Angela Bainter

Everything You Could Need for Any Worship Service

Worship services are a backbone of the modern-day church. It is a time and place for the church and congregation to come together to learn and grow their faith. Visual elements are a great way to keep the engagement of current attendees, as well as retain new guests. The days of boring backgrounds are over! You now have the capability to choose the best media for Sunday’s topic and make yourself look like a media pro with a service full of cohesion.

Several years ago, we stopped making “backgrounds” for churches and started making Collections. In the early days of video projectors, our backgrounds were a hodgepodge of cool-looking nature shots and abstracts we made in Photoshop. Building a service for Sunday morning involved scrolling through endless pages of backgrounds on our site and others and picking out your favorites to mix and match on Sundays. We knew there was a better solution to save time and upgrade the service at the same time.

After seeing the results in our own churches (and lots of others), we decided there had to be a better way to do this. Instead of throwing up an assortment of unrelated backgrounds, it made much more sense to us to create sets of backgrounds—similar but varied—designed to be used in the same service to tell the same story.

That’s what a Collection is. It’s a way of keeping any service cohesive, intentional, and connected. We believe visual media should help make the entire service better. For us, that means the background on the opening song should be connected in some way to the background on the closing number—and the announcement slides, sermon notes, countdowns, and sermon bumpers should all look and feel connected, too. Every service is one story. Collections help you show that visually.

Since then, what is included in each collection on our site has grown as we have added elements to cover everything any church might want to do visually in a service. We have also added more and more ways for churches to customize our media into every Collection.

Bottom line: Every new Collection on Shift Worship provides everything you need for any one service.

1-Click Sync to Dropbox – Pro Feature
Don’t waste time downloading the media you might need for a service one-by-one. This button will send everything, all at once, to your connected Dropbox folder so it’s ready to go on your computer when you’re ready for it.

Motions/Stills
These are the foundation for any service. They work as backgrounds for the lyrics, yes, but they also include pre-made slides for Welcome, Exit, Communion, Offering, Prayer, and Upcoming Events. Majority of our collections also include Triple Wide versions for Environmental Projection.

Countdowns
Not every church uses these to start the service, but those who do will find one to match the rest of the set in each Collection. Countdowns serve as a great way to assist with time management. Staff, volunteers, teams, and the congregation have a visual of when service will begin-honing in their attention to the service. Use it with the music on the video or turn down the audio and use your own.

Editable Photoshop/After Effects Files – Pro Feature
For media folks comfortable with the software, these files allow them to quickly and easily customize the text in motions and still backgrounds.

Transparent Text Layers – Media/Pro Feature
This is kind of the reverse of the editable Photoshop and After Effects files. Instead of putting your text on our images, you can use that software to put our text and art elements on your images.

Quick Editor – Media/Pro Feature
Brand new! Now anyone can customize the text on motion and still backgrounds without Photoshop. It works right on our site inside the Collection-no extra software need. Make any and all edits needed, and then download straight to your computer or Dropbox account. So fast and easy, there’s no reason not to make every visual you use in a service fit the look of the Collection.

Licensing – Media/Pro Feature
Everything we make comes with permission to project onto screens during your church services, but it’s not legal to stream our content or put it on your web site without these licenses.

Editable Sermon Titles – Pro Feature
Need title screens for a sermon or sermon series? Our professional designers have already laid one out for you. You can use it as is, of course, but quickly make it your own in Quick Editor.

Editable Bulletins & Postcards – Pro Feature
Going all out for a special series? Don’t lose the look and feel with your bulletins and postcards. These files are big enough to customize and print (or send to the printer). Bulletins and postcards are another great engagement tool that your congregation can benefit from! Use these to help guests follow along with the sermon, or share special announcements.

Social Media (also Editable!) – Media/Pro Feature
Feed your feeds the same look and feel your people will find on Sunday morning. We’ve added ready-to-send text to these so you can use them any time or edit the text in Photoshop to fit your series or special announcements.

Mini Movies/Sermon Bumpers
Many Collections include a very short video to kick off worship, illustrate a sermon topic, or recognize a holiday. This is a great way to inspire and reiterate important faith-based messages.