Last weekend we started a mini series called iServe (betcha can’t figure out what thats about). Shannon started it off and I’ll be wrapping it up this weekend. I thought I’d share last weeks bumper with you as my creative chaos. We thought it’d be cool to spotlight a few of our volunteers who faithfully serve every week, the unsung heros of Bay that make this baby happen.
Our next Agape is right around the corner, and this one is going to be amazing.
For those of you who don’t know, Agape is a worship concert we have about every quarter. It’s a creative worship environment with different elements, videos, communion, readings, etc.
So this next one (August 3rd) is going to be very cool because we’ve got the worship band from Gateway Church (Dallas) coming in for it. If you haven’t heard these guys you need to, they are amazing. They’ve just released their second live album and its smokin.’
Here’s the art Jeff worked up for the night. I’m diggin’ the pink.
Edging your lawn is a pretty small thing in the grand scheme of lawn maintenance, but it’s that one little thing that makes all the difference in how great your yard looks. It’s the difference between a “nice” lawn and a “well-manicured” lawn… which is a BIG difference. It’s an easy step to skip and no one is going to look down on you for skipping out it (depending on the neighborhood of course). But it’s that extra step that makes your lawn pop.
We have opportunities every day to put that little extra into everything we do. That small detail that most would overlook that takes us to the next level in excellence. It’s amazing how much the small things, I mean tiny, can make or break a design, a video, a sermon or anything else for that matter. A tiny detail, and not just any detail, but the one that is above and beyond.
These little extras are gonna take more time, but in the end its totally worth it. For me, it also means that I’m gonna need to start every project earlier. I know the rest of you aren’t like this (ha) but it’s an every week thing for me to skip these small things simply because I’ve waited till the last minute to work on my project. So I’m doing good just to crank it out, forget the polishing.
It’s these small things that set us apart. I believe the church should be the most creative and excellent place on the planet, we won’t get there by dodging the details. It’s the persistence of the details that equal greatness, not one great act.
Saturday night, about 30 minutes before our service started, our power went out. Now, thats not necessarily a big surprise because in that last few months we’ve had it go out during services, but typically its only for a second or two. Don’t get me wrong, that’s bad, because it takes a few minutes to get everything back up and running. But this black-out on Saturday was a brand new experience, you guys that follow me on twitter you may have witnessed the drama as it unfolded.
This was a whole new thing, because it went out, and it stayed out. Service time rolled around and we were still in the dark, and its starting to get hot. It stayed out until about midnight. So we created a back-up plan on the spot, which involved us cramming 130 people in our youth hang out room, which overflowed into the back portion of the main auditorium. We opened the garage door in that room for light and airflow, and we had church… the old fashioned way. Felt like an ol’ time revival.
Why we haven’t come up with a back up plan for that scenario before then I don’t know, but you better believe its something I’ll start working on real soon. If it would have been one of the larger services we would’ve had some serious problems. But it wasn’t and everything went great, considering.
This is sort of a part 2 to yesterdayspost about One Prayer. I wanted to share one other way that this series has been so great for us. One Prayer has been an awesome way to get our peeps ready for video sermons. We’ve been talking about going multi-site for a while now (read more here), so this has been a great way to introduce them to video pastor. And the response has been so much better than I expected. They reacted no different than if the speaker were live, they laughed out loud (especially with Perry), the would say their typical ‘amens,’ and they bowed their heads when the speakers prayed. Which is exactly what we were hoping would happen.
Our next step in evolving into a multi-site church is to start one video service at our current location. Our plan as of now will be to record Saturday nights message and then roll it during any one of our Sunday morning services, and the fun thing is that we are going to keep it random. We’re doing this for a few reasons:
1. Our auditorium only seats 500, and every seat is within 75 ft of the stage, so iMag has never been needed, it may would even be more of a distraction (and that totally misses the point of iMag). So our people aren’t used to watching the screens as they are in so many other churches, so rolling it on Sundays gets them used to it and hopefully makes it a little easier to transition them to a video campus (our goal is have 200 or so commit to helping us launch our first off-site campus).
2. We’re keeping it random so we can introduce it to everyone, not just one service or group of folks. We’re sharing the love man! And hopefully it will kill the negative preconceived notions that a lot of people may have, you know the ones that have never experienced it but will still complain and point out every reason why it won’t work. Those people are so much fun.
3. The last reason is to give our Pastor a break. He’s been preaching 4 services a weekend for over a year now. To keep him from burnout, we feel its a necessity to introduce a video message in one service a weekend.
For the most part these are initial ideas, we’ve still got a lot of planning and learning to do before we truly get a lock on whats gonna be going down.
I’d love to hear your thoughts, especially you guys out there that may be in a multi-site church or planning to go multi-site… give me yo wisdom!
Edging your lawn is a pretty small thing in the grand scheme of lawn maintenance, but it’s that one little thing that makes all the difference in how great your yard looks. It’s the difference between a “nice” lawn and a “well-manicured” lawn… which is a BIG difference. It’s an easy step to skip and no one is going to look down on you for skipping out it (depending on the neighborhood of course). But it’s that extra step that makes your lawn pop.
