It’s What I Do: Sermon Power Points
One of the things I do here at Middletown is make the sermon graphics for my Senior Pastor’s (Dr. Phil Rogers) sermons each week. Phil likes to distribute notes when he preaches, and likes to have the “answers” show up on the screen while he’s preaching so people don’t get lost trying to fill them in. That means Power Point!
Of course, Power Point is less than ideal when you’re trying to communicate to people. There was a time when Power Point was new and cutting edge. But the fact is, many people “get” to watch Power Point presentations every day at work (and a lot of times, it’s bad Power Point at that). There’s few things worse than coming to church and getting hit up with more of the same stuff that left you bored and uninspired all week at work (especially when the Power Point at church is bad Power Point too).
That’s why we’ve tried hard to leave Power Point behind. Each of our graphics is designed in Corel’s graphics suite, but we do use Easy Worship’s integrated PowerPoint viewer to make displaying them easier. That way we get the ease of Power Point’s presentation interface without the often clunky and bland Power Point clip art and text rendering (and NO WordArt!!!).
To give you a feel for what our slides look like, here are some sample slides from a sermon Dr. Rogers is presenting today at ONU’s Pastor Appreciation Days. His message shares the story of our small community and our church, and lessons that he has learned in more than 30 years of pastoring in Middletown. The analogy he’s using for his message is the difference between throwing rocks (creating exciting but only short lived splashes) and the less glamorous task of digging channels so the current can flow. I’m pretty excited about the message, and hopefully after he delivers it he’ll let me blog some more about what it all means. (I’d hate to steal his thunder . . .)
Pictures after the jump…
