Blog: Church Slides
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Church Slides - Wednesday, November 12, 2025
For the past month, I've been working on a new project: Church Slides, a web-based PowerPoint slide builder tool for worship services.
PowerPoint is a pretty old-school way of displaying songs during service, but our church still uses it extensively. And our individual worship leaders have the job of putting together song slides each week, which can be slightly cumbersome. So at the suggestion of one of the worship leaders, who also happens to be in our small group and is my workout buddy, I built this tool to help streamline the weekly prep that people have to do.
The tool is basically a web form with the backend being a Python script so that I could use the python-pptx library. Users have to manually copy-paste song lyrics, but the tool takes care of creating the slides with the desired formatting. Priscilla thought it deserved its own domain, and I was pleasantly surprised that churchslides.com was available, though that's probably because PowerPoint is kind of niche for church services now.
I think the tool is starting to gain traction; one of our worship leaders used it to generate the slides for last week's service. She said that it reduced the prep time from 20 minutes down to 5 minutes, so that's progress. My hope is that this will be a useful tool for other churches as well, e.g. small churches that still rely on PowerPoint for its simplicity and nominal cost. Eventually I'd like to see what integration I can do with Planning Center (the platform that we use to track services and manage song sheets), with the goal of being able to pull song lyrics automatically—basically eliminating the manual copy and pasting.
Even if this tool ultimately is not used much (or at all), I think it was worthwhile to build. In the process, I learned more JavaScript as I wrote code to manipulate the DOM and used AJAX to make the app more responsive. I even rolled some minor improvements back into my personal site.
On the topic of software development, I'm pretty sure that I'll never go back to a corporate job. Working at a non-profit, particularly one with a Christian focus, is still on the table... but probably still a ways out. In the meantime, I'm glad that I can still leverage my software skills, and learn some new ones, as I find new avenues to keep automating things and make people's lives a little better. Sometimes the focus is relatively small, but the impact is meaningful nonetheless.
PowerPoint is a pretty old-school way of displaying songs during service, but our church still uses it extensively. And our individual worship leaders have the job of putting together song slides each week, which can be slightly cumbersome. So at the suggestion of one of the worship leaders, who also happens to be in our small group and is my workout buddy, I built this tool to help streamline the weekly prep that people have to do.
The tool is basically a web form with the backend being a Python script so that I could use the python-pptx library. Users have to manually copy-paste song lyrics, but the tool takes care of creating the slides with the desired formatting. Priscilla thought it deserved its own domain, and I was pleasantly surprised that churchslides.com was available, though that's probably because PowerPoint is kind of niche for church services now.
I think the tool is starting to gain traction; one of our worship leaders used it to generate the slides for last week's service. She said that it reduced the prep time from 20 minutes down to 5 minutes, so that's progress. My hope is that this will be a useful tool for other churches as well, e.g. small churches that still rely on PowerPoint for its simplicity and nominal cost. Eventually I'd like to see what integration I can do with Planning Center (the platform that we use to track services and manage song sheets), with the goal of being able to pull song lyrics automatically—basically eliminating the manual copy and pasting.
Even if this tool ultimately is not used much (or at all), I think it was worthwhile to build. In the process, I learned more JavaScript as I wrote code to manipulate the DOM and used AJAX to make the app more responsive. I even rolled some minor improvements back into my personal site.
On the topic of software development, I'm pretty sure that I'll never go back to a corporate job. Working at a non-profit, particularly one with a Christian focus, is still on the table... but probably still a ways out. In the meantime, I'm glad that I can still leverage my software skills, and learn some new ones, as I find new avenues to keep automating things and make people's lives a little better. Sometimes the focus is relatively small, but the impact is meaningful nonetheless.