Curve Ball
Just read an interesting interview with Julie Arnold, the executive director of Service Programming for Northpoint Community Church. They have three guiding principles when it comes to planning services:
1) It has to be fun
2) It has to be excellent
3) It has to be relevant
One of the things she talked about was the importance of unpredictablity. I like to think of it as a curve ball. Can you tell it's World Series season?
The challenge with church is that it's so easy to go through the motions. You get into a rut. That's why we try to throw curve balls every once in a while.
To be honest, the wild goose chase video was a curve ball. So was dancing in the middle of the Atlanta airport. When we show those kind of videos on a Sunday it keeps people on their toes. I never want our people to know exactly what to expect. That's in keeping with our core value: expect the unexpected.
Julie Arnold shared one thing that I found incredibly helpful. Every church needs to find a rhythm that works for them. Arnold said they avoid creative burnout by choosing three series each year that they heavily package and promote. Their other series are done with excellence, but they are less intensive.
We brand all of our series. But we go all out with a few marquee series each year. We usually do the marquee series in a few time slots--New Years, Easter, Summer, and Back to School. We give those series a little extra umph.
For what it's worth, we do two outreach series each year as well. I think every week is a great week for NCCers to invite unchurched or dechurched friends. But our God @ the Box Office and God @ the Billboard series are over the top.
1) It has to be fun
2) It has to be excellent
3) It has to be relevant
One of the things she talked about was the importance of unpredictablity. I like to think of it as a curve ball. Can you tell it's World Series season?
The challenge with church is that it's so easy to go through the motions. You get into a rut. That's why we try to throw curve balls every once in a while.
To be honest, the wild goose chase video was a curve ball. So was dancing in the middle of the Atlanta airport. When we show those kind of videos on a Sunday it keeps people on their toes. I never want our people to know exactly what to expect. That's in keeping with our core value: expect the unexpected.
Julie Arnold shared one thing that I found incredibly helpful. Every church needs to find a rhythm that works for them. Arnold said they avoid creative burnout by choosing three series each year that they heavily package and promote. Their other series are done with excellence, but they are less intensive.
We brand all of our series. But we go all out with a few marquee series each year. We usually do the marquee series in a few time slots--New Years, Easter, Summer, and Back to School. We give those series a little extra umph.
For what it's worth, we do two outreach series each year as well. I think every week is a great week for NCCers to invite unchurched or dechurched friends. But our God @ the Box Office and God @ the Billboard series are over the top.
2 Comments:
My all time favorite message was one from God at the Box Office a year or two ago when you did one one Seabiscuit.
this is SO true - one of the greatest compliments we ever got here at Healing Place went something like this, "going there is like opening a box of cracker jacks - you never know what you're going to find." here's to some of my favorite cracker jacks - Mark, Joel and Dave. keep it up y'all.
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