Some decades ago, churches didn’t care for multimedia during their services let alone for sermons.
Today, technology has changed the tide, giving us access to several tools to make our services more interactive and interesting. One such tool is sermon slides.
Sermon slides help the preacher to communicate sermon points with more clarity. While they are very powerful church communication tools, they can also detract and distract your congregation if poorly designed. If you are new to sermon slides, you should read this post to find out some tips and how to use them effectively.
How to Design Engaging Sermon Slides
The fact that you incorporate sermon slides into your services doesn’t make them as engaging as you want. We will share a few tips with you in this section to help you design engaging sermon slides.
Stay Simple
There is a phrase that is common in the design industry, “less is more.” While this phrase seems cliché, it is very true with sermon slides. It is easier for your slides to be engaging if you make use of simple designs.
Don’t try to muddle up so many sentences or points per slide. Each slide should contain a simple and clear point. Doing this helps your listeners to properly articulate the message you are trying to pass across. If the slides are for song lyrics, then two to four lines are okay per slide. Also, the fewer the sentences on a slide, the easier it is to enlarge the font for clearer reading.
Plan the Slides
Here’s a quick question for you. Do you plan the slides along with your message or wait until you complete the sermon preparation? It isn’t uncommon to find pastors doing the latter because it is easier. The challenge is that when you do this, your slides become an afterthought and it could affect the flow.
Of course, we can advise that you change what works for you. However, we suggest that you become a bit more intentional about planning your slides. Answer these questions each time you are preparing your sermon slides:
- Are the slides simple enough to communicate the message?
- Does each slide support the sermon in the best way possible?
- Can anyone read the contents of the slides?
Never Over or Under-Fill Your Slides
While you are trying to stay simple with your slide designs, you much watch out for being too careful or going overboard. When the text is in excess, it becomes distracting and a huge turnoff for most people. Let’s say you put up a paragraph on each slide, people will begin reading ahead and disengage from the sermon.
On the other hand, putting too little text makes one wonder why you put up that slide in the first place. Either way, you’ll distract your congregants from the sermon which defies the essence of church communication. The best thing to do is to ensure that your sermon slides enhance your message. You shouldn’t just create slides for the sake of having them, make sure they help your congregants understand you better.
Use Matching Graphics
Before choosing your slide template, you need to answer the question, “what is the sermon series about?” Next, you should figure out what message each slide should contain.
Once you figure these out, you should pick a template that matches your sermon. After doing this, you should choose matching graphics for each slide. The graphics should help you to enhance the message of the text on each slide. You should do this because mismatching your theme or graphics can confuse your audience.
It is one thing to use matching graphics, it is another for the graphics not to be distracting. Ensure that there is proper contrast between your text and your graphics. The same goes for the theme that you choose. You can download themes and graphics for messages from different websites for free.
Be Timely
One aspect of church administration that we overlook a lot is time. If you are going to make use of sermon slides, you shouldn’t hand them to your media team on service day. The slides should be ready at least a day before so that they can check how it looks on the screen.
Doing this helps your media team to make adjustments to the slides where necessary and you can have better content. If you wouldn’t be designing the slides yourself, get the sermon points to your team some days before. With this, they can get the best themes and graphics to use for the slides and test run them early enough.
Conclusion
Sermon slides can be very helpful if you understand how best to use them. We have shared a few helpful tips on how to design engaging sermon slides in this post. Please, visit ChurchPad for other articles to help you improve your church communication.