You’re preparing for Sunday worship. The pastor has given you his or her scripture. You have photos to represent sermon points – maybe even a video. You’re all set to build that week’s audio-visual presentation and start promoting the upcoming worship experience on social media.
But you are lacking options for backgrounds – for the hymns, for prayer requests, maybe even announcements prior to the service starting.
It’s frustrating, and I understand completely how much time is wasted trying to go to Google or some other search engine to seek out photos. Then, even if you’re lucky enough to find the perfect image, it seems like all of the best ones are unavailable for use without violating copyright law.
In most of the churches my wife has served, I’ve assisted with the visuals that help spice things up in our worship settings. Sometimes, software such as EasyWorship or Media Shout comes with images. But after a while, you want to change things up a bit. You need new images.
While there are some free websites out there, the reality is most of those sites don’t provide much for free. It’s a method of introducing their products to you so they can entice you to buy a larger library of images. That doesn’t make them bad; it just makes them, at times, too expensive for a church’s budget.
The conference staff wants to help ease your time constraints and make it a little easier for you to find images to use in worship. So, as we travel the under-appreciated landscape we find across Kansas and Nebraska, we do our best to pull out our cameras and capture some images that reflect our two states. And we’re making those images available to you for free to help with your sermon illustrations, slide backgrounds and social media posts.
Our Flickr album titled “Scenes from the Great Plains Conference” features images of croplands, photos of landmarks, pictures of waterways and creatures that call our conference boundaries “home” and even some natural phenomena.
And we’ve had some help in pulling together some of these photos. Besides our staff, special thanks go to Thomas Renich and the Rev. Bill Ritter. We know a few others are preparing to contribute in the days ahead, and we invite you to share as well. There are only a few stipulations:
