If you’ve kept up with our tips for church PowerPoint, hopefully you’ve gained some best-practices tip for Christian PowerPoints. (If not, you need to read the article.) These tips will help steer you away from PowerPoint failure. However, you may be committing some Christian PowerPoint sins already–things that will destine your Worship PowerPoints and Sermon PowerPoints to failure. Read on for the signs of Christian PowerPoint failure.
- Christian PowerPoints fail when you place all of Psalm 119 on one slide. Okay, I know you’d never place the entirety of Psalm 119 on one slide, but the principle is this: Don’t put too much text on one slide. It’s automatic PowerPoint fail. Think big. Think white space. Think spacious. And, just in case you wonder what Psalm 119 looks like on one slide, see below.
Besides the fact that whoever designed the sermon slide tried to steal (notice the watermark), this is a prime example of a sermon slide with absolutely no devotional impact. The image is nice; it comes from the Worship Love PowerPoint Template. - Christian PowerPoints fail when your PowerPoint is 425 slides long. People’s eyes have to work hard during a PowerPoint. They’re reading, scanning, looking, and inspecting. The longer the slideshow, the more tired they become. Leading men of the church may physically claw down the screen after 50 slides. Our PowerPoints come in packages of nine to twelve, which suggests the optimum length for a PowerPoint sermon. The image below displays the slides for the Redeemed PowerPoint Sermon Template.
- Christian PowerPoints fail when you do the same thing all the time. When it first came out, PowerPoint was hip, cool, and snazzy. That was in 1997. Now, people expect PowerPoints. They endure PowerPoint presentations in work meetings, on GoToMeeting, and at seminars. In order to be effective, PowerPoint cannot be boring. The bore-factor is in full play if you use standard backgrounds, a dreary outline layout, predictable titles and no variation from this rut. In order to be effective, use a bit of creativity and spice. Add a video to your church PowerPoint presentation or worship background. Use some nice backgrounds. You don’t want to be guilty of Death by PowerPoint.
- Christian PowerPoints fail when you can’t read the Sermon PowerPoint very well. Look at the PowerPoint sermon slide below.
It’s a nice picture, which comes from the Resurrection PowerPoint Sermon set. but as a sermon slide it fails miserably. Why? Because you can’t read it! The whole point of Christian PowerPoints is communication. Make sure that your slides are readable. Quick free tip: a sermon slide that may be totally readable on your computer at home may not be as clear when projected. It’s best to test it on the projector before a live worship service. - Christian PowerPoint fails when you go wild with transitions and animation. True story: I once saw a church PowerPoint presentation where every single LETTER of the text was set to spin and fly onto the screen. No joke. This PowerPoint sermon was incredible. First, there was a lot of text (see point #1 above). But to make it worse, in each paragraph, line, and word, every single letter flew onto the screen individually, spinning as it flew. Besides being entertaining (for 15 seconds), it was also distracting. The reason why your Christian PowerPoint fails with zany transitions is because people pay more attention to the zany transitions than to the content of your presentation.
The corrective for all these egregious abuses of Christian PowerPoints is to follow the ten tips, keep it simple, and get feedback from others. Using Sharefaith’s professionally-designed PowerPoint sermons and worship backgrounds is a huge step in the right direction. Get a membership today…quick, before next Sunday!