Thoughts on Visuals

This isn't always something that the average church-goer would think about, but it is important as worship leaders and planners to be conscious of: how our lyrics look on screen.  If you go to a church that utilizes projected images, the way those images look is incredibly important.
I have had to go into different presentation softwares on a few different occasions to input lyrics to songs we were going to do in the upcoming service.  Each time I was very nit-picky about how words were placed onto each slide (for lack of a better, general term).  There is nothing more distracting than lyrics that cannot be read, lines that break funny, or poor backgrounds.  When lyrics are too small or are ridiculously large or there are just too many words on the slide, the average worshipper finds it hard to give everything to God as part of his or her mind becomes preoccupied with how those poorly formatted slides just get more and more annoying.

One thing to think about is punctuation.  For whatever reason, punctuation is usually omitted in lyric projections, and sometimes when we see punctuation (like a "?" or "!"...really anything that's not a comma) we get distracted.  At the very least, our eyes and thoughts are immediately drawn to it.  Though this can be distracting, it can also be used to draw emphasis to certain words, phrases, and/or ideas.  For example, if in Revelation Song you put "With all creation I sing, 'Praise to the King of Kings! You are my everything, and I will adore You!'", it can make people read the line differently and so give a freshness to the song.

One last thing: videos.  At my church our Associate Worship Director occasionally makes videos to "intro" the sermon for the service.  Usually it's just to introduce a new sermon series, but sometimes it finds its way before every sermon in the series.  This is not a bad thing, as it can help mentally prepare the congregation to receive the message and switch gears from worship to instruction.  However, one of the backtracks he used for a particular sermon series was David Crowder* Band's Phos Hilaron(Hail Gladdening Light).  Though this was an awesome tune for the actual video clip, it created an awkward feeling (for me at least) in the worship order when we would exit the stage having just finished a song like Aftermath (Hillsong United) or Awakening (Chris Tomlin).  Those that are familiar with the songs can probably understand what I mean by bad transition music.  The reason I bring up the instance is because it is also important to think about when videos are used, how often, and, if possible, what the audio is and how it will fall within a specific service.

These are all things to think about when planning a worship service, but, thankfully, not necessarily things that one has to think about for every service.