Karl Vaters says it’s time to put art, creativity, passion and beauty front-and-center in the church again:

I wish there were more artists in the church.

No, not painters and sculptors. Actually, yes, those too.

Mostly I wish there were more church leaders who saw the art in their ministry.

Church leaders who put the same kind of passion and creativity into their calling that artists put into their craft.

A Prophetic Imagination

Instead of learning from artists, most of our church leadership teaching in the last forty years has taken its cue from managers, CEOs and salespeople.

Not that we can’t learn a lot from them. I know I have. Good management is certainly a big part of biblical leadership and stewardship.

But we’ve been managing ourselves to death – or at least irrelevance – in much of the western church world.

We need artists to bring in some vital elements that the church hasn’t had enough of for a long time.

Passion.

Beauty.

Joy.

Anger.

Even a bit of holy fear.

The church needs to be filled and led by people with a prophetic imagination.

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Aaron Armstrong shares a friend’s cult-like church experience:

When I went off to college as a bright-eyed 18-year-old, I found a church to get involved with right away. The church had a college group that met in my dorm, and I loved it from the beginning. It was an incredibly friendly group and I forged deep relationships that are still some of my closest friendships 19 years later. We were deeply committed to giving our lives to Christ, and many of our unchurched friends from the dorm gave their lives to Christ as well. I myself was baptized that fall in a frigid alpine lake at the top of a mountain.

Unbeknownst to me or my friends, this church’s wider movement had been classified as a cult a handful of years before and was included in several publications about abusive churches for their manipulative, controlling tactics. The church movement knew about its weaknesses and was, and still is, trying with God’s help to overcome them. It is no longer considered a cult, but a subtle residual culture of spiritual manipulation and control persists. It is hard to change decades of culture.

The movement was rallied around a noble cause—spreading the gospel—but in order to most efficiently and effectively spread the gospel, a rigorous structure was in place to recruit, train and send out more people. To keep the mission of the people tight and focused, a strong emphasis was placed on following, imitating and obeying your leaders. Therefore, there was one tract for people to follow, and deviation from that accepted path was often perceived as a sign of spiritual immaturity or rebellion. This extended into many areas including the method for procuring a spouse (no dating), the method of child discipline (exclusive spanking), how you schooled your child (homeschool), and whether wives worked after having children (definitely not). And because of a hierarchical discipleship model, deviation from the normative beliefs always made it up the chain of command.

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Russ Hutto discusses selecting music and crafting worship set lists that are on mission:

Finding songs that allow us to express our love to God is fairly easy. With modern worship writers churning out hundreds if not thousands of songs per year to choose from, we’re in a wonderful era of access. You can find a song that supports any and every theological theme you need to reinforce from Sunday to Sunday. You can find a song that conveys the specific attribute of God’s character that you want to focus on.

That being said, finding songs that serve the congregation well is more about learning the heartbeat of your people. Do your people like wordy, traditional hymns? Do your people like simple, repetitive choruses? Does your faith family like high-energy, expressive praise? Does your congregation like orchestrated arrangements?

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Kenny Lamm addresses font sizes, font types, and line spacing:

Displaying song lyrics in worship with excellence is an often overlooked area of preparation, yet one that can really enhance our worship times. Conversely, poor slide production and operation of the lyric display can greatly hamper worship. (If your church does not use video in worship, start with a previous post, Got Video?)

In the next few weeks, we will look at various components of slide production and operation. These principles will be applicable whether you use PowerPoint or one of the worship presentation software packages such as EasyWorship, MediaShout, ProPresenter, Open LP or SongShow Plus.

This post will address the font size, font type, and line spacing.

Our goal is to make the slide clearly readable by every person from the front row to the back row. Here are some things to keep in mind:

Select a sans-serif font. (that’s a font without “feet”). Some examples are Arial, Calibri, and Verdana. These fonts are easier to read than the serif fonts like Times Roman. Please please please NEVER use Comic Sans!

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Jeff McIntosh introduces the top most used typefaces that churches are using:

You have many typefaces (fonts) to choose from when projecting lyrics during your church service, youth group or worship concert. I wanted to introduce you to the top most used typefaces that churches are using and give a brief description of their history and key properties. I hope this list will give you a better understanding of these typefaces and will help you make better typeface selections for worship lyric projection in the future. Each example uses the same font size of 27pt for simple visual comparison.

1. Helvetica and Arial

Helvetica is a widely used sans-serif typeface that was published in 1957. It was designed to be a neutral typeface with great clarity, no intrinsic meaning and could be used in a wide variety of signage. Over half a century later it is still a purposeful font that can be found in advertising, street signs and print.

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Chris Rouse explains how to spruce up your worship slides:

In my job I see a lot of lyrics slides at a lot of different churches. Some look amazing; some, well, some don’t. I’ve been guilty of making my share of poorly designed lyric slides in the past, but hopefully I’ve moved past that phase in my life.

Different backgrounds and fonts can breathe new life into how people experience the songs you’ve sung for weeks. Below are a few examples that are easy to read, but aren’t 75 point white Helvetica with a 3 point black outline and a drop shadow. When I started planning this post, I wasn’t expecting to end up with some many all-caps slides. But with the right font and design, all capital letters can work really well.

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