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Digital Storytelling: Use multimedia in worship to enhance, not replace
Like everyone else walking into the sanctuary, Tracy Radosevicreceived a bluebook and pencil. There was a desk on the platform. The screen upfront showed students, desks, bluebooks, pencils, and a blackboard—as viewed from the back of the classroom. The only words on the screen were TEST TIME.
For the call to worship, a live band sang, “Don’t know much about history, don’t know much biology…” After that, a worship leader welcomed people to a service about being tested.
The order of worship and the sermon itself were fairly traditional. Yet the digital elements of that service about Jesus being tested in the wilderness were so powerful that, a few years later, Tracy Radosevic still remembers the experience.
She and Tim Coombs, who like Radosevic, is a seasoned biblical storyteller, give three keys for telling Bible stories effectively in a digital age. The secret is to plan well-grounded worship that uses visual metaphors to enhance how worshipers experience Scripture. You can apply this secret even if your church is a total beginner at digital storytelling.
Where is it grounded?
Radosevic was at that service because she’d been asked to tell the sermon text. She already knew the power of internalizing and telling Scripture. More than silently reading printed words or hearing them read aloud, biblical storytelling helps worshipers experience God’s actions as real-time events.
But before Radosevic told about the devil goading a hungry Jesus to turn stones into bread, the congregation saw a short clip from the sci-fi comedy Men in Black. It was the scene where actor Will Smith has to take a recruitment exam. He has only a chair, no desk, so must use his leg as a writing surface. His paper rips and his pencil breaks.
After the movie clip, there was a short skit. “A guy walked in wearing a letter jacket and backpack. He sat at the desk. He’d prerecorded a verbal monologue that we listened to, as if we could hear his thoughts. ‘A train leaves Chicago at 1:20 p.m. traveling west at 65 miles per hour. Meanwhile, another train leaves San Francisco…’
“The whole point was to elicit feelings of anxiety before hearing the story told of Jesus in the wilderness. Churches can create a digital experience that’s exciting or flashy—but is it grounded in the Bible and authentic theology?” Radosevic says.
What does the visual metaphor do?
The classroom image stayed on screen while the minister preached. Near the end of his sermon, he asked people to open their bluebooks and journal about three questions:
- How are you being tested?
- How’s that going?
- What do you specifically need to ask God’s help for?
“We were asked to come up for communion and lay our bluebooks on the altar. It was immensely powerful,” Radosevic recalls.
You might wonder why worship planners didn’t simply projectclassic art about the Temptations of Jesus or aerial photos of Old Jerusalem.
“Digital storytelling works best when it incorporates metaphors or offers complementary sounds and imagery to a story. There are aspects of stories we don’t get because of our distance from biblical events. A visual metaphor works like a bridge from our world to the biblical world and culture,” says Tim Coombs, who co-pastors Trinity Presbyterian Church in Scotia, New York.
He describes himself as a cultural missionary. He’s found worshipers absorb more when he tells Scripture rather than reads it aloud. He adds digital media—whether PowerPoint graphics, a still image, a film clip, or soundtrack—when it will “lift people out of their ordinary experience into the reality of the story. When the story ends, they come back, but they are a little changed.
“I start with the story and what the Holy Spirit is attempting to say to me or us through it today. Once I identify that theme or message, I ask how I can communicate it digitally so it will be faithfully rendered and received well,” Coombs explains.
After asking himself what in today’s world might connect worshipers with Isaiah 43, where God promises to do a new thing through Christ, Coombs made a video of his son walking on stones across a stream.
“Just about everyone has tried to work their way across a stream on stones. They have trouble, lose their balance, and have to pick a new way,” he says. He showed the video while telling the passage.
How does it enhance worship?
In the three or four years since Radosevic told the story of Jesus being tested, everyday experiences—flipping through radio or TV channels, shopping in a campus store—have triggered visual and musical memories embedded in that service. “I’ve been immediately transported to a moment in that service. Basically, I’ve ‘reworshipped’ it at least six times,” she says.
Radosevic and Coombs advise looking on digital technologies as a way to enhance, not replace. That’s why it’s vital to ground digital storytelling in the Bible and theology.
It also helps to retain orders of worship that mean a lot to your congregation. From there you can add layers of visuals, sounds, and experiences that help worshipers more fully and consciously understand and act on God’s Word.
“We don’t monkey with the order of worship. Still, we try to do each part so it communicates to the dominant culture. The prayer of confession will always be in the same place in worship, but one week the call to confession might be a video montage that pictures why we need to come to God and confess our sins. Another week the screen might show words and images of a responsive litany,” Coombs says.
Radosevic adds that effective storytelling in a digital age “doesn’t have to be high tech. It’s more important to keep it experiential and relational.
“My first art form is telling a well-embodied story. There’s me, the audience, and the story. Before I tell it, I’ve done my background research. I’ve practiced and prepared. So when I tell a story, I’m creating a visual image for worshipers.
“If I add a literal visual image—projected on a screen or art on an easel or pointing out a stained glass window—it adds another layer. How can that not be more powerful in enhancing the overall experience?” she asks.
Eileen D. Crowley on Planning Worship as a Moving Word
Picture an evening prayer service during autumn midterms on a college campus. You arrive worrying about how to finish your papers and keep your scholarship.
You hear the roar of harvesting machines. You smell hay bales before you sit on them. In the dark room, lit by candles flickering in canning jars, you see on one wall a projected image of crumpled paper.
As you sing, pray, read, and recite text and melody lines projected on another wall, you think about how hard it is to harvest—whether that means bringing in the corn before rain descends or synthesizing ideas, research, and quotes into a logical whole.
The closing prayer sticks in your head as you return to the library: “You are in our midst, O Lord, and you have named us yours; do not forsake us, O Lord our God” (Jeremiah 14:9).
Eileen D. Crowley describes this service in her slim yet substantial book A Moving Word: Media Art in Worship. In it and her book Liturgical Art for a Media Culture, Crowley explains that the best way to use media art and technology in worship is to start with the liturgy. She teaches worship at Catholic Theological Union in Chicago.
Start with the liturgy
For people who get geeked about decibels, pixels, IMAG (image magnification), animations, and the like, this is an exciting time to use the church credit card.
Contrary to what church technology magazines or websites may suggest, however, Crowley says the wrong place to start is “with the right equipment.” Starting with technology has two problems.
First, congregational discussions about media arts in worship go awry, with one side championing new technology (“We need to keep our kids and attract seekers!”) and another arguing for tradition (“I don’t come to church to be entertained by a screen!”).
Objecting to what’s new overlooks the fact that “Christians have always used aural and visual media of their day to glorify God in worship and uplift worshipers,” Crowley explains in Liturgical Art for a Media Culture. That’s how certain ways of lighting, dress, movement, gestures, posture, tastes, fragrances, and ritual speech entered Christian worship.
Second, falling in love with technology tempts people to amass their favorite products and clips and shoehorn them into worship, whether or not the media art fits.
“Since liturgy is the work of the people giving praise and thanks to God, people should be the starting point, not technology,” she writes.
Crowley’s books and presentations show how to develop a liturgical media ministry that “begins with liturgy, includes all the faithful in the creative process, and encourages the creation of locally produced liturgical media.” She calls this model “Communal Co-Creation.”
Consider the people
Since liturgy is the work of the people, effective digital storytellers begin by asking who will be at worship and how the liturgy will flow. They mark points in worship where worshipers will be “externally active in speaking, singing, or moving… [or] internally active in listening, reflecting, or contemplating.”
Churches most often use media technology to project songs, text, orders of worship, or images that march in lockstep with the words. These informative uses help people who can’t hold heavy books or read small fonts. Screens can be a real boon in bilingual congregations.
The Deaf Fellowship at Frederick Church of the Brethren in Frederick, Maryland, uses drama, multimedia technology, American Sign Language, and voice interpretation so deaf and hearing people can worship together.
As valuable as it is to inform and educate worshipers, Crowley inspires congregations to create media art that helps worshipers meditate or experience beauty. She says that when media functions as art, it reveals new things to worshipers and becomes “a moving word.”
This revelatory use, she explains in A Moving Word: Media Art in Worship, is a mix of images and sounds that “whizzes by our consciousness on a video monitor but that leaves a permanent impression in our memory.” These revelations give us “sights and sounds from worlds to which we may never travel bodily.”
Considering the people who will participate in a certain liturgy helps planners choose sounds and images. Crowley notes that people who come to a healing service are looking for peace and assurance that God and others care for them. So it’s more pastoral to use low-key biblical images instead of dramatic, intense, flashy scenes that seem to promise instant cures.
The key to evaluating whether you chose helpful sights and sounds, simple as they may be, is to discover whether your choices helped people contemplate God’s grace in a way they would not have done with words or music alone.
Make connections
The art of using media technology in worship depends in part on making connections. “No liturgy has to have media technology or media art incorporated into it. It is an option to be chosen with great care and to be executed with ongoing discernment, prayer, and attention,” Crowley says.
This includes steering clear of using images in a way that leads worshipers to unfortunate connections. For example, when churches use image magnification (IMAG) to project larger-than-life images of preachers and musicians, it works against the idea of liturgy as the work of the people. Instead those projected seem like stars and worshipers feel like spectators.
Prince of Peace Lutheran Church in Burnsville, Minnesota, uses IMAG in their large sanctuary to help everyone see and hear important moments—children sitting on the floor for the children’s sermon, the face of someone being baptized, oil glistening on hands and foreheads while everyone sings “There Is a Balm in Gilead” during a healing service.
Kent V. Wilson, senior pastor at Zion Lutheran Church in Lima, Ohio, told Crowley how his congregations have used media art to make two-way connections between worshipers and people not able to physically attend worship. Possibilities include getting permission to visit and record homebound parishioners as they:
- Explain what favorite Bible passages or songs mean to them.
- Recall experiences of baptism, communion, or Easter memories.
- Say what or for whom they pray and how they’d like the church to pray for them.
- Read aloud an upcoming lectionary text.
These still photographs, audio or video clips can be woven into Scripture reading, congregational prayers, or church announcements.
Getting Started with Liturgical Media Arts
Whether you think of it as digital storytelling or liturgical media arts, your congregation probably has—or has thought about buying—multimedia equipment to use in worship.
And it’s possible your discussions about new purchases or feedback on new technology in worship have already drawn some fire.
Here’s a starting point for introducing liturgical media arts in your church, along with tips from three experts who each have real life experience in combining digital images and sounds in worship.
Begin by seeing yourselves as co-creators with God the Creator, suggests Eileen D. Crowley, who teaches worship at Catholic Theological Union in Chicago.
“Media art that we see on a video monitor or media screen can move us to action, bring us new insight, break through our prejudices, call us to love one another. It can do this, but we must be receptive.
“When we open ourselves to God, the Holy Spirit breathes new life into us. In such Spirit-filled encounters with media, we can be inspired to be the hands and feet of Christ in the world,” Crowley writes in her slim yet substantial book A Moving Word: Media Art in Worship.
Get the pastor onboard
Tracy Radosevic is a biblical storyteller, educator, and retreat leader who included a special emphasis on digital storytelling in her doctor of ministry degree.
“Churches need support in getting started with digital storytelling. It helps if it’s from the top down. I can’t emphasize enough how important it is to have the pastor on board.
“The old days of a senior pastor in charge of everything doesn’t work as well. You need a ministry team. Often a great number of youth do know how to do this stuff. What a great way to keep them involved, do intergenerational ministry, and utilize the gifts of the many!” Radosevic says.
Tim Coombs co-pastors Trinity Presbyterian Church in Scotia, New York, and is the digital culture ministry specialist for Albany Presbytery. He’s earning his doctor of ministry degree in biblical storytelling in digital culture.
So that church leaders don’t get hung up on the suitability of certain technologies in worship, Coombs often speaks about how images can act more powerfully in worship than words can.
“I begin by naming non-digital experiences, like the act of baptism and the breaking of the bread during communion. Some of the most profound experiences in worship have been wordless.
“Recently, I experienced a new form of praying called ‘enacted prayer,’ where a group of people through mimed actions set to music embodies the intent of a named prayer concern. I confess that I was initially skeptical when the process was first explained, but after having witnessed it performed, I admit to being moved to tears,” he says.
Coombs finds that an experience of only a few minutes can demonstrate multimedia’s power for good. For example, he pairs a Luke 1:26-38 reading (or telling) of the Angel Gabriel visiting Mary with the brief sonogram video clip “Let It Be,” produced by Lumicon.
Sometimes he plays two brief videos (1 and 2) to show how digital storytelling speaks to people of different generations in his church.
Coombs also explains what digital storytelling has in common with other worship arts.
“Digital storytelling, as I understand it, involves the telling of a sacred or biblical story through the use of digital presentation technology, such as projector and screen or audio backdrops, or in support of a ‘live’ telling or liturgical drama.
“In this way, digital storytelling, biblical storytelling, and liturgical dramas all have the same end—to get the words off the printed page and give them life and breath so that people can experience them as real-time events. Digital storytelling places greater emphasis on visual and sound possibilities offered through technology,” he says.
Start with simple equipment
If all you plan to do is project words, you don’t need to spend a lot. Radosevic says, “My friends Len Wilson and Jason Mooresay in their book Digital Storytellers: The Art of Communicating the Gospel in Worship that using a screen just to project words is like taking a jumbo jet to the grocery store.”
Crowley says that if you don’t have a screen, it’s easiest to project images on walls in a darkened space. That’s why evening services are good times to experiment with projection. You can also project on to scrim (lightweight fabric used as theater scenery). You can get by with an inexpensive projector or even an overhead projector.
Coombs recommends a specific order for prioritizing multimedia purchases. First, he says churches should improve their sound system. “Bad sound can kill even the best visual experience,” he says.
Next, when you’re ready to use a screen in worship, he advises buying “a modest set-up of a laptop computer, a 2,000-lumen projector, and a screen big enough so that the person in the last pew doesn’t have to work to see the visuals clearly.”
Learn as you go
After you’ve got your hardware, Coombs suggests mastering one piece of software before you buy another.
“Build your presentations slowly. The first few times may seem like more work than it’s worth, but with experience, your preparation time will decrease markedly. If you’re using PowerPoint to start, then try to learn at least one new feature each time you use it.
“Do only as much as you’re capable of doing. Don’t worry about making it a profound visual experience every time. At first, maybe you’ll just put up a few images. Next you might learn how to keep a slice of the main visual metaphor on screen while you project lyrics or Scripture.
“The learning curve may seem steep at first, but once a certain competency is reached, you’ll feel like a pro in no time,” he promises.
Though you can buy a multitude of worship graphics, video clips, and more, Coombs reminds worship leaders to start with the Bible story, let the Spirit speak, and then start brainstorming about how to produce or find visual resources.
Or, as Crowley explains in her books A Moving Word: Media Art in Worship and Liturgical Art for a Media Culture, keep your focus on the liturgy and the people involved in it.
That focus will keep you from being overwhelmed by all you could buy or do or produce. In fact, if your congregation is very traditional and highly liturgical, Coombs notes that “cutting edge soundtrack and video probably isn’t going to work well. A little sanctified common sense goes a long way when it comes to building acceptance for digital technology.’
Value visuals
Starting small and learning as you go will help you do a good job of introducing liturgical media arts. Better that than over-reaching during your first attempts.
Radosevic notes that congregations are often most receptive to multimedia experiments when they’re offered on “special Sundays,” such as a youth service, fifth Sunday, or a service led by a guest pastor.
“If your sermon uses digital media, then do it right. Put money in the budget to hire someone who knows how to do it or else send people to continuing education events so they get trained,” Radosevic says.
Besides paying for training, valuing visuals means choosing images with the most potential to help worshipers meditate or see God or faith in a new way.
That’s why Crowley cautions against being too literal in matching images and words. For a reading of the creation story (Genesis 1:1-2:4a), your first impulse might be to find stock photos or film footage of sunrises (“Let there be light”), flowers and fruits (“Let the land produce vegetation”), birds (“Let birds fly”), and so on. Crowley says this would simply be a visual cliché.
She says the power of media art comes from juxtaposition, because the way you set images, words, or sounds against another changes what they mean. Crowley says, “We can produce media art that invites people in, because they need to interpret it. They need to wrestle with this art. In their effort they may find new meaning emerges.”
So with the creation story, you might choose “stunning video footage or a single image of star fields or galaxies might be played throughout the passage. Gazing at the heavens typically moves us to awe and wonder. This kind of attitude is apropos when listening to the creation story.”
Engage more people
Digital storytelling engages people in two ways. It involves more people in planning worship and it helps worshipers worship more deeply.
“If liturgy is the work of the people, this has made our worship at Trinity more liturgical,” Coombs says. “Worship planning used to be me, the organist, and choir director. I’d sit at my desk, grab prayers for resource books, open hymnals, and write my sermon.
“Now that the screen is a presence in our worship, easily twice as many people are involved. People sit at the computer, run the sound system, brainstorm visual metaphors, produce or act in videos. The people who are predominately visual learners are very happy,” he says.
During his doctoral research, Coombs found that his congregation reported being even more engaged while listening to biblical storytelling than when singing a hymn.
In Liturgical Art for a Media Culture, Crowley explains how simply producing art that might be used in worship engages people more deeply in actual worship.
She tells about 73 seventh graders at St. Bede the Venerable Church in Chicago who each made a PowerPoint meditation for possible use in an International Day of Families liturgy. Every student had to reflect on the liturgy’s theme, Scripture, and music as well as learn basic production skills. Many asked family members to help them.
Though the art of only two students was used in the service, the class viewed every student’s work. And when the religious education director invited students to help plan the next year’s liturgy, about half the class volunteered.
Learn More
Listen to brief audio excerpts from these fall 2007 interviews:
- Tim Coombs on using the screen for World Communion Sunday(9:17)
- Tim Coombs on worship in digital culture (5:54)
- Tracy Radosevic on adding multisensory elements to biblical storytelling (3:59)
Book Tracy Radosevic for a retreat, storytelling workshop, worship service, or performance. Attend her seminar at the 2008 Academy for Biblical Storytelling, sponsored by Network of Biblical Storytellers (NOBS).
Book Tim Coombs to offer a workshop or media-rich worship and post-worship discussion. View video clips he’s made on digital culture and children or older adults. Read why he decided to go digital in worship.
Radosevic and Coombs credit Tom Boomershine for their ideas on effective storytelling in a digital age. Boomershine concisely describes links between oral and digital culture. Because he’d like for every congregation to have a cadre of people internalizing and telling Scripture, Boomershine offers, for free, online access to his book Story Journey: An Invitation to the Gospel as Storytelling andinstruction on how to learn and tell Bible stories.
For excellent scholarly thought on hermeneutics, interpretation, methods, and more of biblical storytelling, check out NOBS Seminar archives. Read Eileen D. Crowley’s paper on media art in worship.
Gather a group to learn how to effectively tell biblical stories in a digital culture. These books will help you learn:
- Design Matters: Creating Powerful Imagery for Worship by Jason Moore and Len Wilson
- Digital Storytellers: The Art of Communicating the Gospel in Worship by Len Wilson and Jason Moore
- For the Sake of the Gospel: A Media Ministry Primer by Kent V. Wilson
- High-Tech Worship? Using Presentation Technologies Wisely by Quentin Schultze
- Liturgical Art for a Media Culture by Eileen D. Crowley
- A Moving Word: Media Art in Worship by Eileen D. Crowley
Get step-by-step training from Midnight Oil Productions, which also offers seminars, free resources, and metaphor-based visuals. Other sources for multimedia ideas, video backdrops, video “raw material,” or training include Digital Juice, Faith Visuals, General Board of Discipleship (United Methodist Church), Highway Video, Lumicon, TextWeek, and Worship Films.
Browse related stories about biblical storytelling, lectionary dramas, technology in worship, andworship aesthetics.
Start a Discussion
Talk about creating multimedia that serves the liturgy:
- How does media technology in your church make worship more hospitable for everyone—including people who have trouble seeing, hearing, or moving?
- In what ways does your church use wordless resources or digital media to enhance worship? What would you like to add or change to help worshipers participate more fully in worship or meditate more deeply?
- What do you think of the idea that visual metaphor works better in worship than images that more closely match the words?
- How might you build community in your church by using media technology in new ways?
Share Your Wisdom
What is the best way you’ve found to enhance worship through liturgical media arts?
- Did you visit new museums to get ideas for effective media use that might work well in your congregation’s worship? If so, please let us know what you observed at which museum and how you applied those best practices to your church.
- At end of her book A Moving Word, Eileen D. Crowley challenges readers to fill a gap she sees in media for worship—parabolic media art. She asks, “How might you contribute to the evolution of liturgical media art that can be tomorrow’s liturgical media parable?” She’s looking for art that, like Jesus’ parables, “leaves us with questions that continue to haunt us long after the story has ended…take unexpected turns…feature unlikely protagonists…turn upside down the usual way of seeing a situation.”
- Did you talk with parish nurses, social workers, and members with illnesses about images, psalms, songs, or stories that give them hope—and might be good to use in a healing service?
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