announcements, display scripture passages and illustrate sermons. Many come with sets of clipart specifically selected for church use. Some even come with their own Bible software modules that contain the entire Bible text for quick retrieval and insertion into slides. Despite this, in the case of making announcements and illustrating sermons, the extensive slide creation features of PowerPoint sometimes make it a better choice. Some worship software packages account for this by enabling a mode that allows users to incorporate PowerPoint prepared slides into the program without the audience knowing that a change in software has taken place.