5 Tips For Preaching to a Camera

Well, nobody saw this coming. If you’re reading this in the future, I’m writing this during the middle of the COVID-19 Pandemic. Churches around the world are forced to shut down, and the only thing keeping us connected to our people is the internet. We’re preaching to a camera instead of a crowd.

I swear, God has used my experience with ProPreacher.com over the last seven years and dabbling with videos on YouTube over the last few years to help my church. 

I’m doing more video every day than I ever have before. We’re cranking out daily devotional videos, announcement videos, and multiple online services every week.

But I’ll tell you what, a few weeks ago, when I preached my first full-length sermon in an auditorium with hundreds of empty seats except for one guy behind a camera and a sound engineer way, way in the back of the room, it was a weird experience.

The usual feedback you get from your audience isn’t there. Nobody laughed at my jokes (except for me). Nobody clapped or said, “Amen.” Nobody was in the pews nodding their head along with me. 

It was just empty. I didn’t like it.

But what I will tell you is that I have learned a lot over the years of doing video, and the experience has really paid off. I’m not perfect at it, there are a lot of areas that I’m trying to improve, but I have gotten better. 

Preaching to a camera is just different than preaching to a crowd. Can we agree on that? And a lot of pastors are wrestling with learning an entirely different skillset right now.

So here are a few tips I’ve learned that will help you preach to a camera better.

1. Be Yourself

Don’t feel like you need to imitate other churches, and other famous pastors you see on the screen. Be who God called you to be. 

Some of you are young and trendy. Some of you are old and nerdy. That’s okay. God uses all kinds of pastors to reach all kinds of people. The modern and the traditional crowds will reach different folks.

Be yourself. I’m going to talk about a few things here, but we need an authentic preacher more than a polished preacher.

Stop looking at other pastors and trying to be who you are not. Be who God created you to be. 

He knit you together to be who you are. God doesn’t make cheap knock offs. Every person is 100% authentically hand-crafted to be unique. You are a one-of-a-kind work of art, designed by God to reach the people he has uniquely gifted you to reach. 

It may be the masses. It may be the few. But the person God created to reach those people isn’t some other preacher; it’s you.

2. Look at the Lens

Look at the lens. This one is hard to do. I find myself looking off to the ceiling, looking at the empty chairs, looking at my notes. As much as you can, look at that camera.

Don’t stare at it with a creepy, unblinking gaze…

But look at the lens it like you would look a person in the eyes across the table from you in a cafe. 

You have to make a human connection with the camera like you would anyone else. It feels weird because it’s an inanimate object, but you have to think of it like it’s a person because it represents every individual person who will be watching.

It can be helpful to imagine the people you are talking to like they are sitting in their living room on the other side of that lens—like the lens is a window to their living room—and you are looking right at them. 

When you look away, you look disengaged. When you look at the lens, it’s like you are looking people in the eye. It captures our attention, engages us, and feels more personal.

So look at the lens. And if your notes are getting in the way, get rid of them, get a teleprompter, or tape them below the camera if you have to.

3. Up Your Energy

I don’t know what it is, but energy levels diminish through video. If you are a slightly energetic preacher, you may be surprised at how much you appear to lack energy on video. 

It’s kind of like the difference between speaking in a small room and a large room. When it’s just you a few dozen people in a classroom, everyone is close up. It’s more intimate, more personal, and you don’t have to be as animated. It’s more casual, like hanging out with a group of friends. 

But when you preach in a large auditorium with hundreds of seats, people are much further away. It’s less personal. There is a lot more distance between you and your audience. So you can’t approach it with the same energy level. You have to project and speak louder, and you have to be more even more energetic and animated. Your average energy level won’t have the same effect; you have to expand it to fill the space.

Preaching on video is more like preaching in a big room. Even if the shot is up close, there’s almost a distance between you and your viewers. So to engage people through the screen and hold their attention, you have to up your energy level.

It doesn’t mean bouncing around on stage like the hype man at a concert, but it does mean that you need to take your average energy level and boost it a few levels. You probably shouldn’t crank it up to 11, but you will need to boost your energy level from a 5 to a 7.

4. Expand Your Gestures

This goes along with what I was just saying.

When you are sitting in a church on a Sunday morning, and you are tired of looking at a static preacher, what do you do? You look at the screen, you look at your notes, you look out a window, you check your phone (and hopefully it’s the Bible app), or around the room at people nearby. 

You aren’t locked in to one thing that you have to look at, so you can sit still longer even when your attention wanes.

But on video, you only have one view. So the more you move (or change camera angles), the more it helps break up the monotony and hold people’s wandering attention.

But like I was saying about your energy level, a funny thing about gestures on video is that you almost always have to double the size of them for it to show on camera. 

So if you usually make small hand motions while you are preaching, you may need to make them bigger and more elaborate to be effective.

If you don’t already, you need to speak more with your whole body and your hands. Work on being more animated in your facial expressions and body movement. 

This does not mean being fake. We don’t need to see you acting like a clown. I’m talking about natural expressions that overflow from how you really feel inside about what you are saying.

Your passion needs to be felt in your heart, heard in your voice, and seen in your actions.

5. Preach the Word

2 Timothy 4:2 commands us to preach the word in season and out. We are definitely not in a normal season right now. So what should we do? Preach the word.

This is the same as when you are preaching to a camera or not. The most important thing is that you stay true to God and His Word. We aren’t trying to be hyped up, evangelical superstars. We are trying to be faithful to the Lord, and continue to encourage and equip his people and spread the gospel to a lost and broken world.

So whatever you do, the most important thing is not your energy or gestures or the look of your video, it’s staying true to the Word. 

Say what the Bible says. Don’t say what the Bible doesn’t say. 

God is the same yesterday, today, and forever. His Word has not changed, and his message has not changed. 

Now, the way we deliver that message in person or on video may change; how we explain the message through our God-given personality might change, but the message is the same.

We might use different technologies, different languages, and different words, but the hope we have in an unchanging God is the same as it was when Jesus rose from the grave 2,000 years ago, and it will remain the same until Jesus returns.

Preach the Word.

Preaching to a camera may feel strange at first, but the more you do it, the better you’ll get. Trust me; my first videos were bad.

Keep on preaching.