Throughout the history of the Christian Church there have been technological milestones which have had a dramatic impact on how we worship together as believers.

I'm not sure that even Guttenberg understood the significance his press with movable type would have on the lives of the faithful. Technology allowed for the mass production of the printed page and eventually resulted in individual believers having their own Bibles which they were able carry to church, allowing them to enter more fully into the worship experience.

The automobile not only changed the way we travel, it also had a dramatic impact on the way we worship. Our church home wouldn’t have to be dictated by its distance from our home, or whether or not it was close enough to walk to. People could now choose their church based on their personal preferences for preaching and worship style. If you didn't like the church next door you could drive another ten minutes and find a congregation you were comfortable with. The advent of personal transportation was the beginning of the consumer mentality within the church.

In the late seventies the churches on the cutting edge of technology discovered the overhead projector. No longer would Sunday worship be limited to the printed page. New songs were introduced, sung and retired at a pace undreamed of only ten years before.
Instead of having to print song sheets to introduce new music and trying to maintain "chorus" books typed, copied and stapled together by the church secretary, individual overheads could be prepared quickly and relatively inexpensively.

Individual churches had individual tastes and even churches within the same tradition weren't necessarily singing from the same page. Within ten years the overhead projector became a "must have" tool in evangelical churches.

During the late 80s and into the 90s some of the larger more progressive churches experimented with slide projectors, but soon discovered that slides were expensive to produce and awkward to maintain. Logistically it was still easier and cheaper to introduce new songs using the faithful overhead.

If we were to ask, "What technological advance in the last decade is going to have the greatest impact on the North American Sunday morning worship experience?" the responses would certainly include the almost universal use of personal computers as well as the Internet. And while those technologies have definitely changed how we do church work and prepare sermons, the technology that has done the most in changing the look of worship has to be the new affordable digital or video projectors.

Industry has known the potential of presentation software such as Microsoft PowerPoint and Lotus Presentation for years; however, it has only been recently that the equipment needed has been priced so the average church can justify the expense. Video projectors that could only be afforded by the largest churches have drastically declined in price during the last couple of years and are now within the reach of many midsize churches and even some smaller churches. Within ten years video projectors will be as commonplace in churches as overhead projectors are today.

Unfortunately, too many churches are using their presentation software and video as nothing more then glorified overheads... words for songs are projected on the screen during the song service and then the projector is shut off.

(Article © Denn Guptill / PowerPoint4Preaching.com, used with permission)