Worship presentation program

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A worship presentation program is a specialised presentation program designed for displaying images (primarily song lyrics) during some forms of Christian worship.

Churches adopting a contemporary worship style often projected song lyrics for congregational singing. Originally, overhead projectors were most frequently used, but video projectors became commonplace as they increased in performance and decreased in price.

A resulting need was for a software package to produce the images for display. Originally, general purpose presentation programs such as PowerPoint were used, but these were found to be of limited value, primarily because of the need to display lyrics of a selection from a large number of songs.

Worship presentation programs were developed by a number of vendors to solve this problem. A common feature is a database which stores the song lyrics and enables them to be easily retrieved and projected. Other features in current programs include the ability to display bible texts (often from a number of translations) and PowerPoint slides (often used for notices and sermon illustrations), as well as use graphics or video clips as a background. Another common feature is the ability to play DVDs or show live video from a camera.

Although these software packages are occasionally used by the person leading the service or speaking, churches generally have a computer operator to control what is projected.

There are many programs available both commercially and as shareware. The two most popular programs for Windows are EasyWorship and MediaShout. ProPresenter is the most popular Macintosh based program.