One of the unexpected benefits that we have discovered with using PowerPoint as a part of our worship celebration is the added visibility of the Word of God.
There are several fairly obvious places in your service for scripture as well some instances where you can sneak it in. I love taking the opportunity to expose my people to God's Word whenever I can.

Scripture Reading

At Bedford Community Church we have the Scripture that I will be preaching from read early in the service and we project the scripture as it is being read aloud. I understand the argument that by projecting your Scripture you will encourage your people to not bring their Bibles to church. Here's the news folks: some of your people will bring their Bibles to church and some won't.

We had projected our Scripture readings the first two years we were using PowerPoint, but after reading a fairly persuasive argument against the practice we stopped. For several months we used a transition slide that said “The Word of God” along with the reference but didn’t project the full text. What changed my mind was being in another service where the Scriptures weren't displayed. The speaker was reading from the fifteenth chapter of John's Gospel and in verse 5 where it says “I am the vine; you are the branches.” the speaker inadvertently included an extra word. What he read was “I am not the vine; you are the branches.” I was following along in my Bible so I realized that he had goofed. However, looking around at the rest of the crowd most of them weren’t following along. Some didn’t have a Bible with them and many of those who were carrying Bibles didn’t have them open. And so, at some level, maybe only subconsciously, some people heard that Jesus was not the vine. The next Sunday we started projecting our Scriptures again.

When you project your Scriptures, set them apart from the rest of the presentation. We have chosen a specific font that we use whenever there are Scripture verses on the screen. We picked Georgia for no other reason than I like it. It is an attractive font that is not distracting. We also use a specific background and people know that at this point something different is happening... we are going to read the Word of God.

In order to encourage your people to bring their Bibles with them don’t rely entirely on the image. Instead of simply stating, “You will see the Scripture on the screen,” Say something to the effect of, “Open your Bibles to John 3:16. If you don’t have your Bible with you today, the Scripture will be on the screen.” And allow people the time to turn to the appropriate reference. The temptation is to immediately begin reading and if you do that it won’t matter if you are projecting the verses or not. People aren’t going to follow along in their Bibles if they have to frantically flip pages trying to find the reference. By giving your people a little bit of time while leaving the title screen up the have the time to find the reference as well as a reminder of what it is.

(Part 2 coming next month)

(Article © Denn Guptill / PowerPoint4Preaching.com, used with permission)