r/churchtech

Any recommendations for an affordable room mic? Hoping to add congregational singing and ambient sound to the livestream mix. Thanks!

What systems do you use in your church for members votes?
Specifically would like a product that allows voting by phone, and allows the ability to prevent nonmembers from casting votes.

Hey everybody! I recently bought a used Behringer X32 from Facebook Marketplace and was unpleasantly surprised to see there aren't many videos showing how to fix these things when they break, so I recorded some tutorial videos as I was fixing this one.

The repairs are relatively easy to do, the only potentially challenging part is that some of them require soldering. If you have an X32 that has any issues, there are step-by-step instructions in the videos in this playlist. The repair tutorials there are for:

Fixing Slow or Dead X32 Faders
This is the most common one I see. This repair also requires soldering, unless you're lucky and it just needs a new rubber belt for the fader. This repair requires soldering.

Fixing a Broken X32 XLR Input Jack
Sometimes XLR cables get stuck and the input jack gets broken trying to get it out of there. This repair also requires soldering.

Fixing the Rotary Encoder Knobs Under the X32 Screen
On older X32's, these knobs get oil, dust, and gunk in the switches and the knobs don't respond very well when you try to use them. They're typically jumpy or they scroll back and forward when you're only scrolling one way. No soldering required for this repair.

Replacing an X32 Scribble Strip LCD
Sometimes the scribble strips go blank, have blurry text, or just die. This one is an easy replacement, no soldering required.

I hope these videos help some of you out there with X32's that need repairs. Don't listen to people who say they're trash or that they're not worth fixing. Anyone that tells you that is spending someone else's money on gear.

Looking for opinions based on experience using Ubiquiti in churches. Anyone used them for vlan, video, guest, and internal use? What do you think?

“They do this *every year*” — Sid the Slot, Iceage

Hello, I'm a volunteer in my church and we do live streaming every week. We've had an issue where during our praise and worship section our camera tends to shake quite a bit. Especially when the lows hit. I've been trying to find a solution for it for a while but haven't seen much. Our camera is on a tripod which sits on a wooden box we made (has carpet flooring on the box and on the floor). Any suggestions would be appreciated.

Edit: Just some extra info. The camera is a Canon XA60. Tripod is a NEEWER 79"/200cm.

Church communicators, is anyone else feeling overwhelmed by how much goes into managing church social media?

Sermon clips, captions, graphics, scheduling, engagement, and somehow trying to stay consistent every week can feel like a lot.

How are you keeping up with it all?

Hey everyone ! Hope y'all going well

Curious what people here run for video/audio playback when it actually matters : no room for error.

We've gone through a few options over the years. Always the same story : either Mac-only, subscription, or just unreliable at the wrong moment.

What's your setup ? What made you stick with it ? And what do you wish it did better ?

I ended up building my own tool out of frustration and using it in my county across multiples churches and others specific use cases. Happy to share if anyone's curious, but mainly just want to know what's working for people out there.

I work at a very low-tech church with three bulletin boards in our parish hall.

The first two I’ve actually gotten pretty comfortable with: one covers information, the ministry schedule, and outreach opportunities I’ve recently started adding; the other has parishioner pictures and a couple of monthly calendars for upcoming events. Those feel useful and manageable.

The third one, though… is my nemesis. The Reverend has specific decorative visions for it. Think Sunday school or elementary school style, except we don’t actually have Sunday school or young children. Trying to bring someone else’s vision to life is tough, incredibly time-consuming, and no matter what I do it ends up looking cluttered.

So I’m curious: does your church still use physical bulletin boards? Or have you moved to screens with slideshows? Would love to hear what’s working (or not working) for other low-tech congregations.

ETA: Just to clarify, I am absolutely wanting to keep my two functional bulletin boards! My question is more specifically about the third decorative board, which is made up of cut out paper pieces that I cut and staple, themed around a Bible study or season of the church we are in year etc. Does your church still do something like this, or have you found a better alternative?

Background: I have been running the soundbooth for years at my church and while I have an technology related background, I have kept my head out of the IT space simply because I was hoping another member who specifically does IT work might fill the gap. It's become clear that isn't going to happen, so I'm picking up the bag and running with it. What I have found is a mixture of licensing tied to emails through GoDaddy (interesting place for a church to do business) and some purchased via other means.

Problem: I would like to be able to provide church domain email addresses at no/low cost for specific accounts that do not need o365, but GoDaddy doesn't offer that. I would also like to provide o365 or full office suites to those who need it, or specific computers which might have multiple users.

Our domain and email setup is through GoDaddy, website hosted by another entity (not sure who yet), and Livestream service by another entity as a tie-in to our website. We are currently paying around $550 per year for 6 users to have a church email and office access, and we have additional users who should have a church email but have not been set up with one due to cost.

What is the best way to manage this moving forward?

Sometimes out PP volunteers forget to change the stage monitor layout for the sermon.
So I used an iOS shortcut and an automation so when the Focus Mode on the pastors iPad is set to „On Stage“ the layout will change for him.

The way it works is this:
First you need a shortcut with the following action:
Get Contents of URL

As the URL you need to put in the following:

http://[IP-Adress]:[Port]/v1/stage/screen/[Screen-ID]/layout/[Layout-ID]

In my case it’s: http://192.168.178.242:50569/v1/stage/screen/0/layout/1

Then save.
Now you have to set up an automation in the shortcut app.

It’s basically: when a certain focus mode is activated execute the shortcut you just created.

And now, whenever the pastor wants to change the stage display layout he can. Just swipe down on the iPad. Change the Focus mode. And the layout changes. So he doesn’t have to request changing his view.

Thought that might help.

Oh!
The pastors iPad has to be on the same network as the PP Machine.

Our church hosted a denomination meeting a while back. We have a “traditional” worship space that doesn’t have a permanent screen.

In addition to a worship service, there was also a business meeting with slides. We setup our (somewhat) portable screen. It was while testing the setup that I learned that our church’s projector was not only not very bright but was also SVGA and the slide deck for the business meeting where 16:9.

I brought my projector from home. Not much brighter than the one at the church, but 1080p. The pastor didn’t understand why I brought mine in because the church has a projector and as far as she’s concerned, a projector is a projector. She told me she couldn’t see the different in the images.

I’m not sure what to do with this as I would think most people with eyes can see the difference between 800x600 and 1920 x 1080, not to mention how putting a 16:9 image through a 4:3 projector looks.

We’re talking about potentially adding a permanent screen of some kind (it will likely be a TV instead of a projector), but how do I make sure we get the right thing when people can’t SEE the difference in the options. The church bought the projector during COVID, so there were better options available then that would have still been affordable. This was purchased because someone chose it (I wasn’t here then).

Thoughts?

Our church is growing (praise the Lord). We went up to 3 services in 2023, and we're going to bump it up to 4 services every Sunday morning at the end of the summer. We've got a building project for a larger campus in the works, but it'll probably be a year or two before that's complete.

We currently require the tech team from 7:15AM-12:00PM, but that'll be moving to 6:45AM-12:30PM. I know it's not that much more, but it's another full service, and we're cutting the 'between-service-time' from 15 minutes to 10 minutes.

How do I thank my tech team (and keep them sane) for doing 4 straight services on Sunday morning?

My local church currently uses spreadsheets for rotas and I want to move everyone off to using AltarDesk so they can also set up their unavailability so rota management is easier to do.

How do you ensure people buy into using a portal for rotas instead of spreadsheets.

I'm thinking of revoking access to the sheets and forcing them to create an account on AltarDesk.

Any other ideas?

Hi everyone. My question might have been asked multiple times already. I just don't know the keywords to type 🙁

Our church sanctuary has a balcony and our in-house electrician installed 2 televisions so the congregants upstairs can see the lyrics and the pastor clearly. What kind of system can we use so we can feed the televisions upstairs the video that we also flash from the camera and computer? Can we also use that system or equipment for livestream? Thank you for your time and patience.

Edit: We are using a videocamera plugged into a computer via Elgato camlink (HDMI). Someone has mentioned the HDMI splitter extender. I think that's what we need. Thank you all.

If you have an older Behringer X32 and the rotary encoder knobs under the LCD screen are jumpy, unresponsive, or just don't work, I made a video tutorial showing the process to fix them so they work good as new. It's a relatively easy fix, there's no soldering required; just some DeOxit Fader F5 spray and a screwdriver.

I bought this X32 used off FB Marketplace and it needed some TLC. I was surprised to find that there aren't many repair videos out there for this console, which seems odd based on how many of these are out there.

Today we were in service and I went to make a small adjustment to the pulpit mic (senior day discussions). At that moment my son spun his seat in a circle and hit my elbow with the back of his chair (something I have told him not to do many times), which immediately added 15db to the mic. I got it corrected, and when half the congregation turned around to take a look I just pushed my son up against the desk so they could all see him too. He was terrified of all the immediate attention and is now backed away from the desk and not moving his chair an inch. Sometimes they just have to learn the "why" the hard way instead of trusting the source. I hope this lesson sticks.