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Eight of 10 families in the United States own at least one VCR, said American Demographics magazine in 1995. Many churches are taking advantage of home VCRs by providing visitor videos.

"We're in a world that's visually driven," says Dean Parham, assistant pastor of Gray Road Baptist Church in Indianapolis, Indiana. "Creating a video about our church seems to be better than a print piece."

A 10-minute video can offer a great overview of a church's ministries. "Our church is big enough that you can't know all that's going on," Parham says. "Our video gives a good snapshot feel to the big picture of things." Visitors who attend the church may each have a video, but they must go to the front of the sanctuary after church to pick one up. Videos do not have to be returned.

Metro Life Community Church, in Orlando, Florida, shows videos to visitors during a break in the morning service. While church members are taking children out of the service to various classrooms, visitors are encouraged to go to a room where they can enjoy refreshments and the video. After the break, the adults go back to the sanctuary for the rest of the service.

Seven Rivers Presbyterian Church in Lecanto, Florida, chronicled church events on video for more than a year. Now it's working that footage into a 20-minute outreach tool. Each member of the church will receive a video, says Tara Bryant, who is working on the project. People can pass the video along to people who want to know more about the church. "At some point, we might produce several different videos that are geared toward a particular population," Bryant says.

Before creating a video for your church, you should answer some important questions: What is the purpose of your video? Who is it for? What is its message? And how can you best state that message? For example, if you want to reach out to people with children, you'll want to emphasize children's ministries in your video. If you want to stress the interpersonal strength of your congregation, you could show people interacting in small groups.

Next, consider the technical aspects of creating a video, such as:

Scripting. Will you use narration or let pictures do all the work?

Visuals. If you want to use video clips, do you have a well-trained person who knows how to get good footage? Do you have video camera equipment that will produce great material? If you want photos in your video, do you have a photographer who can produce those for you?

Editing. You can use a video-based system to edit videotape into a final product. Some home camcorders have this capability. However, you won't create professional-quality work without professional-quality equipment. A computer-based linear editing system provides various editing functions. It would allow you to scan photos into the computer, then weave animation or words around them. You could also feed video footage into the system, then add narration, music, and/or graphics. Because visuals take up a lot of hard-drive space, though, you may be limited to producing a short video of less than 10 minutes.

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