My Preaching Ritual

Brew strong pour over coffee with my Chemex and fill my 10 ounce Yeti tumbler.

Put the Bible case, my Unique Planner, and a bottle of water in my book bag.

:)

The bit about advancing your own slides resonates with me… and the whole topic of using PowerPoint effectively. When I get going on the topic, I always find I have more to say than I thought. But a few quick things:

• it’s well worth the time to learn to advance your own slides.
• Set up your auditorium/equipment so that speakers can advance their own slides (the pc running PowerPoint—or similar—needs to be close enough for a remote ‘clicker’ to work)
• Don’t put your whole outline in your slides, and don’t routinely put complete sentences in there. Less is more.
• Keep your slides relatively few in number
• Mark in your notes where your slide needs to advance

I use PowerPoint quite a bit when I teach SS. I use it to highlight words or phrases in passages and show how the text is using them. I sometimes display multiple translations of a verse if that is helpful in explaining a translation choice in the text. I use PowerPoint to display passages that I can refer to immediately, rather than waiting for everyone to turn to it in their Bibles. I often interact with what is up on the screen and will often display my main points as it is helpful for those who want to take notes. In other words, I use it as a teaching tool and am not against using it, but…

I don’t find PowerPoint nearly as helpful in preaching contexts. Preaching, at least in my mind, is more of an oratory event that is more often hindered by displayed text, than helped. I think preaching is made more impactful by a forceful and memorable delivery than by external slides.

I preach using an extended outline as my preaching notes. When I use Powerpoint, I usually only include high-level points that correspond to the preaching notes in the bulletin. In other words, in my former church, each bulletin would include a page for preaching notes with a “fill in the blank” outline of the sermon. My Powerpoint notes would correspond to bulletin notes so that people would be able both to hear and see the answers to the blanks.

To your point, Aaron, I would only use Powerpoint if I were confident that the sound booth folks were able to transition the slides appropriately. For the most part, they were reasonably good at transitions because they regularly ran Powerpoint for our senior pastor. At times, however, I would have to tell them, “Please advance to the next slide.”

• One watch out for preachers who want to use Powerpoint: don’t get fancy with animations, colors, fonts, or graphics. Keep the presentation clean, professional, and simple. Usually a solid black background and white font is best. Many churches use non-professional-grade projectors (i.e. lower clarity and lumens), and this results in less clarity and contrast than what you see on your computer screen. If you’re using different shades of the same color to mark emphasis, chances are the congregation won’t be able to tell the difference. Certain colors (yellow, some blues, etc.) are practically impossible to read when projected.
• A second watch out: make sure people in the back row of the sanctuary can read the slide. At our church, the minimum font size I would use was Arial or Times New Roman 54. Font size will vary based on the location / size of the screen and the size of the sanctuary.
• A third watch out: manually check for typos and common spelling errors. There <> their. it’s <> its. too <> to.
• A fourth watch out: don’t rely on your slides to preach your sermon. For that matter, don’t rely on technology to work properly when you preach. Either memorize your sermon or keep a hard copy of your notes with you. I was at a church when the preacher had to stop his sermon part way in because his iPad stopped working. He had to call the music guy up to do a congregational song while he ran to his office and printed out his notes.

That being said, I appreciate what Andy writes:

I don’t find PowerPoint nearly as helpful in preaching contexts. Preaching, at least in my mind, is more of an oratory event that is more often hindered by displayed text, than helped. I think preaching is made more impactful by a forceful and memorable delivery than by external slides.

[AndyE]

I don’t find PowerPoint nearly as helpful in preaching contexts. Preaching, at least in my mind, is more of an oratory event that is more often hindered by displayed text, than helped. I think preaching is made more impactful by a forceful and memorable delivery than by external slides.

I guess it’s going to depend on your best method of learning. I learn well by hearing. My wife does not. The difference was made really clear to me when my kids were still home and we were memorizing scripture as a family. Both I and my oldest daughter memorized best by hearing and repeating. That didn’t help my wife at all. She had to see it on the page and keep reading it to be able to get anywhere with memorization. (Of course, the fact that English is her 2nd language probably made it more difficult in any case.)

This same difference also applies to sermons. I don’t usually take notes. I find it slows me down from listening, and I miss things that are said while writing things down. And then, I almost can’t read the notes when I’m done, and I didn’t write down enough to use well a year later. My wife takes copious notes on every sermon. My current pastor uses PowerPoint. He puts the text of the scripture covered, all the main points, some sub points, and quotes or particular examples on the slides. Although I don’t refer to them as much while listening, I do some. My wife really likes seeing them, and for a slide that has a lot of info she can’t copy down quickly, she takes a picture of it with her phone, and inserts it in the notes, which she is also taking on her phone.

I think sermons work just fine for me without the PowerPoint, but I know it helps a lot of people, so I’m glad that most preachers today use it. Even most of our guest speakers do. When the slides are well-organized and not overwhelming, I see them as a good tool for helping the congregation to remember and think about the points of the sermon.

[dcbii] My current pastor uses PowerPoint. He puts the text of the scripture covered, all the main points, some sub points, and quotes or particular examples on the slides. Although I don’t refer to them as much while listening, I do some. My wife really likes seeing them, and for a slide that has a lot of info she can’t copy down quickly, she takes a picture of it with her phone, and inserts it in the notes, which she is also taking on her phone.

I think sermons work just fine for me without the PowerPoint, but I know it helps a lot of people, so I’m glad that most preachers today use it. Even most of our guest speakers do. When the slides are well-organized and not overwhelming, I see them as a good tool for helping the congregation to remember and think about the points of the sermon.

Yeah, I get all that. Sermons today, especially exegetical sermons, are largely teaching sermons. A heavy teaching emphasis lends itself to things like PowerPoint, which is exactly why I also use it in my SS classes. I certainly don’t think sermons should be devoid of teaching or that teaching should not be an important part of regular pastoral pulpit ministry. What I am saying, though, is that I believe there is a difference between preaching and teaching and that PowerPoint lends itself more towards teaching than preaching. Let’s put it this way. How many football coaches do you think incorporate powerpoint in their half-time pep talk with their players?

Opening slide: Don’t give up! Point 1 — least important score is that score at halftime; Point 2 — (could someone please advance the slide???) — we need to contain their quarterback and limit turnovers!; Point 3 — Win one for the gipper! (slide with quote from gipper); End — All right team, go get them, Give 110% Let’s go!

I’m not saying that preaching is the same as a pep talk, but that the elements of exhortation, and rebuke, and motivation are more preaching than teaching and are probably not helped that much by powerpoint and that powerpoint might be contributing to the loss of some of these important elements.

Really, just giving something to think about, rather than advocating for a hard and fast rule.

[AndyE]

Really, just giving something to think about, rather than advocating for a hard and fast rule.

Yes, I understand. You’ll note that big political speeches don’t use PowerPoint either (like inauguration or SotU speeches, which might actually benefit from summarization of the points). So I get your example about the half-time pep talk as well.

Of course, being about as old as you, I’ve experienced a lot of sermons that were big on the “pep talk” aspect, but didn’t focus much on the more doctrinal or teaching aspects of scripture. I’m sure you’ve heard plenty of those as well. I remember that some of them really fired me up at the time, but I’d be hard pressed to recall anything specific about anything I was actually taught from those messages. If we expect most sermons to teach the scriptures and what is in them, I think whatever we can do to enhance learning without distracting from the message will be quite useful in service of the teaching goal.

Even when slides are used, I think it would be rare to have all the exhortation, rebuke, and motivation laid out on the slides, except for the biggest take-away concepts. Our pastor definitely doesn’t change the slides very often in those parts of the messages, which is similar to what you are saying.

As you said, it’s not hard and fast. I’m not going to quibble if some pastors don’t want to use slides for the same reasons you mentioned. However, I do think that in many cases, when they don’t use some of the excellent basic learning tools at their disposal, they are only making it easier for what they say to be forgotten an hour after preaching it. People’s attention span is not what it was. We can spend a lot of time griping about it, or we can use additional methods to fight against it.

[T Howard]

Quote:Brew strong pour over coffee with my Chemex and fill my 10 ounce Yeti tumbler.

Quote:Put the Bible case, my Unique Planner, and a bottle of water in my book bag.

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I probably should have written, “When I use PowerPoint …” I don’t always. Sometimes it is helpful and other times it seems to compete for attention.

An anecdote for the plus column of using it: I have had people whose primary language was not English thank me for using PowerPoint because it helps them follow.

Along with others who have commented along these lines, I do lean more toward using PowerPoint for teaching situations versus preaching. But in my case the difference between the two is really not vast. I don’t have different energy levels for the two… And the style isn’t really all that different I guess. The main difference for me tends to be the size of the audience and how much interaction is worked into the event. My preaching is usually a monologue. My teaching is usually dialogue. But the keyword there is usually.

I used to use Powerpoint just for teaching sessions. I occasionally used it for a sermon, especially if I had a lot of texts I wanted to refer to and wanted to speed things up rather than wait for everyone to turn to the passage. Along the way, I discovered a couple of things so that I use PP for most messages.

The first thing was that we encourage our children to learn to take notes on the messages. The teachers told me that if I used PP, the kids were able to get better notes, and not just copying my main points. So that became a motivation to keep doing it.

However, I don’t include much more than the main points and proposition, if I have one. I also start with the main text on the screen. I also sometimes include supporting Scriptures and/or lengthy quotations that I want to spend some time on. If people can see it, hear me read it, and read it over again as I explain it, they seem to get it better.

As for animation, I think some animation is good, but you can go overboard on it. I recommend taking an online course at Lynda.com on using animation. It will help you learn how the program works and how to emphasize points as you are making them. We live in a visual age, and while we aren’t here to entertain with a light show, we can use the tool to be more effective.