Creative Teams

Well this is for all of you pastors out there who are doing the lone ranger preaching style where you come up with all of the ideas and your develop all of the sermons. STOP listen to your sermons your not that good. Start doing this with a team of people and you will get some amazing result. I am not the one who came up with this, the people at Disney have been doing it for years and Ed Young from Fellowship Church I think brought this idea to the forfront of the church. But to make this happen as the lead pastor you are going to have to do a few thing. Trust me I had to do them to and they are not easy in the beginning but over time creating as a team will make you a better communicator and give your people more buy in to what you are doing.

Here are a couple of things you as the leader need to to if you consider trying this model.

1. Check your ego at the door- you don't have to have all of the good ideas
2. Shut up- as leader we like to talk more that listen so listen more than you talk at theses meetings
3. Invite people who do not think like you. Some conservative, some radical. (if possible have a person who is not a Christ Follower yet on the team)
-I know the last one scared you but a bunch of Christ Followers sitting around a room discuss the needs of people who are not Christ Followers is a waste of time.
4. do the meeting when it is convient for the other people not you.
5. PRAY PRAY PRAY- Make sure that you are prayed up and ready to recieve.

Well now that you know what you need to do here is how we conduct our meetings I hope this helps. we have do our meetings about 4 different ways and we have only do two this way but they have both been the most productive.

1. Provide food for the team. If you are asking them to come to a meeting in the evening do not expect them to have time to go home and eat and then come so provide food for them. (If you feed them they will come)

2. Have a schedule for the time that your are going to spend on each topic. (you do not need a time natzi but a schedule help with the focus) Below you will find our schedule for last night

7:00-7:15p- Eat
7:15-7:20p- Personal mind dump
7:20-7:35p- answer questions about CHI series (series on Jesus) Series begins August 5
Chi Series Questions
1. Who is Jesus to You?
2. What is confusing to you about Jesus?
3. What misconceptions do people have about Jesus?
4. What come to mind when you see the symbol X?
5. List any set ideas for Chi:

7:35-8:05p discuss questions and ideas from Chi questions
8:05-8:15p Answer questions about confessions series (series begins Sept. 9)
Confessions Questions
1. What does the word confession make you think of?
2. What is your definition of confession?
3. What if the church confessed?
4. List any advertising ideas for this series?
5. List any set ideas for this series?

8:15-8:40p discuss questions and brain storm ideas for Confessions series
8:40-9:00p Brain storm ideas for lat two series for fall (one beginning Nov 4 Felt need, one beginning Dec. 9 Holiday series.)
9:00p Close in prayer

3. have 5-10 minutes of personal mind dump time with music and paper. (this encourages everyone to clear their mind of stuff from the day. The paper helps them to remember to come back to it if it is necessary)

4. Make sure that you have done your homework with a few people so that the question on the paper provoke the type of answers you are looking for.

5. Remember there are no bad ideas when it come to creativity. Plus everyone and all comments. I have heard people say before that they tell first time people in there creative meeting that their ideas are bad just to see how they will respond, to that I would say you are an idiot and uninformed about the creative process. Creative people are sensitive to criticism and a creative meeting in not the place for criticism it is the place for ideas. If a person becomes critical in the meeting you need to shut them down or they will shut down the whole meeting.

6. Personally invite people to the meeting do not ask for volunteers for the meeting our you will get all of the crazy people who sign up for everything.

7. Rotate people on and off the team.

8. work the main series first then spend small amounts of time on future series to prep for next meeting.

9 . Have fun.

Mid week Mind Dump

Well it's Wednesday. And I am finishing up my thought for this weekends message for Live Free Die Hard. No I have not seen the movie I am going to do that at noon today but I have seen enough of it to know what I am going to talk about. Our new series "EPIC" has been just that epic. We have had so many people getting connected to other people just by catching a movie together every weekend. This truly has been an amazing summer. We have been averaging over 250 in attendance over the summer thus far which is over 100 people more than last year. God has been so faithful over the last year. I can tell you that last year at this time I was wondering if God had called me to the right thing. WOW am I amazed now. Thanks God for showing me that it never was about me and never will be about me. So This morning I could not sleep and got up around 5:30am. Now I know some of you do that everyday and to you I would say "good for you Just don't think you get extra credit with God just because your an early riser cause your not" HA HA. So when I decided that sleep was no longer an option for me I remembered some items on my "honey do" list so I went out into the garage in my underwear (I don't know why it matters that I was in my underwear" however, I digress I went looking for the touch up paint for the front door of the house because I decided to paint it at 6am. Susie came out into the garage and said what in the world are you doing out here in you underwear with a can of paint. So I explained to her that I could not sleep and thought it was a good time to paint, to which she said whatever and went back to bed. Now I know may of you are saying Paul what is the point. Well there is no point this is my Wednesday mind dump and I am wondering why I painted my front door, then mowed and weeded and edged my grass today all before 8am. Which is usually when I wake up. I don't know I just have a little more energy today so that is pretty cool. I am also going on vacation next Friday so maybe I am getting pumped for that. Whatever it is I am having an awesome day so far and I trust that you are to. I have another post for today on Creative teams that I will post in a bit have an awesome day.

Sorry It's been a while

I can not believe that it has been almost a month since I have blogged. There has been so much going on around here. We launched our first night service Sunday June 3. It was awesome!!! We had 73 people attend and over 300 for the full day. Just giving people options I think helps people want to come to church. I am learning more and more that people really want to attend church but their lives are so crazy that they can only show up about once a month. So by adding options you allow people more opportunities to connect with God and others. This is one of our core values so it is really cool when a plan comes together.

Our new EPIC blockbuster series has really be great with several people attending the movie nights each week. This series has been particularly interesting for me because we are dealing with issues that we all deal with. From the first week with Shrek and dealing with the whole idea of not wanting to step up when called upon to Oceans Eleven and the whole idea of revenge. After our service on that Sunday I had a gentleman come up to me and say I really needed that to which I responded normally "thanks I am glad God used it" however, then he continued with his reason and told me that he had been attacked the previous week by 6 people and we all know as humans that revenge is what we want to do when we are violated in that manner. WOW just to think that God knew what was going to happen to that guy on that week and to orchestrate the message is really amazing.

Well this week we are gearing up for "Evan Almighty" and I can tell you that I am really jazzed about this movie because Evan does something completely out of the box. Maybe we need to step out of our box a little more and see what God could do when we did that. Well that is all for now. I promise it will not be so long between my next post. see ya.