Story
OrinSync: How a Yoruba Word Became ACP's Secret Weapon for Worship
By ACP Media Team
Every Sunday morning at Anglican Church of Pentecost in Stafford, Texas, there's a quiet scramble that most of the congregation never sees. Before the first praise song rings out, someone on the media team is formatting lyrics into EasyWorship slides — copying text from the internet, cleaning up line breaks, splitting verses into slides, and hoping the formatting doesn't fall apart mid-service.
For a volunteer-run church, every minute counts. And we were losing too many of them to lyrics prep.
So we built OrinSync.
What's in a Name?
"Orin" is the Yoruba word for song. "Sync" is exactly what it sounds like — getting those songs in sync with our worship presentation software. Put them together and you get OrinSync: Song Sync.
It's a small name with a big nod to who we are. ACP is a Church of Nigeria North American Mission congregation. Our worship is a mix of contemporary praise, traditional hymns, and Nigerian gospel — songs in English, Yoruba, and Igbo that carry the sound of home for our community. The name reflects that identity.
What It Does
Visit orinsync.org and search for any song. OrinSync finds the lyrics and formats them specifically for EasyWorship 7 — our presentation software. Verses are split into proper slide-length sections. Headers are labeled. The output is ready to paste straight into a schedule.
Need to prep an entire service at once? Batch mode takes a full song list, processes every track, and lets you download them all as a ZIP file. What used to take 30–45 minutes of manual formatting now takes about 2 minutes.
The Part We're Most Excited About
Here's where it gets interesting. OrinSync doesn't just search — it learns.
Every time a volunteer searches for a song and confirms the lyrics are correct, those lyrics get saved to our own database. The next person who searches for the same song gets an instant result. No external API call. No waiting.
The more our team uses it, the smarter it gets.
This matters most for the songs you can't find anywhere else online. Try searching for a Nigerian gospel song by Sinach, Frank Edwards, or Mercy Chinwo on most lyrics sites — you'll either get nothing or get it wrong. Yoruba diacritics mangled. Igbo lyrics missing entirely. These songs live in the hearts of congregations across the Nigerian diaspora, but they barely exist on the English-speaking internet.
Every time someone at ACP searches for one of these songs and confirms the lyrics, OrinSync captures it — with the correct language, the right diacritics, and the proper section breaks. Over time, we're building something that doesn't exist anywhere else: a community-verified database of Nigerian gospel lyrics.
Built by Volunteers, for Volunteers
OrinSync was built because we needed it. ACP is a church of about 150 members, and our media department runs entirely on volunteers. We don't have the budget for enterprise software or the staff for manual processes. What we do have is a team that shows up every week and makes things work.
This tool is our way of making that a little easier.
Try It Out
OrinSync is live now at orinsync.org. If you're on the media team, start using it this week. If you're at another church and want to see what it can do, give it a search.
Every song you confirm makes the database better for the next person. That's the whole idea — a tool that grows with the community that uses it.
OrinSync is part of the ACP Church Media project. Learn more at acpmedia.org.