A weekly church media checklist for volunteers

A calm Sunday morning comes from a dull, predictable week. If everyone knows what’s due and when, the slides get built in small pieces from Monday on, and Saturday night is for small fixes rather than a rebuild. Here’s a weekly rhythm a small media team can actually keep, and what to do when the sermon changes anyway.

Monday: find out what Sunday holds

Start the week by collecting the plan, not by opening your presentation software. You need the order of service, the sermon title and main scripture, the song list, and any announcements. Some of that won’t exist yet on Monday, and that’s fine. What you want is to know who will send each piece and by when.

Keep one place for all of it. A shared folder or a single message thread, the same one every week, beats requests scattered across texts, emails and a word after the service. If your pastor, worship leader and church admin each know where to drop their part, you stop chasing people.

Monday is also when you check what’s coming beyond this Sunday. A new series in three weeks needs a graphic before week one, and a special service needs extra slides. Spotting them now means they never land on a Friday. Plan your sermon series graphic before week one covers the series side.

Deadlines everyone can see

Deadlines only work if they’re agreed and written down, and if they’re the same every week. Here’s one pattern that suits a Sunday-morning church. Shift the days if your services are on Saturday evening.

Be realistic about the sermon. Plenty of preachers are still writing on Thursday, and some on Saturday. Don’t ask for the finished notes early. Ask for the scripture references and the main points early, because that’s most of what goes on the screen, and let the rest follow. A pastor who can’t give you a full manuscript by Wednesday can almost always give you a title and a passage.

Tuesday to Thursday: build in the right order

Build the parts that change least first.

Songs come first. Once the list arrives, check that your church’s song licence covers each one, then make sure the lyrics match the arrangement your band actually plays: the verse order, the repeated chorus, the bridge that comes twice. Four lines per slide at most. Put the licence line on the last slide of each song.

Announcements come next. Keep them few and short, and reuse a slide from last week when nothing has changed, after checking the date on it. Church announcement slides people actually read has more on cutting them down.

Sermon slides come last, because they change most. Start with the series graphic as the title slide and a plain layout for scripture and points that matches it. If you set that layout up once at the start of a series, each week’s sermon slides take minutes instead of an evening.

Name the file with the date, such as “2026-10-11 Sunday”, and save it in the same folder every week. Next year you’ll be glad you did.

Friday: proof it on the real screen

A slide that looks fine on your laptop can be unreadable on the projector. Proof on the screen in the room when you can, and have a second person read it. You’ll see your own typos last.

Go through every slide and check:

• Names are spelled right, especially guest speakers and anyone being prayed for.
• Every scripture reference matches the verse text, in the translation your pastor reads from.
• Lyrics follow the worship leader’s verse order, with nothing missing at the end.
• Dates, times and room names on announcements are correct for this week.
• Text sits clear of the edges and reads from the back row.
• Each song ends with its licence line.

If things look faded or hard to read up on the wall, why your slide washed out on the projector explains the usual causes.

Saturday night: when the sermon changes

It will happen. At 9:45 on Saturday night a message arrives: new third point, different closing verse, and could there be a slide for an illustration.

Agree the rule before the week this happens, not at 9:45. A fair one: after Saturday at 6pm, changes go in as text on the existing design and nothing else. A new scripture, a reworded point, a dropped slide, all fine. A new graphic, a photo hunt or a redesign waits for another week. A pastor is often relieved to have the rule, because it stops them feeling guilty for asking.

Keep that plain sermon-point layout ready so a new slide is a copy, a paste and a retype. Make the change, proof it once, and reply with exactly what you changed and anything you couldn’t do. If a point didn’t make it onto the screen, the pastor can still read it aloud. Then go to bed. A tired operator on Sunday morning causes more trouble than one missing slide.

Sunday morning: the run-through

Arrive early enough to run the whole service before anyone else needs the room, usually during the band’s rehearsal. Power on, open the file, and step through every slide with the actual screen in front of you, following the band as they play. Check the confidence monitor if you have one, the side TVs, and any lobby screen.

Take two minutes with the pastor to walk through the sermon slides and confirm the order. Then start the pre-service loop, copy the file to a USB stick as a backup, and keep the run sheet next to the keyboard.

After the service: five minutes that save next month

Before you pack up, make a short note of anything that went wrong, like a lyric in the wrong order or a slide that was hard to read, and pass it on to whoever runs next week. Then put this week’s file and any graphics in their proper folder. If you keep finished designs in Congregate, they stay in your Library and re-download at any of the three sizes, so the series graphic is there when the pastor wants it for a social post in week four. However you store them, where to keep your church’s graphics will help you find them next Advent.

Then Monday comes round, and you collect the plan again.