PowerPoint Peeves
Just about every preacher I know uses PowerPoint for his sermons. It's the craze these days. Even older preachers, who are usually not as interested in technology, are raving about how PowerPoint is today what "sheet sermons" were to the pioneer preachers of yesteryear.
Several years ago my elders told me they were investing in projection equipment so that I could use PowerPoint to enhance my lessons. They expected me to be thrilled, but I wasn't. For years I had been honing my preaching style--learning to get away from my notes, addressing the audience directly and giving my lessons an extemporaneous feel. I wanted to learn to preach, as Gus Nichols used to say, from the "overflow." I liked the idea of Baxter's dying man preaching to dying men. To me, PowerPoint was a threat to all of these things. It created the necessity of copious notes and wedged a barrier between myself and the audience. I voiced my concerns to my elders; they listened but decided to get the projectors anyway.
After the first Sunday I had to concede that PowerPoint did have its benefits. Folks came up to me after services and said they were able to follow along better than ever. They took better notes. The sermon held their interest longer (and I thought they were already on the edge of their seats!). I decided that, even though it wasn't my preference, I would design a PowerPoint presentation for every lesson I preach and every Bible study I present. With few exceptions, I've kept it up...and I hate it.
Edward Tufte wrote a column for Wired Magazine entitled "PowerPoint Is Evil." Basically the piece questions the wisdom of boiling information down to bulleted lists on a series of slides. One point that he makes is especially important to all preachers and Bible class teachers.
Presentations largely stand or fall on the quality, relevance, and integrity of the content. If your numbers are boring, then you've got the wrong numbers. If your words or images are not on point, making them dance in color won't make them relevant. Audience boredom is usually a content failure, not a decoration failure. At a minimum, a presentation format should do no harm. Yet the PowerPoint style routinely disrupts, dominates, and trivializes content. Thus PowerPoint presentations too often resemble a school play -very loud, very slow, and very simple.
I've talked to preachers who tell me they have quit writing outlines, designing their lessons in PowerPoint instead. Instead of having their thoughts firmly planted in their mind before speaking, they just click their remote mouse and see what the next slide will say. In my opinion, this leads to shallow sermons that have little to offer. We could almost eliminate the preacher altogether--just dim the lights and run the slide show!
Because I want the message of the gospel to overpower everything else--the custom animation, animated clip art and exciting backgrounds--I take a minimalist approach to my PowerPoint slides. After spending hours carefully crafting the sermon and writing it in outline form, I spend about 15 minutes putting together a PowerPoint presentation, usually on Saturday night in front of the television set. I just don't think a preacher ought to rely on colorful slides to make his point. PowerPoint should be a supplement, not a substitute.
