Teaching Series Slides Software Built Into Your Church's Display Engine

Ekkli treats teaching and sermon slides as a first-class content type in the same live display engine that runs your worship songs and Bible verses — not a separate PowerPoint file the preaching team emails to the booth every week. Build a teaching deck once, drop it straight into Sunday's service plan next to the worship set and the sermon verses, and reuse it across every week of a series without rebuilding anything from scratch.

If your church currently runs two separate systems — presentation software for songs and verses, and a PowerPoint or Keynote file the pastor puts together separately — you already know the friction: two logins, two file formats, two places for something to go wrong on a Sunday morning. This page is about how Ekkli's teaching-slide feature actually works, not about how to design a good sermon slide (for that, see the best-practice guide linked below).

One display engine, not a separate slide tool

In most church tech setups, "the slides" are really two different workflows wearing one label. Song lyrics and Bible verses live in the presentation software the tech booth runs. Sermon and teaching slides live in whatever the pastor or a staff member built the deck in — usually PowerPoint or Google Slides — and get handed off separately, often as a last-minute file drop before doors open.

Ekkli collapses that into one system. A teaching or sermon slide deck is built and stored inside the same content library as your songs, Bible verses, and announcements, and it displays through the same live engine — the same remote control, the same stage view, the same offline export. There's no exporting a PowerPoint file to PDF, no re-importing images into a separate presentation tool, no second login for whoever built the sermon slides this week.

That matters for who actually gets to build the deck, too. Because it's built by and for the preaching team inside the same tool the tech volunteers already use, a pastor or teaching-series leader can put a deck together during the week without needing to hand a file to someone else to convert or reformat before Sunday.

Reusing a deck across a teaching series

Most churches don't preach a single standalone sermon each week — they run a series over several weeks, often four to eight, sometimes longer. A series usually shares a consistent look: a title slide, a series graphic, a recurring "where we are in the series" marker, and a structure that repeats week to week even though the content changes.

Ekkli's teaching slides are built to be reused that way. Instead of starting from a blank deck every Sunday, the tech or teaching team can duplicate last week's deck, keep the series title and formatting intact, and swap in this week's outline points and Scripture references. The series lives in the library as a set of related decks rather than a pile of one-off files with inconsistent naming buried in someone's downloads folder — which also means a new volunteer can find and understand a mid-series deck without having to ask what "sermon3_FINAL_v2" was supposed to be.

Announcement slides in the same place

Announcement slides — upcoming events, a giving reminder, a welcome slide for first-time visitors — go through the same content type as teaching decks and the same display engine as everything else. They can be queued before the service starts, dropped between worship and the sermon, or run on a loop before doors open, without switching tools or formats to do it.

What the operator actually sees on a Sunday

From the tech booth, a teaching or sermon deck behaves exactly like a song or a Bible verse in the running order: it's an item in the service plan that can be jumped to instantly, advanced slide by slide, or skipped if the pastor runs long and cuts a section. The same phone or tablet remote control that runs the worship set also runs the sermon slides, so the operator doesn't need to switch apps or hand off control when the service moves from worship into teaching.

Because teaching slides sit in the same display engine as everything else, they also inherit the same display styling — backgrounds, transitions, and any countdown or banner overlay your church has set up — so a sermon slide doesn't look like a visually mismatched import bolted onto an otherwise consistent-looking service. And because the whole service plan, songs through sermon slides, can be exported as a self-contained offline HTML file, a dropped internet connection mid-sermon doesn't mean the teaching slides go dark any more than the worship slides would.

Why this matters for a volunteer-run tech team

Small, volunteer-run churches feel the two-system problem more than larger ones do, simply because there are fewer people covering more roles. If the person who normally builds the sermon slides is away, and the fallback tech volunteer only knows the presentation software, a separate PowerPoint workflow becomes a real Sunday-morning risk rather than an inconvenience. Keeping teaching slides inside the same tool as songs and verses means anyone who already knows how to run the service plan can also open, adjust, or rebuild a sermon deck — there's no second skill set to train a backup volunteer on.

It also removes a common last-minute failure: the pastor finishes the sermon outline Saturday night, and instead of emailing a file that someone then has to import, reformat, and test before the 9am service, the deck already lives where the rest of Sunday's content lives, ready to slot into the plan.

How it fits with the rest of your worship display

Teaching and sermon slides aren't a bolt-on feature — they share the same remote control, stage view, and offline export as the rest of Ekkli's presentation tool. For the full picture of how live display and remote control work together during a service, see worship display and remote control. For how your song library feeds into the same service plan, see the song library. And for how Scripture references are looked up and displayed alongside a sermon, see Bible verse display.

If you're looking for guidance on what to actually put on a sermon slide — how much text, what to include, how to format for readability — that's a separate question from the tool itself. See our sermon slides best-practices guide for best-practice tips on building sermon slides.

Frequently asked questions

Do I need separate software for sermon slides and worship slides?

No. Ekkli treats teaching and sermon decks as a content type inside the same display engine that runs songs, Bible verses, and announcements. There's one login, one running order, and one remote control for the whole service.

Can I reuse a teaching slide deck across multiple weeks of a series?

Yes. A teaching series deck can be duplicated week to week, keeping the series title and formatting consistent while you swap in that week's outline and Scripture references, instead of rebuilding a deck from scratch every Sunday.

Who is meant to build the teaching slides — the tech team or the pastor?

Either, or both. Because teaching slides live in the same tool the tech team already uses, a pastor or teaching-series leader can build the deck directly during the week without handing off a separate file for someone else to convert or import.

Do teaching slides work with the phone remote control and stage view?

Yes. Teaching and sermon slides are an item in the same service plan as songs and verses, so the same remote control, stage view, and display styling apply to them as to the rest of the service.

What happens to sermon slides if the internet drops during the service?

The whole service plan, including teaching and sermon slides, can be exported as a self-contained offline HTML file ahead of time, so the deck keeps running locally if the connection drops mid-service.

Is this feature available on the free trial?

Yes. Teaching and sermon slides are part of Ekkli's six-month free trial, for churches up to 50 people, with no card required to start.

This page is maintained by the Ekkli team, who build the presentation tool described above. Have a question about moving your teaching series into Ekkli? Reach out — we're happy to help you think it through.