Evening Star Missionary Baptist Church
Los Angeles, CA
Summary
For over 78 years, Evening Star Missionary Baptist Church has been a presence of faith in their South Central Los Angeles neighborhood. Pastor Keith Williams, and his wife, First Lady Sandra Williams, have provided leadership to this church for the past 12 years. The COVID pandemic almost shut them down as many of their worship team and audio-visual tech volunteers left. While being challenged to recreate his worship and tech team from scratch, Pastor Williams and his wife were introduced to Risen Media. Now their worship service preparation and presentation is better and easier than ever.
THE CHURCH
Evening Star Missionary Baptist Church was founded in 1932 in Santa Monica, California. About 1946, the church relocated to their current South Central location in Los Angeles. Over the years the neighborhood, and the congregation, dramatically changed, posing challenges for the church leadership. Evening Star is in the process of rebuilding and growing their congregation. They now have an average attendance of about 60 attendees per Sunday. Evening Star is a rare multigenerational church, with five generations worshiping together. Evening Star also has a Spanish speaking congregation. Evening Star’s annual budget is about $110,000 a year. The church has been affiliated with the Southern Baptist Convention and the National Baptist Association.
THE PROBLEM
Pastor Keith had a problem and a dream. His problem was that his entire worship team, band, and audio-visual tech team left his church for various reasons during the pandemic. When he reopened for in-person worship services, he had to build a team from the few volunteers available. He also had a dream of making his worship services more effective and creative. While visiting another church, he was impressed with their effective use of images, music and videos. He wanted to incorporate these features in his own worship services, but had no idea how to do it, nor did he have the technical team to do it.
THE RISEN MEDIA RESPONSE
Risen Media provided a solution to his problem and a way to improve the professionalism and creativity of his worship services. He was introduced to Risen Media at a Baptist pastor’s conference and quickly realized that this affordable and flexible program was just what he was looking for. After subscribing to Risen Media, the founders, Michael-Paul Terranova and Arbi Stepanian, came to his church to help him set-up the program and train his volunteers. According to Sandra Williams, the new, younger tech volunteers “picked up the program easily” and soon they had a team of six volunteers who put together the service each week. The head tech volunteer uses the extensive Risen Media music and image library to develop beautiful and creative worship services. The entire worship service program is run on a computer in the sound booth by a volunteer each Sunday.
THE RISEN MEDIA IMPACT
Risen Media Helped the Church Build Back Their Tech Team: Thanks to the availability and ease of use of Risen Media, the pastor and his wife were able to build a new group of worship and tech volunteers. Members of the team have used the video tutorials provided by Risen Media to learn how to develop presentations and bundles. The Risen staff has been very responsive to questions and problem solving. It was not long before all the members of the team knew how to use the program.
Risen Media Provided Creative Features: Pastor Keith wanted to use features such as images, graphics, music and videos to “spice-up” his worship services and Risen Media provided for him. Pastor Keith and his team regularly use the large library of images, music, and backgrounds to create beautiful worship services. According to Pastor Keith, the congregation has responded to these changes in very positive ways. The tech team is looking forward to using more Risen Media features, such as importing videos, using the speaker notes, and using the SideSlide™ feature.
Risen Media Has Made Worship Planning Simpler and More Collaborative: Because of the Cloud based nature of Risen Media, the volunteers at church can work on their responsibilities from any location, increasing efficiency and saving time. The team of six can easily collaborate when putting the program together.
Risen Media Features are Improving the Sunday Morning Presentation: Before using Risen Media, the worship team and the pastor could not project song lyrics or scripture verses onto a sanctuary screen. Now, each week, the worship song lyrics and Bible verses are easily projected. Evening Star has recently added two monitors to their sanctuary on either side of a large projection screen. This small investment is giving them many more creative options for using the Risen Media features.
The Church Has Felt Supported by the Risen Media Staff: Pastor Keith, and his wife, Sandra, have felt very supported by the Risen staff, who have responded quickly to anything they have requested. As First Lady Sandra expressed, “It is so helpful to have experts to help us whenever we need it. Risen has done this for us.”
CONCLUSION
Evening Star Missionary Baptist Church is experiencing the same problems so many other congregations are facing – the loss of attendees, volunteers, and finances. Yet Pastor Williams was intent on not letting the quality of his worship service slip, but actually wanted to improve them. Risen Media has allowed him to dramatically improve the quality of his worship services and build back a volunteer tech team, for a very affordable monthly subscription. Pastor Keith is enthusiastically telling all of his church leader friends about Risen Media.