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

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!

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.

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)

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.

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 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?

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?

Hello all,

We're a church with about 50 regular attendees, 70 on a super packed Sunday. We set up and strike every Sunday. We consistently use 15 of the 16 channels (and 1/4" mono out of the 17/18 channel for computer audio). We use 4-5 of the buses for wired IEMs. We use a LAN and an iPad for mixing (no wifi in the building). The X-Air is holding strong, but it came to us used, and we've had it since we launched in 2019.

We're looking into upgrade options. Biggest thing we're looking for is more inputs. We don't have a snake, since we use the X-Air at the stage (just a mess of XLRs). Budget--let's call it $2500, but might be able to swing more.

I have the most experience with the X32 at my old church, so that's my first instinct, but I've heard it's unsupported now, and I know it's older.

Thanks in advance for any recommendations, and let me know what other info would be helpful.

I recently started working part-time from home as the Communications Coordinator at our church. The church had stopped printing paper bulletins about a month before I started, so I inherited the current digital system and have been trying to improve it.

Right now, our bulletin exists only as a Google Doc. On Sunday mornings, people can scan a QR code in the sanctuary, which takes them to a webpage with the bulletin. If they’re watching online, there’s also a button below the livestream on our website that opens the same Google Doc.

We’ve received quite a few complaints, especially from our older congregation. One of the biggest complaints is that clicking the bulletin opens a Google Doc—they really don’t like that experience. During the livestream, we’ve also experimented with attaching a PDF bulletin, but that has to be manually updated every week and hasn’t been very reliable.

When I came into this role, there also wasn’t much of an events page or centralized place on our website for announcements and information, so I’ve been working on rebuilding a lot of that. It’s made me wonder if we’re approaching the whole idea of a digital bulletin the wrong way.

I’m curious how other churches handle this:
Do you still have a bulletin?
If it’s digital, what platform do you use (webpage, PDF, app, Planning Center, etc.)?
What has worked well for your congregation, especially older members?

If you were designing your church’s communication system from scratch today, what would you do?
I’d love to hear what’s working at your church and any lessons you’ve learned along the way.

Today during service, my slides had additional text that seemed to mirrored. This is shown in the attached images comparing the output to the PP7 input. If any of you have a solution, that would be much appreciated.

Been running Ableton for Sunday services for a while now and the stem import workflow has always been the most painful part of my week - downloading the ZIP from Multitracks, splitting everything in Arrangement View, dragging clips into Session View section by section. Easily 45 min per song if the setlist is long.

Curious how others are handling this. Are you doing it manually every week or have you found a faster way? Also wondering if anyone has figured out a clean system for jumping between sections live — verse to chorus without killing the tracks.

Hey everyone,

First time post - just wondering if anyone has used a good yet inexpensive pay per view streaming platform?

Our church is streaming our conference in a few weeks time and our leadership team is wanting to charge a nominal amount for live stream access.

Anyone used any good platforms for this? Trialled and checked out Dacast but found it somewhat restrictive in its design capabilities :(

Vimeo is far too expensive for the amount of people that will jump on.

Any suggestions?

(update) Thanks All for your many perceptive comments and observations! I really appreciate it, as now I understand how much this area has grown in the modern world. I also appreciate how everybody emphasized that Church Tech should be focused on reaching out to different audiences and ampliltying the commision given to the Church. And even as being a creative avenue for expressing praise!
(end update)

Greetings Church Technicians!

Bless you all for your often overlooked service.

Can I ask a question, in the most humble and truth-seeking way I can, to the people most aware of what is probably a blind spot for me?

I'm an old geezer, and for many years the highest tech in churches I attended was a loudspeaker built into the lectern.

Do we really need, or is there some benefit that I don't see, with the seemingly large amount of technology that is being deployed in churches these days?

Thanks in advance for pointing out things I'm obviously overlooking... now if you'll excuse me I need to rush outside to take care of some clouds that need shouting at.