ProPresenter Sermon Slides: Best Practices for Scripture on Screen

The pastor reads verse one, tells a story, then comes back to read verse two. Meanwhile the slide still shows both verses together, and everyone reading along has to hunt for their place. Problems like that usually aren’t ProPresenter problems. They start with what the slide builder receives from the teaching team and the rules for splitting scripture.

These are the practices I used building sermon slides for the teaching team at the church I served. They cover the notes handoff, four scripture rules, handling long verses, layout styles and how to stop rebuilding the look every week.

It Starts With the Pastor’s Notes

At the church I served, the teaching team wrote an outline for each message and carried it on stage while preaching. The notes could hold as much or as little as they wanted. But they always included any scripture, main points or graphic references meant for the screens.

Before the notes were printed, every element that needed to be a slide was made bold and digitally highlighted in yellow. For the person building slides, that turns a page of prose into a checklist: every highlight becomes a slide.

Ask for the Verses, Not Just the References

This habit matters most. Our pastors didn’t just give us scripture references and leave us to find the best version. They wrote out the entire passages in their notes, and we copied and pasted the versions they were using into ProPresenter.

A lot of pastors send the slide person their references by text or email, and there’s nothing wrong with texting or email. The issue is incomplete content. When you get the references with the verses written out, in whatever version the pastor plans to read, nobody has to worry that the screen won’t match the pulpit.

One pastor I know sends his team the notes as a simple PDF, with each slide separated by a dash. That file makes setup in ProPresenter very simple, because it already shows where every slide breaks.

What to ask your teaching team for:

• Every scripture reference and the full verse text, in the version they’ll read from
• Main points worded exactly as they should appear on screen
• Any graphic they want shown
• A clear marker for each slide, such as highlighting, bold or a dash between slides

Four Rules for Scripture Slides

These are the best practices I use when creating scripture slides.

1. Put the Reference on Every Slide, and Show the Range

Every scripture slide should display its reference. If the pastor is reading several verses back to back, show the whole range.

For Matthew 6:22–23, I put verse 22 on one slide and verse 23 on the next. Both slides carry the 22–23 range, so anyone glancing up knows which passage is being read.

2. Give Every Verse Its Own Slide

Say the passage is Genesis 1:1–2. Pastors like to read verse one and talk about it before reading the next verse. A quick comment is fine. But if they tell a story, I have to take the lower third off the screen.

When they finally get back to verse two, if it’s on the same slide as verse one, people have to hunt for where they’re supposed to be reading.

Pastors don’t usually stop mid-verse, so separating slides by verses works perfectly.

Splitting on the verse follows how people actually preach, so the slide changes at the moment the pastor moves on.

3. Show the Verse Number at the Start of Each Verse

If each verse gets its own slide, put the verse number before the text. In the Matthew example, 22 and 23 each start their slide. It’s the fastest way for someone reading along to confirm they’re in the right place.

4. Use the Built-In Bibles When the Pastor Calls Out Scripture

If your pastor likes to call out scripture that you have to get on screen quickly, you should definitely be using ProPresenter’s built-in Bibles. There’s a quick walkthrough further down.

When a Verse Is Too Long for One Slide

Some verses are just big. Philippians 4:8 is one, and I didn’t want to make the text small, so I split it across two slides.

My order for splitting slides:

1. By verse first, following rule 2.
2. By sentence second.
3. Evenly when neither works.

Philippians 4:8 has lots of commas and not many sentences, so I split it evenly to make both slides look good. Readability comes first.

Pick a Layout Style

To show some options, I built demo sermon slides from ProPresenter’s built-in themes. Go through those themes yourself for ideas. These are the styles I showed.

Full-screen graphic. A full-screen series image (mine was made in Photoshop) can be your bumper, sit on screen during the message or fill the screens between points. The matching scripture slide puts the verse and its reference full-screen.

Main points. Points can be full-screen as well. One demo put two points on the same slide, and another showed all three main points of a three-point sermon on one full-screen slide.

Lower thirds over live video. The green areas in the lower-third demos become live video, and the graphic stays where it is. That’s how scripture sits in a band along the bottom while the camera shows the pastor.

Left of center. When we were online only during COVID, we tried putting the scripture verse on the left and the reference along the bottom. It worked out really well.

One design lesson from those demos: keep the lower-third bar separate from your background art. In one demo, the bar was part of the Photoshop graphic, so it showed up on a slide that was only a point. When the bar is its own element, you can take it away whenever there’s no scripture.

For more on designing sermon slides for a stream, see Design Guidelines for Better Sermon Slides and Perfect Full Screen and Lower Thirds Sermon Slides Tutorial.

Save the Look in a Sermons Theme

Once we decided on a slide style for a series or a sermon, I saved it in our sermons theme. That way we could apply it each week while setting up ProPresenter, instead of restyling everything.

The theme holds the design, so whoever builds the slides only has to drop in text. If themes are new to you, ProPresenter 7 | Themes & Templates Training shows how to apply a template and why templates are so powerful.

Quick Scripture With ProPresenter’s Built-In Bibles

This is how rule 4 works in practice, as shown in the video. Labels may have moved in newer versions.

1. Click the Bibles tab and look up the passage at the top, for example Genesis 1:1.
2. Set the range, for example 1 through 2.
3. If you have more translations installed, change the version to match what the pastor is reading.
4. Set verse and reference. They decide what the applied theme does with each piece of text.
5. Open Options. Turn on show verse numbers and break on new verse. Turn on display translation if you want “ASV” (or your translation) on the slide. Font color and verse reference options are there too.
6. Select the theme. This one is super important.

From there, click a slide to show it live right away. Or right-click, choose copy, go back to Show and paste the slides into your presentation.

Play around with it. With some practice, you can have well-formatted scripture slides ready in literally seconds.

At the church I served, we didn’t use the built-in Bibles. Like everyone else, we had our own style for setting up and presenting scripture. Either way works if you follow the four rules. The full feature, including installing translations and building a scripture theme, is in Getting Started with ProPresenter Bibles Feature.

Common Sermon-Slide Mistakes

• The screen doesn’t match the pulpit. Ask for the verses written out in the version being read, or switch the Bibles translation to match.
• Two verses share one slide. Split on the verse so people don’t have to hunt.
• A scripture slide has no reference. Every scripture slide gets one. Show the full range when verses are read back to back.
• A long verse is crammed into tiny text. Split it by verse, then by sentence, then evenly.
• A lower-third bar shows up on a point slide. Build the bar as its own element instead of baking it into the background graphic.
• You restyle every week. Save the series look in a sermons theme and apply it.
• You’re working from a bare list of references. Ask for highlighted notes, or a PDF with a dash between slides.

If you’d rather not design sermon layouts from a blank screen, the ProPresenter Quick Start Template includes sermon-note layouts along with Looks, Themes and Macros. You can drop your pastor’s text into a finished design. It works with ProPresenter 7.1 and newer.

Watch the Video

In the video I show the notes, the demo layouts and the Bibles feature. You can jump to asking for more than scripture references, the slide layout types, the best practices or using the built-in Bibles.

The Whole Thing in One Picture

• Fix the handoff first. Highlighted notes with the full verses written out, in the version the pastor will read.
• Reference on every slide. Show the range when verses are read back to back.
• One verse per slide. Pastors don’t usually stop mid-verse.
• Verse number at the start of each verse.
• Long verses: split by verse, then sentence, then evenly.
• Built-in Bibles for scripture that’s called out on the fly, with verse numbers and break on new verse turned on.
• Save the look in a sermons theme so weekly setup is a drop-in job.

Keep Going

• Lyrics follow the same readability rules: ProPresenter song lyric slides.
• Streaming? A dedicated ProPresenter stream output turns scripture and points into stream-friendly graphics.
• For the bigger picture, see the ProPresenter complete training guide for church.

More training is on the YouTube channel: youtube.com/@CrazyAmazingDesigns.