Scots Church Adelaide

At first glance

I can pick out  a tune on my recorder, and teach myself to sing it. With a lot of practice I can even begin to play the tune moderately well.  I’d never even consider playing in Sunday worship.  By contrast, I have a friend who can sight read music; the first verse is impressive, the second verse is “Surely he practiced this!”

I can sight read text.  Give me a bible reading, unprepared , and I’ll do it well, adding expression as I go. It’s easy... except for many people, it is not. We who prepare worship know this well. People need time to practice the readings before the service.  Reading in worship is hard work, and stressful.

What’s my point?  When we print a liturgy in the news sheet, or throw it up on the wall, we are asking people to sight read. Essentially, we are asking them to do the Bible reading without notice.

And, we are asking them to do the Bible reading, without notice, in unison with twenty or fifty other people.  It’s no wonder responsive readings sometimes sound like a verbal version of Brown’s cows!

Some folk appear to think they can save the planet by getting everything onto one single sheet of paper.  So we struggle with a crammed full sheet, small text, and ugly layout. Other folk make it a point of pride to fit the entire verse of a hymn on one projector slide. Too bad that we of a certain age can no longer read 10 point text from 30 metres!

We wish to honour God by doing worship well. This is part of our discipleship.  So we should also seek to be compassionate to our congregations, by providing them with appropriate resources in worship.  That means we do the best we can to help people sight read. (Indeed, too much responsive material in a service, becomes excluding to some people... and not just the very young children.)

These pointers will help.

• User decent sized text.  We get the measure of “decent” by asking our oldest members to proof read our orders of service.
• Size is not everything.  The boldness of text is critical.  Kerning is critical: squashing the letters up close to each other to make them fit, also makes them harder to read.
• Line spacing helps.  Put text in short blocks. It’s easier to read.
• Use indented paragraphs so that it is easier to see if the next line is a new sentence of a continuation of the old one.
  
• Phrasing is especially important.  Make line breaks where there will be a natural breathing space.  This makes sight reading of the text far easier.
• Short sentences are easier to sight read.  Use fullstops, not long sentences with commas and many subclauses; these make it harder for people to carry the meaning towards the end of the sentence, which means they lose some of the impact of the liturgy; it descends into babble.
• If you have a program which takes your text and auto formats slides, remember that this may not break slides and lines where there is a natural breathing space. You may have to make artificial breaks so that the projector is not shifting to a new slide in the middle of a line.

All of these things are far more important than making things fit on the page or the slide.

I’ve added part of the Nicene Creed below.  The first example is taken from one a very poor order of service.  Watch the development and improvement of the layout.

Example One: Paper saver, terrible to read
We believe in one God, the Father, the Almighty,of all that is, seen and unseen.
We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ,the only Son of God, eternally begotten of the Father, God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God,begotten, not made, of one Being with the Father. Through him all things were made.
For us and for our salvation he came down from heaven: by the power of the Holy Spirit he became incarnate from the Virgin Mary, and was made man. For our sake he was crucified under Pontius Pilate; he suffered death and was buried. On the third day he rose again in accordance with the Scriptures; he ascended into heaven and is seated at the right hand of the Father. He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead, and his kingdom will have no end......