Sermon slide size: the right dimensions for every church screen

Make your sermon slides 1920 × 1080 pixels. That’s a 16:9 widescreen shape, and it’s what nearly every modern projector, TV and streaming setup expects. Your presentation software’s “widescreen” setting is already that shape.

The rest of this is for the Sunday when the number isn’t enough: the old projector in the fellowship hall, the TVs on the side walls, the LED wall someone donated, the livestream. Each has its own quirk, and most are easy to handle.

Why 1920 × 1080 is the safe default

Two numbers describe a slide. The aspect ratio is its shape (16:9 means 16 units wide for every 9 tall). The resolution is how many pixels fill that shape. 1920 × 1080 is the most common resolution for a 16:9 screen, often called “1080p” or “Full HD”.

If the shape is wrong, you get black bars or a stretched picture. If the resolution is too low, the image gets blown up and goes soft. A 1280 × 720 background stretched to fill a 1920 × 1080 projector will look slightly out of focus no matter how well the projector is set up.

Going bigger than 1920 × 1080 rarely helps in the room. The extra pixels just make your files heavier and your presentation software slower. The one exception is a 4K screen, which is 3840 × 2160. That’s exactly twice 1920 × 1080 each way, so a 1080p slide scales up to it cleanly.

The sizes you’ll actually need

The last three aren’t for the sanctuary, but your sermon series graphic will end up there too, so it’s worth knowing them now. There’s more on that in making one design work as a square post and a tall story.

What to do about an older 4:3 projector

You may still have a 4:3 projector in a side room or a smaller chapel, or even in the main room. These are commonly 1024 × 768, a boxier shape than widescreen.

You have two options. The first is to keep making 16:9 slides and let them show with black bars above and below (called letterboxing). Nothing gets cut off, the slide just sits in a thinner strip across the middle of the screen. For one projector in a small room, this is usually fine.

The second is to make a separate 4:3 version for that room. Do this if the 4:3 screen is your main one, because letterboxing wastes about a quarter of the screen height, and the words get smaller for everyone.

What you shouldn’t do is let the software stretch a 16:9 slide to fill a 4:3 screen. Everything gets squashed sideways and circles become eggs. Check the scaling setting in your presentation software and set it to fit, not fill or stretch.

If you’re about to buy a new projector, buy a 16:9 one. Everything else you’ll make or download is already that shape.

Side-wall TVs

Side TVs are almost always 16:9, so your 1920 × 1080 slides fit them exactly. The trouble is usually the connection, not the size. Many TVs come out of the box set to “overscan”, which zooms the picture in slightly and crops the edges. You’ll notice it when the bottom line of a lyric slide or the last word of a scripture reference is clipped on the TV but fine on the main screen.

Look in the TV’s picture settings for something called “just scan”, “screen fit”, “full pixel” or “1:1”. Turn that on and the whole slide comes back. If you can’t find it, the margin advice below will cover you.

Confidence monitors

A confidence monitor is the screen facing the stage so the pastor or the worship team can see what’s up without turning around. If it simply mirrors the main screen, it needs nothing special: it’s another 16:9 display showing the same 1920 × 1080 slide.

If your software sends a separate stage view (next slide, notes, a clock), the software builds that layout, not you. Just check the person on stage can read it from where they stand.

LED walls and other odd shapes

LED walls are built from panels, so the pixel count depends on how many were bolted together. The result can be much wider than 16:9, or an odd resolution that matches no standard.

Don’t guess. Ask whoever installed it two questions: what resolution does the wall’s processor accept as input, and does it crop or scale what it receives? Most processors accept a standard 1920 × 1080 signal and then fit or crop it to the wall. If yours crops, you need to know which part of the slide survives, so put a test image up with a thin border and a word in each corner and see what’s missing.

If the wall is very wide, the usual approach is to design for the shape it really is and keep the important words in the middle, where they’ll also look right on the stream and the side TVs.

Lower thirds and the livestream

A lower third is text across the bottom part of the frame, over a camera shot. It’s how lyrics and scripture often appear on a livestream, so online viewers see the pastor and the words at the same time.

Make lower-third graphics at the full 1920 × 1080 so they line up with the camera picture, with the text in the bottom third of the frame and a solid or semi-solid band behind it so it reads over whatever the camera shows. A full-screen worship background doesn’t work as a lower third: it covers the whole shot.

This often means the room and the stream need different slides for the same moment. The room gets the full-screen lyric slide; the stream gets the lyrics in a band at the bottom. Ask whoever runs your stream how your software sends different layouts to different outputs before you make two of everything. And if lyrics go out on the stream, check your church’s song licence covers streaming as well as the room.

Keep words away from the edges

Whatever the screen, keep text off the outer edge. Keystone correction, TV overscan and LED wall cropping all eat into the edges first. A simple rule is to leave at least 5 percent of the width and height clear on every side. On a 1920 × 1080 slide, that’s about 96 pixels in from the left and right and 54 pixels in from the top and bottom.

Backgrounds and photos should still run to the edge. Only the words and logos stay inside the margin.

A quick check before Sunday

When you’ve got a new screen or a new volunteer on the computer, run through this at the Wednesday night run-through:

1. Confirm your presentation software is set to 16:9, 1920 × 1080.
2. Put up a slide with words near all four edges and check every screen: main, side TVs, confidence monitor, stream.
3. If anything is clipped, fix the setting on that screen (overscan, scaling, the wall’s processor) before you change the slide.
4. Look for stretching. A circle in the design should still be a circle.
5. Walk to the back row and read a full lyric slide from there.

If the back row struggles, the size is probably fine and the type or the colours need work. Fonts that read from the back row and why slides wash out on a projector cover those.

If you use Congregate, anything you keep in your Library re-downloads as a PNG at 1920 × 1080 for the screens, and at 1080 × 1080 and 1080 × 1920 for the square and tall versions. Whatever you use, keep one known-good 1920 × 1080 test slide on the presentation computer. It’s the fastest way to tell, on a rushed Sunday morning, whether the problem is the slide or the screen.