Church presentation slides are an important part of your worship. While, of course, they’re not as important as truthfully preaching the Word of God, slides help transmit the message you’re preaching to those in the pews—hopefully in an easy-to-read way.
However, many churches struggle to put together slides that are clear, consistent, and well-designed. You don’t have to be a graphic designer to make effective slides—we’re here to show you how!
What Are Church Presentation Slides?
Church presentation slides are the graphics that appear on the screen, wall, or TV in your worship space before, during, and after the service. There are many different types of slides, including welcome slides, announcement slides, and worship slides.
These slides can be designed in a variety of presentation programs, including PowerPoint, Canva, Google Slides, and Proclaim. Whether you choose a paid or free option, there are some best design practices you will want to keep in mind.
Best Practices for Using Slides in Worship
We’ve compiled some of our best graphic design tips for church slides here. Whether you have past experience in graphic design or are totally new to the concept, our tips will help you make your slides look professional.
Keep It Simple
One of the biggest mistakes to make when it comes to designing presentation slides is to include too much: a busy background image, different colors, different fonts, clipart images—the list goes on and on.
If you want your slides to be legible and clear, keep it simple. This doesn’t mean having black text on a white background—although that can be a good choice sometimes! We recommend making one element (background image, font color, etc.) visually interesting but keeping the rest simple. For example, you might choose a video background of water flowing but keep your font simple, bold, and sans serif (with no little tails on the letters).
Make Sure Everything Is Consistent
For your worship slides, everything should be consistent from slide to slide. If you don’t want to worry about having to change backgrounds and fonts each week, just choose one design with a few variations for different types of slides—such as liturgy, Scripture verses, prayers, and songs. This ensures that from slide to slide (and week to week), everything is consistent.
Of course, it’s your choice if you want to have different thematic backgrounds for different songs, but you should make sure they’re simple and easy to read. If you choose to have thematic backgrounds, we recommend keeping your font the same across slides!
Choose the Right Slide Backgrounds
We’ve mentioned this many times already, but the slide background is critically important to ensure the words on the screen are legible and easy to read. There are many options for slide backgrounds:
- Plain color
- Image
- Video
All of these options can serve your church well in different types of slides, and you should have the creative freedom to experiment and see what works best for your church!
Just keep in mind that no matter what type of background you choose for your slides, it shouldn’t distract from what people need to read on the slide. If your image is too light and makes the words illegible, try putting a 30% opacity black overlay on top of the image. If your video is moving too fast, choose one that moves in slower motion. These small changes can make a big difference in legibility!
Subscribe to the CTS Blog Technology & Your Ministry for more church-specific design tips!
