We are in North Carolina.
church website is
http://www.opendoorbaptistministries.org
band website is
http://www.visionmusicministries.org
We're a pretty small church, but I try not to let that stop us from doing big things! We have grown tremendously over the last couple of years.
At the same time, our worship band has fewer members than ever. In fact, right now I play guitar, we have a keyboard player who sings, and two other vocalists, and that's IT. Our drummer, and a guitarist left after about 3 years with the band. Our bass player also left to go to school.
This is where ableton live came in. We had always wanted to start using a click track when we went to all "in ear" monitors. After struggling for a month or so with no drummer or bass guitarist, I stumbled on this idea (using ableton live for worship) online. I happend to have a "lite" copy that came with a soundcard I bought.
We have taken this setup and ran with it, and it's working out GREAT for us.
It has a pretty good drum sequencer that doesn't feel like a drum machine at all. For most songs I dont just program simple loops, I record a "full out" drum track, with fills and everything, adding reverb and necessary effects to make it sound as natural as possible. Then I record any additional instruments we need for the song (such as bass, and extra guitar parts)
Because we tend to stick strickly to the arangements we setup before hand we havent dove much into triggering parts of songs on the fly. However I have experimented with it some, and I could see how bands who like to change things up on the fly could still easily use this software.
Still experimenting with this teleprompter/confidance monitor idea, but it looks like it's going to work out pretty good. We'll be running it in tandem with our song books for a little while, untill I get all the songs setup on it and everyone decides they feel comfortable enough to put their books down.
I just rigged up a little 8" LCD I found on ebay for the keyboard player today, its a sweet little setup. I might try to get more of those to replace CRTs on the floor.
I think the video feature in live was designed more for things like making music videos, or adding video effects when DJ-ing, etc... But I like to think "outside the box". It seems like the way we are utilizing this is pretty unique.