If a trained person sits at a computer for every screen, your worship software can run them all. If the screens are in rooms where nobody sits at a computer, like the lobby and the kids’ rooms, screens that run on their own usually fit better. Most churches end up with both: worship software in the sanctuary, and something simpler everywhere else. Here’s how to decide for your building.

What worship software is good at

Worship presentation software is built for one job, and it does that job well: running the screens in the sanctuary, live, in step with the service.

Someone sits at the computer and moves it along with the band and the speaker. Song words change on the beat. A verse goes up when the pastor reads it. If the plan changes in the middle of a service, the person at the computer changes with it.

That job needs a computer, an operator who knows the software, and a plan for every service. Keep it. Nothing in this post is a reason to change how your sanctuary runs.

How churches stretch it to other rooms

The question comes up when you add screens outside the sanctuary. There are a few common ways to use worship software for them:

  • A second output from the sanctuary computer, with a long cable to the lobby. The lobby shows what the computer sends it.
  • A computer in each room, running the same software, with its own slides.
  • The sanctuary’s picture, sent to the lobby, so people outside can follow along.

Each of these works, and many churches use them. Each also has a cost that’s easy to miss: a computer to keep running, a cable to keep connected, or a person to sit with it.

The question that decides it: who is in the room?

Picture each room on a Sunday morning and ask who is there to run the screen.

  • The sanctuary: a trained operator at a desk. Worship software is the right tool.
  • A kids’ room: a leader with twenty children, a story to tell and no free hands. They need the screen to show the right thing, and a remote to move it on.
  • The lobby: nobody. The screen has to run by itself, all morning, and still be right.
The Elementary TV’s own page in Displayte: online, playing lost-sheep from Sunday in Kids, with its name and its sound.

Then ask who changes each screen during the week, and who fixes it when it’s wrong on Sunday. If the answer for every room is “the person at the sanctuary computer,” one tool may be enough. If it’s “whoever leads that room this week,” the rooms need something that person can use alone.

When worship software in other rooms makes sense

Be honest about what you want from each screen.

If you want the lobby to show the service as it happens, so latecomers and parents with babies can follow along, that’s a live feed from the sanctuary. Worship software and your video system are the right tools for it. Separate screens that show prepared pictures won’t do that, and Displayte doesn’t show live video.

If you have one extra room and a volunteer who’s comfortable running a laptop in it every week, that can work well too.

When separate screens make sense

Separate screens fit when:

  • each room shows its own thing: the nursery’s welcome, the elementary room’s story, the café menu,
  • the people who change them are volunteers, not operators,
  • nobody sits with the screen during the service,
  • the screens should keep playing if the Wi-Fi drops,
  • and you want to see every room from one page.
Displayte’s Displays page with six TVs, each showing its own room: the nursery welcome, the memory verse in preschool, the lost-sheep story in elementary, Kids check-in is open on the Check-in TV, Welcome home on the Lobby TV, and the café menu offline.

That’s the job Displayte is built for. Each TV has an Apple TV behind it, not a computer. A leader moves through the lesson with the remote. The lobby plays by itself. Every TV keeps its pictures on the Apple TV, so it keeps playing through a Wi-Fi drop, and Displays shows what each one is showing right now, from your phone.

Your team keeps making slides the way it does now

Choosing separate screens for the rooms doesn’t mean making things twice in a new way. If your team builds slides in Canva, PowerPoint or Keynote, export them as pictures, PNG or JPEG, and add those. The same memory verse can go up in the sanctuary from your worship software and in every kids’ room from Displayte.

Slides saved as pictures in Displayte’s Library, under Pictures: welcome, wednesday-night, cafe-menu and coffees-on-us, with Add files at the top.

Add slides from Canva, PowerPoint or Keynote has the steps for each app.

A simple way to decide

Walk the building on a Sunday morning and, for each screen, write down two things: who is in the room, and who changes the screen. Where the answer is an operator at a computer, use your worship software. Where it’s a volunteer with a remote, or nobody at all, use screens that run on their own.

You can see the second kind in the demo: a church with six TVs across its kids’ rooms, lobby and café, already set up.