Church Voices

Powerpoint* is in church, and its not going away. Whether that’s good, or bad depends on your powerpoint presentation. This book review highlights how a powerpoint presentation can be a liability. From the article:

Bullet points on a screen make information harder to understand, not easier.

The core purpose of communication is to cohere: to coalesce fragments of information back together into a single understanding. That’s the most difficult task of communicating. And it’s actually the origin of the word communication: to “make common”, or to bring together.

Bullet points can do many things, but they do not cohere information. In fact, they do the opposite–they fragment understanding into little pieces. Break any topic into a title, sub-headings and bullet points, and you’re de-communicating, because you’re not helping to bring a single idea together.

Maybe you’re an analytic kind of learner, and you still disagree with me. Maybe you’re already on-board. Either way check out how this presentation saps the power from one of the greatest speeches in history, the Gettysburg Address. I’m serious, go, check it out. Did you check it out? Alright lets go on.

So what suggestion does the author make for creating a powerful presentation?

Instead, Atkinson says you should craft a story to tell in your presentation - much like a Hollywood director scripts a film.

This is especially applicable to sermons. Most of the time what we preach isn’t new information to our audience. Our sermons are probably 10% information and 90% persuasion/motivation. When was the last time you were persuaded/motivated by a bullet point? Probably never. When was the last time you were motivated/persuaded by a story? Probably in your memory, whether it was the story of a child under the care of Compassion International, or the story of the death, burial and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Ever wonder why all those scams on TV promising you that you can make millions from home rely so heavily on testimonials? Because stories motivate/persuade.

Ask yourself this: do the powerpoint presentations you create bring information together to work with your sermon to create a story, or does it chunk out bits of information into separate, floating bits of data?

Along these same lines I’ve always wanted to try a presentation that displays the verse and then goes into a series of images that reflect what that portion of the sermon is about, and then goes to the next verse, and then a different series of images that reflect that portion of the sermon. Unfortunately I’ve not had the chance to do this yet.

*Powerpoint of course being a catch-all term for any type of software that displays images on a screen.