There’s nothing more tedious in media ministry than the weekly ritual of preparing song lyrics. Yet even this task normally given to newbie volunteers, interns, or the church monkey can become an important part of creative worship with a few simple rules.

1. Three to Four and You’ll Score. One or Six Don’t Mix.

Try to keep your song lyrics slides to three to four lines per screen. One or two lines, and you’ll turn the screen into a flipbook and create a guaranteed way for your congregation to miss half the words of the song while the operator has an ADD attack. Five, six or more and you’ll want to consider putting a number in the lower corner and designating someone to stand at the front and turn the screen over like a giant piece of paper, because that’s what you’re making it.

In the example below, the option on the left is clean and easy to visually process, but by splitting each verse of the hymn into five screens, it leaves a lot of room for error. And it’s kind of geriatric. The option on the right is safer in that regard, with the entire verse on one screen, but so much type is on one screen that it starts to look like hieroglyphics.

Figure 1a	Figure 1b

Three to four, or at most five, lines per screen is a happy medium between these two extremes. For this hymn:

Figure 1c	Figure 1d

2. Look After Widows and Orphans in Their Distress.

Betcha didn’t know there’s a rule for song lyrics in the Bible. It’s true. James 1:27 (NIV) says, “Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress.” You may have thought this is a call to moral purity. No, it’s something much greater - don’t put a single word on a separate line when preparing song lyrics!

“Widows and orphans” is a phrase in design circles that refers to those words or short phrases that are left abandoned by their surrounding paragraphs. Look at these poor widows in the example below:

Figure 2a

The better option is to cut the line at the phrase, which makes better sense from a design perspective, and musically too:

Figure 2b

See, aren’t those happy little words now?

3. Speaking of, build lyrics with some phrasing. This is music after all.

Have you ever wondered where is the best spot to insert a line break? Having musical experience helps. If you don’t have a clue, go get a musician friend and ask them. For example, look at the line breaks in the example below:

Figure 3a

Figure 3a, above, works better in terms of equal line length. Which would make sense if this were a brochure. But since this is a song lyric screen, it makes no sense whatsoever. Anyone who’s ever heard this song, which is most people in the western hemisphere, immediately looks at this and thinks, Huh? Who did that screen, the church monkey? The same screen, then, from a musical standpoint:

Figure 3b

Seeing the difference is easy on the most Famous. Hymn. Ever. It may not be so easy on new and obscure tunes, so pay close attention and get your musician friend’s help. Just make sure that when you have the information you need, shoo him or her along, unless your musician friend has design experience.

4. Avoid the matching game.

When thinking of images to put with song lyrics, one school of thought (the bad one) has said, illustrate the song. That’s easy on something like this:

Figure 4a

But not so much on something like this:

Figure 4b

When the words don’t make for good images, what do you do? The same school of thought says, go generic, like clouds or what we call the Holy Blob of Color. Borrr-ing. Not to mention theologically questionable.

Instead, find a metaphorical image that matches the overall theme of the entire worship service. Use that image for the songs, which hopefully also match the theme of the entire worship service. For a service on purity, based on Luke 3:15-18, we chose a coffee metaphor - brewing a pure cup of flavor, we called it “Pure to the Last Drop” - and our songs, on purity, drove the theme as well. So it all matched:

Figure 4c	Figure 4d

For a whole book on this subject, read Digital Storytellers.

5. Lyrics are part of the image.

In spite of what your software might say, text is not foreground above a graphic background. It’s all one image. Even with song lyrics. Why does this matter? If your mentality is that the image is just the background, then you’d have no problem letting type go where it has no business going:

Figure 5a

Avoid covering up important elements in the graphic. The example above covers up both the focal point (the man on the path) and the bars. Bad, bad song lyric! Go to your room!

Use your alignment tool to make the text wrap around the focal point, avoiding the top and bottom bars, so it becomes well designed.

Figure 5b

The image on phrasing from earlier is another good example of the use of alignment to avoid the stoplight. (The stoplight service, called “Green Means Go”, is a call to receive God’s grace, then step on the gas, or should we say electric, in ministry to others.) This serves to maintain the visual focal point of the image even during songs.

Figure 3b Again

6. Be Point Size Monogamous.

A common question is, “What point size should I make my song lyrics?” That’s like a college student asking, “Should I date a blonde or a brunette?” There’s no wrong answer. Just pick one and stick with her, or, um, it. Don’t give every slide its own unique type size, even if the amount of words on the screens varies. Too much of that and you’ll end up getting a bad reputation.

Figure 6a	Figure 6b

And don’t worry if one screen, say a verse, has lots of text, while another, say a chorus, just has a little. It’s okay to vary it. Looks kinda cool, in fact.

Also make sure that whatever your point size is, it’s readable for your sanctuary. Unfortunately not every screen is appropriately sized for its sanctuary. It doesn’t matter how cool it looks on your computer monitor if the poor people beyond row three can’t read it. Then what about the sweet little old lady in the back who likes to complain give feedback in Christian love?

7. It really is about the little old lady in the back.

If she can’t see the words, then it doesn’t matter if your last name is Scorcese. You’re toast. So increase the visibility of the lyrics with such tricks as the use of strokes, outlines and shadows. Some worship presentation software applications have these features built in. Other don’t, and that includes PowerPoint. Well, PowerPoint does have a few text options, but they look like a bad 90s corporate boardroom presentation. So if you need to, do these in a separate application such as Adobe Elements.

Compare the following:

Figure 7a: Plain	Figure 7b: With Stroke
Figure 7c: With Shadow	Figure 7d: With High Contrast

Hopefully the difference is obvious.

8. Every image has a perfect font (which probably isn’t on your system yet).

First, a little primer on fonts. Typically, a design has two fonts - a display or headline font, with lots of personality, and a copy or body font, which is a bit more buttoned-up. Most of the time, display fonts don’t work very well as copy:

Figure 8a

The key is to figure out two fonts for every worship service, one of each type, that matches your theme. For example, this set uses Texas Hero as its display font, and Blackbeard, which has character but is much more readable, for copy. Figure 8b shows the main image for the service, and 8c shows a song lyrics screen:

Figure 8b	Figure 8c

Sometimes you can get away with a single font for both, if the display font is sans serif and readable in big blocks, such as Grains of Truth below, which uses Modula:

Figure 8d	Figure 8e

Preparing song lyrics slides isn’t just a job worthy of an intern. Everything on the screen in worship is important from a visual standpoint. If you can make song lyrics artistic, then you’re well on your way to being a designer, and you’ll make the sweet little old ladies of your church happy, too.

Easter. It’s a well-known fact that it’s one of the annual great opportunities to reach people who normally don’t attend worship on a regular basis. Statistics show while attendance goes way up on Easter, the spike is often short-lived and numbers revert soon after the big day is over. Such an opportunity should not be squandered with the “same old, same old.”

We’ve been designing worship for twelve years and every year we face the Easter challenge. For us, it’s been always been difficult to find new and fresh ways to creatively and visually present the story. Once you get past all of the standard imagery of empty tombs, crosses, and lilies, where do you go? Is it possible to create powerful worship for Easter that inspires, retains and even transforms the influx of visitors that will walk through our doors on that special Sunday morning?

Telling the story through metaphor

Consider metaphor. Metaphor allows us to tell stories in a ways that connect with the everyday experiences of individuals, believer and nonbeliever alike. We’ve come to define metaphor as a tangible way to express an abstract story, thought, or idea. Metaphor allows us to make the foreign familiar. It puts the gospel into everyday language both oral and visual.

Metaphor is sometimes perceived as an advertising industry buzzword that has little or no place in worship. Those who fail to explore the power of communication that comes through metaphor fail to understand that it was the exclusive method of Jesus’ public ministry.

Mark 4 relates a story from the early part of Jesus’ public ministry, in which he tells the parable of the sower. It’s a long parable, the longest in the Gospels (vv. 3-9). Afterward, when the crowds had left and the disciples were alone with Jesus, they revealed to him that they had no clue what he had been saying. He took the time to explain the entire parable to them, actually spending more time on the explanation than he had on the parable itself (vv. 10-20).

What is really interesting is what happens next. Instead of concluding that such a creative presentation of the Good News didn’t work, and returning to the religious style he had learned in the Temple (Luke 2:41-52), he continued to speak in parables, telling the parables of lamp on the stand (vv. 21-25), the growing seed (vv. 26-29), and the mustard seed (vv. 30-32). He was on a roll!

The best moment comes in verses 33 and 34: “With many similar parables Jesus spoke the word to them, as much as they could understand. He did not say anything to them without using a parable. But when he was alone with his own disciples, he explained everything.”
Parables were Jesus’ exclusive public style! He didn’t simply use parables as an alternative for the dumb ones in the crowd. Metaphorical teaching was his only public method. Jesus understood that to communicate ideas with effectiveness he had to present his teaching in a means that made sense to his audience. Our audiences today aren’t any different. People listen best when spoken to in a familiar language. This is the essence of metaphor.

Applying a metaphor to an Easter story

For many, the idea of an omniscient deity sending his only son to earth to die for the sins of humankind, only to be resurrected from the dead, can be rather difficult to grasp. Through metaphor, we can frame the story with familiar objects, settings, and experiences that make the story easier to understand.

A few years ago we began brainstorming metaphors for an upcoming Easter season. We were focusing on John 20:1-18. In the story Mary returns to the tomb on Sunday morning, distraught that Jesus’ body has been removed. After encountering two angels, she turns toward who she believes is the gardener and pleads with him to tell her where the body of her Lord has been taken. He responds by calling out her name, revealing to Mary that he is in fact Jesus. Overjoyed, she cries out “Rabboni” (“teacher”) then, we inferred, reaches out to embrace him.

Some might say Jesus’ response was a bit harsh. He responds to her affection with, “Do not hold on to me, for I have not yet returned to the father.”

Why were his first words to push Mary away? Was he still the Rabboni, even after his death? After much discussion, we began to get excited with the idea that Jesus was telling Mary to let go of what she formerly knew of Jesus. No longer just the earthly man she had known, now he is the risen Christ.

Implicit in Jesus’ statement to Mary is the human tendency to try to hold on to our experiences of God. Call it “camp high,” if you will. We have a fear of losing our awareness of a connection with God, or what some even perceive as losing God or having our connection invalidated. It is ironic that for many, the very fact of grasping onto these memories devalues them. Faith is about living in the daily presence of God. It is through a mutual journey toward the cross that our connection with God is daily renewed. We must be willing to let go of former experiences, no matter how powerful, and continually redefine what it means to be a follower at every stage of our life.

Further, faith for Christians is a communal experience. Our faith experiences are meant to be shared, not bottled up. Jesus says to Mary that life for her will come not just from remembering that experience, but also in sharing it with others.

To capture the bittersweet feeling of having to let go, and after much brainstorming, we decided to use the metaphor of a child catching and releasing a butterfly. If we selfishly hang on to old notions of spiritual highs, religion, church and faith, whether in personal devotion or in our church communities, we can starve them of life, to the point they are no good to anyone. But just like releasing a butterfly from a jar, if let go of them, we open ourselves up to new experiences – fresh, vital, risen Lord experiences.

A fresh and powerful Easter service

We built an entire service around this concept, with the primary image being that of a little girl watching the butterfly she had captured and placed in a jar. The opening video followed the chase, capture, and eventual release of the butterfly. A drama featured the discussion of a mother and her child just after the child has reluctantly released her butterfly back into the world. As worshipers entered the sanctuary they were given origami style butterflies made from tissue paper to use during a prayer time, and to later reflect on the worship experience.

The pastor even incorporated the metaphor in to the sermon, holding a mason jar high as he talked about hoarding, and in the process killing, our faith memories. A sermon illustration told the story of 19th century English Botanist Alfred Russell Wallace, One day in his laboratory Wallace was observing an Emperor butterfly seeking to get free from its cocoon. The scientist was struck by the little butterfly’s painful struggle and the length of time it was pushing and pulling, working to get free. He thought, “What would happen if I assisted in the process?” And so he took his scalpel and he cut down the length of the cocoon. He watched to see what would happen, and noted in his book that, “The butterfly emerged from the cocoon, spread its wings, drooped perceptibly - and died.” That butterfly needed the struggle. It needed the pain, all that intense work. Otherwise, the juices would not be distributed throughout its big, beautiful wings. Without the struggle of letting go, there is no beauty and life.

As with every good metaphor, the butterfly in the jar opened up all kinds of creative possibilities for sharing the good news of Jesus resurrection on Easter morning. The service was very meaningful and made Easter feel fresh and new.

But, the most powerful part of using metaphor to communicate the gospel happens when worship is over. Even though we’ve been doing it for years in our ministry, sometimes it even takes us by surprise. Not long after Easter we received this letter from the pastor:

A couple of weeks after Easter I received a call from one of my church members. The man on the phone and his wife have been in the midst of an intense personal hell. They have had extreme difficulties with their teenage son, so much so that the son is about to become a ward of the state. This distraught dad told me that the previous night he went out to sit by the family pool. He began to reflect on his son, wondering what they had done wrong along the way. As he obsessed over his own failures as a parent, a butterfly that landed on the chair next to him interrupted his thoughts. He watched as the butterfly flew up, around the pool, came down and landed on the chair again. The man said the butterfly then paused a second and flew off. And in that moment, he felt God’s presence with him, telling him to let go of the pain of his son and give the situation to God.

In that moment, this man experienced the presence of the Holy Spirit and the Easter message all over again. Had we done the usual Easter service, and used all of the familiar imagery and elements, this moment may not have taken place. But through metaphor we can take the gospel outside the walls of the church and make it real in the world of our faith communities.

Metaphor has the special almost supernatural ability to sear into our minds God experiences in ways that other methods just can’t. Days, weeks, even years later, metaphor can bring back a message we need to re-experience in our lives for reasons of comfort, conviction, healing and beyond.

One of our goals at Midnight Oil, with “Let Go” and our other resources, is to use media to tell stories with everyday metaphors such as a butterfly, and through these metaphors and stories to allow people to experience the truth of God’s transforming grace. When we transform ordinary, everyday moments into supernatural encounters with the presence of the Holy Spirit, people can see beyond their troubles to the hope of the risen Christ. 



From our point of view, the real power of media to tell the story of Jesus Christ in worship is obscured when we merely use the screen to project the same old typical stuff. This Easter, consider using metaphor to make the story of the resurrection more powerful and memorable.

We (the MO Guys) have recently been appointed adjunct professors in the Master of Arts Program in Missional Leadership at Northwest Nazarene University in Boise, Idaho. This innovative online program seeks to equip leaders to effectively do ministry in our twenty-first century by taking ministry outside the walls of the church.

In the interest of continuing education, we’d love to see your reactions in the comments below. Enjoy.

Note: Click on the image above to advance to the next one.

Check out the other lectures at:
1: An Introduction
2: A History of Change Resistance
3: Text to Image
4: Metaphor
5: References

UPDATE: This is available for purchase and download. Click here to learn more.

We (the MO Guys) have recently been appointed adjunct professors in the Master of Arts Program in Missional Leadership at Northwest Nazarene University in Boise, Idaho. This innovative online program seeks to equip leaders to effectively do ministry in our twenty-first century by taking ministry outside the walls of the church.

In the interest of continuing education, we’d love to see your reactions in the comments below. Enjoy.

Note: Click on the image above to advance to the next one.

Check out the other lectures at:
1: An Introduction
2: A History of Change Resistance
3: Text to Image
4: Metaphor
7: Recap

UPDATE: This is available for purchase and download. Click here to learn more.

We (the MO Guys) have recently been appointed adjunct professors in the Master of Arts Program in Missional Leadership at Northwest Nazarene University in Boise, Idaho. This innovative online program seeks to equip leaders to effectively do ministry in our twenty-first century by taking ministry outside the walls of the church.

In the interest of continuing education, we’d love to see your reactions in the comments below. Enjoy.

Note: Click on the image above to advance to the next one.

Check out the other lectures at:
1: An Introduction
2: A History of Change Resistance
3: Text to Image
5: References
7: Recap

UPDATE: This is available for purchase and download. Click here to learn more.

We (the MO Guys) have recently been appointed adjunct professors in the Master of Arts Program in Missional Leadership at Northwest Nazarene University in Boise, Idaho. This innovative online program seeks to equip leaders to effectively do ministry in our twenty-first century by taking ministry outside the walls of the church.

In the interest of continuing education, we’d love to see your reactions in the comments below. Enjoy.

Note: Click on the image above to advance to the next one.

Check out the other lectures at:
1: An Introduction
2: A History of Change Resistance
4: Metaphor
5: References
7: Recap

UPDATE: This is available for purchase and download. Click here to learn more.