Incorporating PowerPoint Slides in Worship

We began including PowerPoint (PPT) slides in our worship recordings when COVID restrictions put an end to meeting in person. Members at home needed a way to participate in responsive readings and hymns, so we decided to incorporate text alongside the video.

The tradeoff that needs to be managed is the ratio of text to video. The text must be large enough that it's legible even on a smallish screen. The video must be large enough to provide context for what's happening in the service. Filling the entire screen with text might be easy to read but would isolate the viewer to a congregation of one.

This is the way PPT slides were first presented. Approximately two thirds of the screen was text and one third was camera view. This allowed the entire responsive reading or Lords Prayer to fit on a single slide and the text could be large enough for people to watch on YouTube's lowest-resolution presentation. But using one third of the screen for video doesn't allow us to show very much when more than a single person needs to be in the shot. We ended up zooming way out on duets and quartets, meaning the video largely contained walls and furniture rather than people. That doesn't provide much context for what's going on in the service.

Further this format was devised solely to be viewed by people at home. Displayed on the sanctuary monitors this much text would appear tiny to anyone sitting in the pews! We have come to realize that these slides need to be useful to two audiences at once: those in the sanctuary looking at the front monitors and those at home watching online.

When we begin the process of regathering – that is, allowing a limited number of people to return to the sanctuary while maintaining social distance – the sanctuary monitors will need to serve as the order of worship for those in attendance. Text on those monitors must be large enough to read from most of the sanctuary, so they will hold fewer lines of larger text.

The newest iteration of our slides are formatted to be displayed full screen on the sanctuary monitors. The font size has increased and the number of lines displayed has decreased.

This slide is then displayed quarter-screen on the video monitor. The apparent size of the text hasn't changed very much for the viewer but the number of words shown at once – and the amount of video blocked by the slide – has been reduced.

The largest benefit of this format change is that the same PPT slide is legible on the sanctuary monitors and on the recording. A less obvious benefit for those watching at home is that there is more space for duets, quartets, or even the whole choir to show up on screen along with the words to a song.

Once church services have gone back to normal™ we will have to decide if displaying the order of worship on PPT slides is valuable enough to keep producing them for the sanctuary and video recordings. In either event, having the ability to display information of some kind to both those in the sanctuary and those watching a recording could be useful.