A Quick, Effective and Easy way to make Power Point slides for Church Worship Songs

While the use of computer projection systems have increased the quality of many worship services, these advancements are often thwarted by simple errors made in the creation of worship song lyric presentations. The method described in this article will eliminate the room for errors, provide an easy way to develop effective slides for your worship lyrics, and assist with the flow of the service.

 After you open Microsoft Office’s PowerPoint program, it should start you out with a basic slide with ready to use title and subtitle boxes. The first and only thing you should do with these two boxes: delete them. Next, right click on the slide and choose the ‘Format background’ option. Make the background color black and apply it to all slides. I will explain the reason for using black as the background in a few minutes.

Inserting the text into this first slide will be the cornerstone for your entire presentation and is essential for providing consistency throughout. This is where you will establish your text color, size and location. Now, insert a single text box near the top left of the slide leaving room at the top of the slide for the song title if you choose to include it. I would also recommend that the song title is only placed on the first page or on its own slide before the song. The recently added text box will only appear to be tall enough for one line of text but any previous user of PowerPoint knows that it will expand as needed. I also frequently adjust the right side of the text box almost all the way out to the right border.

Begin typing in the song lyrics into this first slide. You will need to set your text color to white after typing at least a few letters. The reason for setting the text to white and the background to black will be well understood once you see it in action. The idea behind it though will help with the attention of your congregation and the flow of the service. Many times PowerPoint users will keep the default black text on white background. However, once the last slide of lyrics is gone, you will be left with a large white box on your screen, and your congregation will continue to stare at this light, assuming some more is to come. However, if you have white text on black background, then when your songs are over, the big bright square will be gone, causing participants to naturally direct their attention toward the next element of the service.

Now back to the inserting of text. Let’s adjust the lines of text so that they will fit on the screen in a way that actually assists with the flow of worship. Your text will automatically begin on the next line in traditional fashion, when it runs out of room on the line above. Do not leave it this way. You will want to read through the lyrics and break the lines at natural pauses for gaps. If it is hard for you to determine where appropriate breaks should go, confer with your worship leader, he/she will know how the song is sung. Adjusting text this way will assist participants in knowing where to pause, breath and sing. At this step you will also need to adjust your text size so that the text is as large as possible. To do this, simply adjust the text size larger while watching the longest line of text.  You will want to make it about the same distance from the right side as your text box is from the left side.

While this set up process on the first slide may seem like quite a bit of work, you are actually almost done with your presentation. From here there are only a few more steps. The first of these is to copy and paste this first slide. Make as many copies of this slide as you will need for all the song lyrics. Now simply replace in the text into each slide, typing over the text from the original slide with the appropriate text in order. One additional trick would be to actually start with your chorus slide rather than the beginning of the song like I said early on. This will eliminate unnecessary typing since the chorus will repeat a number of times throughout the song. Also, some songs have similar verses and may only require you to change some of the lyrics, not the entire thing. If this entire process is done correctly, then when you move from slide to slide, your text will be remain in the same location. If not, your text will appear to jump or move when transitioning to a new slide.

Here are a last few tips you will also want to be sure to check out once your typing is complete. Go through each slide to ensure that all of the lines of text are on a single line. Adjust the font size down if necessary but be sure to do it on all slides equally. Also, it is always a good idea to have someone else proof read your typing. Nothing will distract worshipper’s more than misspelled words. Lastly, give it a test run and if at all possible, during a worship teams practice session. Hope these ideas help you develop good looking song lyrics that will improve your worship service.