How to Share Planning Center Sermon Slides With Your Congregation

Planning Center is where a lot of churches already build the service — the order, the songs, the message. The question is how to get the fruit of that, especially the sermon slides and notes, out of the software and onto the phones of the people in the room. If you're already in the Planning Center ecosystem, you have a few good options, and they differ mainly in one way: whether people end up inside an app or on an open page.

Option 1: Church Center's built-in sermon notes

Planning Center's free member app, Church Center, now includes a sermon notes feature: you build structured, fill-in-the-blank note outlines with personal-note areas, and congregants follow along in the app, fill in blanks, reveal answers at their own pace, and email their notes to themselves. Because it's native to Planning Center, there's no second vendor and no extra data entry. The trade-off is that people need the Church Center app installed, so it serves your engaged members more naturally than a walk-in guest, and it's built around note outlines rather than pushing your actual projection slides.

Option 2: Export and share the slides yourself

You can always export your presentation slides to a PDF and share them with a QR code or a link — a shared cloud folder, a page on your site, or a file link. It's simple and requires no app. The downsides are the familiar ones: slides built for a widescreen projector are hard to read on a phone, a PDF can't hold notes or link out to Scripture, and it's a manual re-upload every week. Fine as a stopgap; tiring as a habit.

Option 3: Connect a tool with a Planning Center integration

The third route is a purpose-built tool that integrates with Planning Center and handles the phone experience for you. A platform like preachly.io offers a two-way Planning Center integration and takes your projection slides, reformats them for phones automatically, and puts them — with the Scripture (linked to Bible.com) and a note pad — on a page people reach by QR code or link, with no app to download. The appeal is that it pulls from the Planning Center data you already maintain and removes the manual weekly export, while keeping the experience frictionless for guests. It's a paid product (with a free tier), so it's worth weighing against what Church Center already gives you for free.

How to choose

It comes down to where you want people to land and how much friction you'll accept:

• —Already all-in on Planning Center and fine asking people to use the Church Center app? Its built-in sermon notes are free and native — start there.
• —Just need slides out occasionally and don't mind rough phone formatting? Export to PDF and share a QR code or link.
• —Want phone-formatted slides, Scripture, and notes on a no-app page, pulled from your Planning Center data automatically? A tool with a Planning Center integration like preachly.io is built for that.

There's no single right answer — a church that lives in Church Center and one that wants to reach every guest without a download will land in different places. Start from the experience you want your people to have on Sunday, and let that, not the software you happen to own, decide.