Should There Be a Church Video Standard?
October 27, 2008 · Print This Article
Last Tuesday afternoon, I received an email from my pastor. Jason, Dave, and I were in the middle of a lunch meeting with the largest church video distributor in the world. Ironically, my pastor’s email message had to do with church video distributing. Here’s my rough paraphrase of his question:
“Gary. I’m looking for a video for this Sunday. It needs to be about the freedom we have from sin, in Christ alone. I’ve looked for the past hour on a church video website, and the videos are awful. I would never show them in our church. Do you guys have anything on that topic, or can you recommend something that’s good?”
I emailed him back, and basically said, “No. Sorry.”
His response was even stronger in his next email: “Then will you please tell your friends who make videos to make them with a certain quality standard? And please tell them to be less preachy….” Because he had already spent an hour of his time looking for a video and found nothing. he concluded, “I want my hour back!”
What are your thoughts?
This is an industry that’s growing larger by the hour, so it’s important that pastors and church leaders consider questions like this. Should a video that a high schooler made on his camcorder for his youth group be allowed to sell on a website, especially if the quality is lacking? Or is there a quality standard that churches and video distributors should adhere to?
I’ve had this exact same conversation with several of my pastors.
I would love to see higher standards for church videos! But then my thought is are we implying that videos with high production value convey God’s truths better than videos with lower production value?
In my experience I’ve seen videos of low quality become top sellers because the content was great and I’ve seen videos with amazing quality barely sell because their content was lacking.
Perhaps as the industry grows and higher quality videos (with good content) are distributed then pastors will see that they don’t have to sacrifice production quality for good content, which in turn will force producers to step up their game and boost the quality of their vids in order to compete in this market.
Just my 2 cents.
You know, an hour spent on anything requiring creativity has the potential of being wasted. I sometimes just stare at my blank monitor trying to somehow develop a thought. Perhaps cross-reference with scripture would help during a search in those times.
Sometimes, however, you find something that’s worth much more than the hour itself. What you find is our equivalent to 16th century stained glasss or the written/spoken word. All in all, those hours wasted are far outweighed by the message found and less to do with quality.
i would love to see higher quality videos (who wouldn’t?) but i have found some great videos in what some would consider to be a waste of time. admittedly, that’s rare. but here’s the challenge: i would hate to limit the choices to only those videos that pass a certain standard decided by someone else.
that being said, the quality we for which we aim still needs to be higher. it’s easy to cut corners … and it shows.
bob chambers
Tell your Pastor friend to make his own, or to hire someone to make it free-lance. I know, he can’t do that- so why does he come off telling everyone else how to do their videos? I know it’s frustrating, but he doesn’t have to buy anything he dislikes.
My first ministry job was producing TV, and I know there’s LOTS of bad stuff out there- not very good quality, no imagination, boring text over music and nothing else, BAD acting… you have to find the outlets that provide what best suits your style and hope they put out what you need. But don’t fault some group or church for making a video that doesn’t meet YOUR standard.