Category Archives: Presentations

Presentation Suggestion #1: Illustration not sermon

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home_slideAs I commented to someone following the last post, I sometimes get requests for my “PowerPoint” after I present somewhere. (Especially true when I did a seminar at a preacher training school last year) I always cheerfully comply, but I warn them that unless they took good notes on my presentation, the slides won’t do them any good. Even I look back at old presentations without being sure what each slide was about.

That’s because I don’t want my whole sermon up on the screen. Presentations are visual aids and are meant to be such. When the inventors of PowerPoint first presented the idea of PowerPoint, they accompanied the presentation with a 53-page handout. 53 pages! They obviously didn’t put all the information on the slides. That’s not the best way to communicate.

Put Bible references up, not the full text. Put main words up, not slide after slide of bullet points. Use pictures that evoke an emotional response. Maps and pictures of Bible lands can aid understanding. Just remember… it’s an illustration, not a sermon. Just as you can’t build a good sermon around nothing but jokes and stories, you can’t build a sermon around a presentation. But you can reinforce the sermon, especially for people that are visual learners. Presentations make great illustrations and lousy sermons.

[Oh, and don’t use slides that look like that one up at the top of the post!]

Should preachers use PowerPoint?

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slideshowOK, I admit it. I’m biased. I cringe when people call a presentation “PowerPoint”? I know, it’s that anti-Microsoft bone in my body. But if it helps you understand, I’ll use the term. I don’t use PowerPoint, but I do use software that creates the same sort of presentation. (Being a Mac user, I use the Keynote program)

With that out of the way, let’s get to the thought question of the day: do projected slides have a place in sermons? In a recent issue of Christian Chronicle, David Fleer says no. (I haven’t been able to find that article on their website; I guess they don’t put all of the articles there) Many others, from education circles to business environments, have decried the use of PowerPoint. Even the creators of PowerPoint don’t like many of the ways it’s being used.

Visual aids are hardly new; preachers of old would take bedsheets and fill them with diagrams that they would carry from place to place. I remember, back in the 1960s (yes, I’m that old), a preacher that would draw images on a chalkboard while he preached. Overhead projectors were used for years. So the concept isn’t that new.

But I dare say the use of visuals was never as prevalent as it is today. And, in some places, churches are beginning to back off from this trend. They like the “novelty” of a man preaching with no visuals behind him.

Personally, I think that most of the criticism of presentations comes from the vast number of really bad presentations that are out there (you can see a good illustration of bad presentations vs. good over at Presentation Zen; a more entertaining post contrasts Darth Vader’s style with Yoda’s). I think that, used well, presentations can help visual learners understand more quickly and more in depth. I use presentations when possible. [Once when the projector was out at the church in Stockdale, I drew a couple of slides on poster board]

But, believe it or not, I can be wrong sometimes. That’s why I’m asking my always wise readers: should preachers use PowerPoint? In what way? How does it help, how does it hurt? I’m interested in hearing your views.