Music on the Screens in Worship

Projecting More than the Lyrics Alone

Morning chapel service during the 2023 Jubilate Deo Summer Music Camp. The hymn sheet music is projected on the screens for the congregation to sing along.

Many modern churches in America have screens being used in their worship service. They may have one or two televisions on the walls. They could have a projector or two projecting to screens on the walls. Either way, most of these screens used in worship will have varied informational use. They may have video magnification or announcements or sermon outlines. They may project a passage of scripture on the screen while it is being read. What is rare is for the hymn/psalm/worship song with its musical notation to be projected on the screen though. Yes, the words are put on the screen. But rarely will you find the sheet music accompanying the lyrics there. Instead, you are likely to see the lyrics unadorned, often without any punctuation or formatting, projected on the screen atop some plain or colorful background image or video. I like to joke, at least have the Disney bouncing ball along with the lyrics so you can at least see the speed of the lyrics if you are not going to have the sheet music up there.

An Opportunity Missed

But joking aside, The churches that project only the lyrics of their songs are missing out on an opportunity to help the music literacy of their congregations. Why not do a little more work and project the words and the music in sheet music notation for the congregation to see? If music is a language, and I believe that it is, seeing the notes and rhythms at the same time they are being sung has been a help to many folks in their learning to read music in church—just like being read to as little children helped them in their own path to literacy. Imagine your grandmother attending worship with a hymnal in her hand week in and week out. She may have never had a formal music lesson, but she was being trained in a basic introduction to reading music and singing. She would see an interval or a note on the page and hear it sung and played. Rinse, wash, and repeat over enough time, and you have some functional music literacy in churches.

Printed Music vs. Screens

The question could arise, why not just print the music and hand it out or sing from hymnals/songbooks? Well, that is a great option. There is something to be said of having a collection or corpus of songs in a bound book that you can touch and hold. In fact, I’m involved in a hymnal project at my church (Redeemer Hymnal) that is over halfway complete. I want to encourage more hymnals and think using them is preferable to not having them. But I am also open to having printed music and digital screens with that same music in the service. Think of the young mother and father who have their hands full with wiggly children that they have in the service with them. They can hold them on their hip and still sing along without having to juggle a hymnal or booklet of songs. Also, I’ve noticed folks holding a hymnal have a natural downward head posture when holding a booklet or hymnal to sing as they read from it. That is not the case when they are reading from a screen up high on a wall. Their heads are lifted and all in the same upward-facing direction while singing. Sure the singers with choir training will know that you don’t have to sing with sheet music and a lowered head posture. But the average Joe or Jane will never be as quick to have that posture.

So, I want a physical hymnal in the life of our church and in the pews, but I’m happy for the hymns to be up on the screens too. I want folks to remember the hymn number and what side of the book it is on—right or left. I also want them to use the hymnal outside of Sunday worship too. For these reasons, I’m happy for churches to have hymnals. But if you want to use screens, use the music. Keep the hymnals in the pews too. Some folks may be unable to read with the brightness of the projected sheet music. Their vision might be unable to focus on the lyrics as well as if they were printed in a hymnal in their hands. Let’s do both where feasible.

But How?

In 2018, my church bought a building with screens and projectors already installed, as pictured at the top of this post. We took scans and digital versions of our hymns and made a template that you see below in the example of “Praise to the Lord, the Almighty.” We sing ALL the stanzas of each hymn and not the first, second, and last that many churches do. Regardless, I built the slides for each song in Apple’s software “Keynote,” their version of Powerpoint. Then we export them as image files and drop them into another worship software called ProPresenter. That way, someone can see the image slides all in front of them and click through them and back through each stanza. We instruct the operator to stay about 2-3 syllables ahead while clicking through during the service.

Conclusion

So much of the musical immaturity in the Christian church is correlated to the lack of music literacy. How can people be expected to sing more glorious and complex forms of music and lyrics to worship the Triune God of the Bible when they can’t read or write music at a basic level? Why not help them in their music literacy at every feasible opportunity in the life and work of the church? You can’t merely theologize your way into music maturity. You have to roll your sleeves up at some point and train people to read and write music. Don’t throw your hymnals out. Use more hymnals and print more song booklets. But if you have screens in your service and only project lyrics, consider projecting the music notation as well. It’s far more doable than you think.