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Friday, August 21, 2009

Q&A Friday

Today it's time for some healthy discussion. What questions do you have about PowerPoint, video, MediaShout, EasyWorship, podcasting, or anything else?

I want this site to be a resource for answering questions that preachers have about all these things - but how will I know unless I'm told?

Fire away!

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

James, I don't know if this is a big v little church issue but I'd be interested in getting you pros and cons on the following ppt approach.

One [big] church I attended the minister would write his sermon and then hand it off to one of the office staff he considered had a knack for locating appropriate pictures. I guess this is one application of "collaborative preaching" but I'm not sure I would like to give up this much control of my ppt. It might be fine when I'm looking for a background to overlay the Scripture text, but not if I'm looking to elicit an emotion by showing a picture to complement my words.

I guess the preacher could give some guidelines eg. lonely person... and then someone else find a couple of possibilities they could discuss.

I'm all for involving more people in the preaching process, but I'm interested in other people's take on whether this is a useful way of involving them.

James T Wood said...

Good question!

I haven't come across anything like that, but I have frequently experienced situations where preachers feel they don't have good skills with visuals and so they hand it off to someone else.

On the one hand I have to commend the person for recognizing their weaknesses and seeking to get more skilled people involved, but I have the same reservations that you do - I wouldn't want to give someone else this much control of the sermon.

Wow, just writing those words made me think about how selfish I can be. I think it's my sermon instead of God's word to his people.

My view of visuals in the sermon is that they should be a second channel of communication that amplifies and elaborates on the spoken word - I would have a hard time being able to have someone else pick up on the subtext of my sermon in order to add that channel. But that's just me.