With Easter being this Sunday, I know we as pastors and team leaders, whether that be in worship, media, production, communications, etc… are all in creative mode. Whether you’re a smaller church with fewer resources or a larger church where you’re pulling off multiple services in multiple settings, we could probably all use some assistance getting the ball rolling when it comes to planning/producing creative materials for services. Therefore, I just wanted to share the resources that I have been using lately that really help me keep our excellence level high in a smaller setting and allow us to bring creative elements on a budget.
Graceway Media is one of my favorite resources because it not only has still and motion backgrounds, but sermon and welcome title photoshop files. These are great bases you can use for just about any communication piece and can be helpful with series topics and themes.
In addition to our Graceway membership, we also chose the bundle partnership deal they do with Igniter. With Igniter, we pull all kinds of service videos, from worship intros to sermon intros to more reflective video clips.
Centerline New Media does it all: mini-movies, motions, countdowns, stills, and even a few sermon-slides. We use them to supplement what we can’t find on Graceway or Igniter. They have really great seasonal items too so I usually take a visit around Christmas and Easter to see what they have released.
Creation Swap has great photos, still graphics, videos, print ready items, and even logos. I mainly use this site for ideas, but they have a free section with every category where you can download some pretty useful items.
I was first introduced to Lightstock via one of the Media Pastors at Church of the Highlands and I couldn’t be more grateful. When we were first designing our website (before we launched) we lacked quality photos to use for the different sections such as the home page and the ministries pages. We used Lightstock for these photos and now I use them for everything, from announcement slide backgrounds to social media post backgrounds. They are amazing.
The company that designed our website introduced me to Dollar Photo Club. It is what it sounds; every photo is a dollar! They have such a huge library of stock photos you can pretty much find anything. I also use this for announcement slide backgrounds and social media post backgrounds. Where a Lightstock photo could cost you $10, for things where I am layering photos or blurring the background, $1 is a deal!
Other than stalking other church’s social media pages for theme and staging ideas, Church Stage Designs is the next best thing. Churches from around the world submit their staging designs and they range from portable to permanent, budget friendly to pretty pricy. It just depends what you’re looking for. This is also a great resource just to pull concepts and ideas from and then edit or alter to fit your context.
I hope these above resources help you as much as they have helped us! Now, go be creative!
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