There are many aspects of Worship Media and a million ways to improve your presentation, but sometimes it’s the smallest steps that make the biggest difference. Here are five practical tweaks that you can make for Sunday that will make a noticeable impact in your projection.
1. Create A Template For All of Your Lyric Slides
Consistency is key for excellent presentation on Sunday mornings. Templates make it super easy to coordinate and keep all of your songs looking their best. Choose a dependable font and text size that are easily visible to everyone in your congregation. (Here are my font recommendations.)
2. Retire Outdated Content
If your church has been using media for a while, you’ve probably accumulated quite a bit of content. Styles come and go, so it’s healthy to regularly comb through your library to remove some of the older stuff. It may be time to retire that one background you’ve used a million times or just delete the ones that don’t really work in your space. Keeping your media library tidy goes a long way.
3. Split Larger Lyric Slides
This is a rookie mistake that can really throw everything off. I’ve seen slides so jam-packed with lyrics that it made my head ache. Keeping with the flow of the song, split larger chunks of lyrics into multiple slides. I recommend displaying 2-4 lines of text per slide. Use pauses and transitions (verse to chorus, etc.) as natural splits.
4. Coordinate Media Throughout Your Service
It’s a must that your lyric backgrounds match in both color and style. But to add an additional level of intentionality to your presentation, coordinate the rest of your media elements. Start with your sermon slides and match your motions, countdown, and announcement slides from there. (Service Packs make this really easy and are available from all major media producers.)
5. Display All Scripture That’s Spoken From The Stage
It’s become pretty standard for churches to display their pastor’s sermon Scripture, but I recommend going a step further. It’s common for Bible passages to be read at other parts of your service such as openings, worship, and offering, too. Touch base with all of your on-stage leaders before service so that you’ll be prepared to project their Scripture. This little bit extra of planning will go a long way for your audience.
Do you have any other tweaks that you’d recommend?
Hey Kendall!
I love the content, man, thanks for posting everything. I’m the lead pastor and anal retentive designer of my own slides (done in Keynote and then imported as JPEG into ProPresenter), so I wanted to push back a little on your fifth point.
When I spend time in marking and PR putting together presentations for my boss, I came across the blog Presentation Zen, which blew my mind and heavily influenced how I design sermon slides. In this article (http://www.presentationzen.com/presentationzen/2007/04/is_it_finally_t.html) the author mentions how some research into Cognitive Load Theory suggests that if someone is reading something for themselves at the same time they hearing may actually decrease their level of understanding compared to if they were only reading it or only hearing it.
So if the pastor is reading the scripture, I don’t know that’s necessary to put the whole thing on the screen. I would think it’s better to pull out the phrase to be emphasized with the scripture address, or perhaps just the scripture address. I’ve seen too many slides that literally become blocks of solid text, which flies in the face of what we’re trying to accomplish with song lyrics.
The one exception might be when someone in the band is reading a scripture, depending on how the rest of the sound is, it might be tough to hear them so the scripture accompanying it would be helpful.
Again, thanks for all the great content, just my perspective…
Great article. One thing I always do is theme all our generic media towards the sermon series, welcome, announcements, events, communion, etc. If we change series, we change themes. Also, each sunday, the worship slides have a theme. If we decide we want to display bubbles, we choose all bubbly motion backgrounds. If we want to use nature has our theme, we pick scenic motion backgrounds. Sticking to a theme goes along way with people interacting with the songs. It allows their mind to go deeper into worship instead of forcing their mind to render something different.
I love your site and your tips! I’m new to church design and your tips are awesome! Thanks for all your work!