Matthew Starner shows how to make good worship slides better:

I had a request from a friend who is doing slides at his church asking for some guidelines and examples of how we do our slides. I looked around for some articles to send him and, finding none that were quite how we do it, figured I’d write him one. This one’s for you, Nathan!

Let me start off by saying that the reason that I couldn’t find an existing article that laid out how our slides are put together is not because we’re the only ones doing it right, but because every church is going to do it a little differently and that’s OK!

Generally speaking, if the lyrics are readable, easy to follow, and look good to your eye, then they’re probably already pretty good. But these steps may make them even better.

For the purposes of this article, I’m going to use two different songs as examples: the hymn A Mighty Fortress, and Mighty to Save.

Step One: Find your Font.
While I’ve seen some churches with great design staff successfully pull off using a different font for every song (or every line), most of the time it just looks tacky and is hard to follow. One good, sans serif font will work great. We use Helvetica. Arial or Futura would be fine too. Above all, it should be easily readable. And for heaven’s sake NO COMIC SANS. Or Papyrus, for that matter.

Also, stick to one size between all of your slides. It’s hard on the eyes when one slide had giant text and the next you need to break out a magnifying glass. While I’ve seen different theories on what is the ideal font size (such as taking the age of your oldest attenders and dividing it in half – i.e. if your oldest are around eighty, your font should be no smaller than 40) it’s just easier to find a font size that you can read comfortably from the seats farthest away from the screen.

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Nathan Sutliff lists ways to start seeing your lyric screens as more than just words:

1. Fonts

I have been in too many churches that just rely on Arial, Verdana, or Times New Roman. Basic fonts that add no creative look to the screens at all. We’ve all seen it. Yes it displays the lyrics of the song but does it display the emotion? I have also seen churches who may try too hard and use crazy fonts that are hard to read or just seem to be used for the sake of using them. If you can identify the emotion of the song and best represent it with a font that helps reinforce it then you are adding to the worship service as oppose to just displaying lyrics.

There is nothing more frustrating to me than a bad line break of paragraph break on worship lyric screens. If you sing through the song you know where there should be a line break or even a screen break. I have seen this before…

Open the eyes of my heart lord Open the
Eyes of my heart. I want to see you, I
want to see You

2. Line Breaks and Paragraph Breaks

There is nothing more frustrating to me than a bad line break of paragraph break on worship lyric screens. If you sing through the song you know where there should be a line break or even a screen break. I have seen this before…

Open the eyes of my heart lord Open the
Eyes of my heart. I want to see you, I
want to see You

Quit that!!!!! Quit letting the screen margins determine where your line breaks happen! Spend the few extra seconds to break the lines naturally at the end of the phrase! Think of how you sing the song and break the lines accordingly.

The same goes for paragraph breaks. A good rule is no more than 5 lines per slide but if you sing through the song I’m positive you can find places to break to a new slide that won’t rush your volunteer and allow for less words per slide. More screens appropriately separated are so much more effective than 4-5 lines per slide; it’s busy.

3. Use Different Font Weights, Sizes and Capitalization

Don’t get lazy and allow each screen to have the same font weight, font size, or capitalization features the whole slide. You can emphasize words with a simple bold or capitalization or font size. You’ve seen this trend if you have ever used good lyric videos. You can achieve this same look with some time spent with each slide. And it’s well worthy it. Imagine an energetic line that is repeated growing in size each time it is repeated on a new screen. It adds motion and energy visually not just through the music. One of my favorite things as of late is to allow one line to be normal weight and capitalization while the following line (or vice verse if the first line carries more weight lyrically) to be capitalized and maybe bolded as well. All of this adds motion and helps reinforce what the music, lights and environment is already doing.

4. Use Background Shapes to Make Your Lyrics Pop

Sometimes you have backgrounds that you really love but don’t work well with lyrics over top of them. Sure you can adjust the brightness with most programs but that tends to make them look kinda washed out and you lose that nice contrast. You could make your lyrics gigantic but that loses that visual balance you are going for. What about using some shapes behind your text to help make those lyrics pop while still being able to use your backgrounds. ProPresenter makes it really easy to do. And I have done it as well with other programs like Media Shout and SongSelect. It’s a simple way to use that nice thin modern font you love with more backgrounds than you could without.

5. Sometimes Simpler is Better

I am very guilty of overdoing it at times. I like motion over still backgrounds, generally. Subtle motion seems more appealing to me than a static image. But that being said, as of late I am beginning to understand the power of a static image vs. a moving one, especially when used together. Maybe you have a low energy verse that leads into a powerful chorus. What if you treated your backgrounds the same way you treat the music of the song? Allowing yourself to see the visuals as important as the music and vocals will give you a whole new perspective and hopefully dedication to spend more than a few minutes putting together your support screens each week for worship.

John UpChurch wonders if youth ministry is Biblical:

I tried to keep my skepticism in check. After all, my friend pastored this new church plant, and we wanted to be there for their first Sunday to support him. But the focus on “family-integrated worship” definitely took some getting used to—especially for those of us with small children. They had no youth classes, no kids’ church, no nursery. Everyone worshiped together in the small chapel.

Here’s how he describes it:

“The goal is to keep the generations together at all points in the Sunday morning service. We sing together, we pray together, we listen to the sermon together and then we celebrate a fellowship meal after church together…. Most USA Protestant pastors see the value of the family unit. We do not imply that we have a ‘corner on the market’ in this respect. However, we do believe that those models that divide the family on Sunday in every venue possibly do a disservice to the spiritual life of the family unit.”

Despite a few cries and some wiggles, the service went well. And the model has resonated with the community, as the church has grown out of two buildings so far.

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T. David Gordon lists 8 reasons the change is happening:

1. Contemporary worship music hymns not only were/are comparatively poor; they had to be. One generation cannot successfully “compete” with 50 generations of hymn-writers; such a generation would need to be fifty times as talented as all previous generations to do so. If only one-half of one percent (42 out of over 6,500) of Charles Wesley’s hymns made it even into the Methodist hymnal, it would be hubristic/arrogant to think that any contemporary hymnist is substantially better than he. Most hymnals are constituted of hymns written by people with Wesley’s unusual talent; the editors had the “pick of the litter” of almost two thousand years of hymn-writing. In English hymnals, for instance, we rarely find even ten of Paul Gerhardt’s 140 hymns, even though many musicologists regard him as one of Germany’s finest hymnwriters. Good hymnals contain, essentially, “the best of the best,” the best hymns of the best hymnwriters of all time; how could any single generation compete with that?

Just speaking arithmetically, one would expect that, at best, each generation could represent itself as well as other generations, permitting hymnal editors to continue to select “the best of the best” from each generation. Were this the case, then one of every fifty hymns we sing should be from one of the fifty generations since the apostles, and, therefore, one of every fifty should be contemporary, the best of the current generation of hymnwriters. Perhaps this is what John Frame meant when, in the second paragraph of his book on CWM, he indicated that he had two goals for his book: to explain some aspects of CWM and to defend its “limited use” in public worship. Perhaps Prof. Frame thought one out of fifty constituted “limited use,” or perhaps he might have permitted as much as one out of ten, I don’t know. But our generation of hymnwriters, while talented and devout, are not more talented or more devout than all other generations, and are surely not so by a ratio of fifty-to-one.

2. Early on in the contemporary worship music movement, many groups began setting traditional hymn-lyrics to contemporary melodies and/or instrumentation. Sovereign Grace Music, Indelible Grace, Red Mountain Music, Reformed Praise all recognized how difficult/demanding it is to write lyrics that are not only theologically sound, but significant, profound, appropriate, memorable, and edifying (not to mention metrical). If the canonical Psalms are our model, few hymn-writers could hope to write with such remarkable insight (into God and His creatures, who are only dust) and remarkable craftsmanship (e.g. the first three words of the first Psalm begin with the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet, aleph (א), each also has a shin (ש), and two of the three also have a resh (ר), even though each is only a 3-letter word. Even those unfamiliar with Hebrew cannot miss the remarkable assonance and alliteration in those opening three words: “ashre ha-ish asher”).

3. As a result, the better contemporary hymns (e.g. “How Deep the Father’s Love,” “In Christ Alone”) have been over-used to the point that we have become weary of them. These two of the better contemporary worship music hymns are sung a half-dozen times or a even a dozen times annually in many contemporary worship music churches; whereas “A Mighty Fortress” may get sung once or twice (if at all); but neither of the two is as good as Luther’s hymn. What is “intrinsically good” (to employ Luther’s expression about music) will always last; what is merely novel will not. Beethoven will outlast 50 Cent, The Black Eyed Peas, and Christina Aguilera. His music will be enjoyed three hundred years from now; theirs will be gone inside of fifty years.

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Roger O’Neel shares praise band principles:

We have had some great comments about the first post “Less is More” on both this site and a sister site worshipchat.com. Some of them stole my thunder on what I wanted to share in part 2 of this post. In the first post, I wanted to share the principle of less is more, and in this post I want to share what it looks like in practice. How do we do this?

1. Acknowledge your role.
What is your role in the band? Are you the bass player? drummer? keyboard player? Is your role primarily supportive of the melody? It it to set and keep the groove? Is your role a solo instrument? If so, when do you play?

2. Take only your share.
A common example of how we should be aware of our part in a group is the example of having a pie that the entire band would share. How much of the pie should one person take? If there are three different instruments playing, how much volume should each one have? Should one person have 50% of the “pie”? This is typically why bands overplay because each player tries to play more than their fair share.

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