Worship Planning Process
On an email list I participate in for DCEs, someone recently sent an email looking for ideas on themes to use in Worship for Lent. I thought it might be helpful to document our worship planning process as a resource for others working in this area. Here are some of the things we do as part of creating a meaningful worship experience each weekend at First Trinity:
We’re much smarter and creative together. Myself, Pastor Chuck (Senior Pastor), Sue Brese (Traditional Worship Director) and Jubal Myer (Contemporary Worship Director) meet twice a month usually to brainstorm ideas. I lead the meeting and we spend time:
- Picking Series Themes: We look at what other churches are doing online. Life Church and David Choate at Table Rock Fellowship have been big inspirations for us in particular. We brainstorm ideas as we browse through what they’ve done. Sometimes we use their concepts and create our own sermon titles/artwork, other times we use most of their concepts/titles. Life Church grants the rights to their artwork, so we end up using a lot of it. David’s material is more brainstorm fodder for us. We try to pay attention to the rhythm of the year and pick topics that apply. For example, our current series for the start of the new year is titled MOVE and focuses on becoming more spiritually fit at a time when people are making New Year’s resolutions.
- Refining Sermon Titles/Themes: Pastor usually has in his mind what he wants to talk about, but we refine it with him and settle on three readings for the service/sermon to be based around. We also come up with some main ideas to help plan the worship service without having a complete sermon outline to work from.
- Refine Artwork Concepts: I usually pitch multiple concepts to the group and we talk about them. Later I develop samples using images from iStockPhoto.com or other “Open Source” sources that we’re legally allowed to use. These are circulated among staff in the building and further refined before settling on a final graphic for the series. This gets used as a title slide, the background for the Bible verses in worship, on our sermon outlines if possible and on the website as a promotion on the front page and a banner on the series page, linked from our “Listen” section.
In addition to this group, we also bring together a larger group of staff before and after the Christmas and Lent/Easter seasons to talk about the theme and get all our ducks in a row. This process includes:
- Brainstorming: We review notes from the previous year and decide what elements we want to keep and what new things we want to try this year. This might include new altar decoration ideas, new traffic flow patterns (like adding a Communion station to the loft for Easter Sunday) and the scheduling/training of volunteers.
- Deadlines: During the busy seasons, we have a lot more going on and need to allow more time for bulletin production and distribution of music/scripts/etc. This means more deadlines to ensure everything gets done. We set deadlines for finding and training volunteers. Deadlines for getting content to Dona for print layout. Deadlines for sermon outlines. If it needs to get done, it gets a deadline date.
- Review: Afterwards, we meet to review the season that was. We debrief what went right and what could be improved next year. Our awesome office manager Kathy Figini records all this and starts the process again the following year. If we had any new ideas to try for the following year, or things we should do away with, we record them so we’ll remember later.
I was talking this week with Bekah and Kathy about how the sermon series and even individual titles stand out to me more now than they used to. I never could have told you what topics we covered a year ago in worship, but now I can probably rattle off at least half of the themes, if not 70 or 80%. I think the more cohesive theme packages we’ve been developing have helped with retention. Or maybe it’s just because I work so much more with these areas now. Or maybe it’s both.
To First Trinity readers: What would help you connect more with God in worship? What kinds of series would you like to see in the future?
For everyone: What worship planning processes have you used in your church? Or what topics have you seen that really struck you and meaningful? If you have a link to your church’s sermon archive, let me have it.
Share your thoughts in the comments.
Announcements or Newsletters?
One of the tips from Erik Ticen, our awesome communications consultant at Vaughn Street that helped us analyze and improve our communication strategy, suggested we try to capitalize more on our weekend worship folder. Each weekend, 425 people get a copy, each week, plus some at some special services. We’ve always used the worship folder as an announcements sheet, primarily focusing on what’s coming up with the occasional story about what happened thrown in. In light of people not knowing what’s going on, what if we started treating the announcements as a form of story telling?
Starting this weekend and going through the the MOVE sermon series, we’re trying something different on the front page of the announcements. I’ll be writing an article, almost as if it were a paper version of a blog, highlighting some of the goings on that you can find inside the announcements. It’s less informational (though there’s certainly some in there) and more relational (kind of like a friend sharing what’s happening in their life). It invites people to engage more with the content, while also acting as a summary page, highlighting what you’ll find inside.
Let me know what you think about it in the comments, our through the First Trinity Feedback page. If you just can’t wait to see what I wrote, you can always sneak a peak by downloading the upcoming announcements page. It kinda feels like traveling forward in time when you do. Sadly, you only get that feeling on Friday afternoon before it becomes the present again.
Artwork: Contemporary Worship Sign
When I informally poll members at First Trinity about what drew them into this family of faith, I often hear some variation of: “I was driving by and saw the Contemporary Worship sign.” I’m struck by the comment, because it’s really a pretty simple sign, but it really speaks to people who are looking for something different than “traditional” church.
Side note about “Traditional” church: I struggle with this label because I believe what people really mean when speaking negatively about past church experiences and labeling them “traditional” is something akin to “empty rituals that have no meaning to me.” There’s lots of other baggage tied up in that word, but it’s often used negatively by those seeking a more “contemporary” worship style. We call our other services “Traditional”, but Sue Brese does such an excellent job of making them anything but “traditional” in the usual (read: bad) sense. They might use familiar liturgical elements and style, but it’s nothing like the “traditional (bad)” church where I grew up. I prefer “contemporary” worship myself, but I have yet to participate in a traditional service carefully planned and orchestrated by Sue and not felt like it was relevant and speaking to me. But this isn’t about worship styles, it’s about signage!
Here’s our new Contemporary Worship Sign:
Our communications team (Pat Canfield, Cathi Doebler, Carolyn Doster, Heide Edgington, Kathy Figini and Myself) has been working on it for a while. Carolyn did most of the design layout on the various options we looked at. After bringing in a few people for a sort of focus group, we narrowed it to two options, which we then sent to the EMT for a decision.
After much discussion, we felt it was important for this sign to remain as an emphasis for Contemporary worship as most people driving by would look at our building and assume we had Traditional worship available. The photo of the guitar players is certainly modern, but not over the top. I think it manages to convey both a contemporary sound, but also a warm, authentic atmosphere.
The primary content is sized to be between .5 – 1 inch larger than our existing sign, which was already quite readable from the corner. The web address is almost twice as large as the current sign. (Side note 2: Did you even know the existing sign had it? I might have known, but forgot until I went out to measure the letter heights.)
I have a dream to add lighting to the sign, but there’s some cost involved to making that happen and we couldn’t afford it right now. Maybe in the future we’ll be able to get that added. It would increase the effective hours the sign is visible, especially during the winter and the peak holiday shopping season.
Telling Stories: Bridging the Information Gap
One thing I hear on a regular basis at church is that people don’t know what’s going on. Sometimes it boggles my mind because I feel like we’ve made big strides to get the word out about what’s happening around here. Our online calendar is always up to date with what’s happening here. We even print out the calendar and put it at the Information Center for people who can’t get online. We publicize every event, class or special function that’s coming up in the weekly announcement sheet. You can download the announcements online as well. We post links to upcoming events on our website.
But despite all this, people still say they don’t know what’s going on at their church. I think it’s because there’s a large gap in our promotion plan. Imagine having a conversation with someone about something their looking forward to. Maybe it’s a special celebration, a concert, a new movie coming out or something else. You hear about all the lead up, then it finally happens and they never talk about it again. Wouldn’t that be a little odd?
We do it all the time, though. We talk about the events and classes that are on the horizon, even getting farther and farther ahead of the timeline, but we rarely take time to talk about what happened. When people say they don’t know what’s happening at church, I think they really mean they don’t know what happened at church. It’s a fair criticism, because we rarely talk about what happened. You know, the rest of the story?
As I craft the verbal announcements, I’m going to work on incorporating more storytelling and less “informational” type stuff. The information can easily be found online or in the written announcements—why keep saying the same thing verbally? The Executive Ministry Team also recently decided to write something for the announcements after each of our meetings. Obviously, it’s not always appropriate to share everything we talk about in a public way, but there’s lots of stuff that we can talk about, so why not?
I’m also working on a new section for the website titled simply “News”. It will be a new menu item where you can find stories and news from ministries that happen around First Trinity on a regular basis. Sadly, I hit a snag as my favorite plugin for making it work the way I want is broken on the new version of WordPress. I’m looking for an alternative, but there are surprisingly few options available. It’s kind of annoying after finally figuring out a system for telling the story to have it break before I could even install it.
Artwork: Change-ing Our World
Tim Hartnett recently circulated a flier for feedback regarding our Change-ing Our World ongoing fundraiser for missions at First Trinity. As I work on communications pieces here, I’ve tried to remember Kem Meyer‘s slogan: Less Clutter. Less Noise. Rather than a wall of text explaining the concept, I wanted to distill down the basics into an easily digestible chunk of information.
I quickly came up with the first two steps. Commit and Collect made sense, but I was struggling with the 3rd. Kathy Figini and Bekah Freed were the only ones in the office to bounce ideas off of, so we went to work. Kathy suggested “Clang!” as an option. We laughed a bit, generated a few more ideas, then I decided to give “Clang!” a go. In the end, I think it works perfectly.
Most of the text is in a light blue, except for a few key phrases in white. We decided to make “Change Our World” in white, but leave off the “-ing” part in the title. It gives the poster an active voice, despite the use of an -ing verb in a subtle way. “Serve others in Jesus’ Name” started on a Crossroads Workcamp flier from several years ago. Bekah kept the emphasis on a recent publicity piece so I decided to carry it over here as well.
This is the poster version of the artwork but there is an almost identically themed version for use as a flier that will be distributed after Christmas.
Artwork: I Am Short Course
One of the things I get to do on a regular basis at First Trinity is create artwork for use in worship, PowerPoint, on the web and other projects. Here’s a recent one I did for Sue’s newest short course, titled “I Am.”
There wasn’t a clear visual associated with the series, so I went with a text treatment of the key phrase, “I Am.” After some searching online, I found this great tutorial for making a typographic poster. I liked the look, so I kept the color scheme, but I changed a single phrase to white instead of black to make it stand out a bit for people. The font is Myriad Pro, Bold Condensed, a standard font in Adobe’s line of products.
If you aren’t familiar with the Short Course concept at First Trinity, check out Sue’s post about this current class.
Christmas Gift Card Flier
After getting feedback about the Gift Card Ministry (formerly Scrip), we decided it would be beneficial to highlight this ministry for Christmas. Here’s what it looks like:
Some thoughts on the design:
- I went simple on the design, using the motif of a Christmas tree. The explanatory text continues the image of the tree, making it appear like a larger tree.
- The catch phrase “serve others in Jesus’ Name” is accented in red. This is consistent with the next flier we’ll release in February/March.
- I intentionally focused on gifts people might give, not every card available. It seemed breaking them out by price group was the way to go for listing those options.
- The order form looks very different from the front page, but matches our regular order form. My hope is that when people see the “usual” form, it will be familiar once they get this flier.
- You’ll notice an extra line at the bottom of the order form for gift card wrappers. We’re giving away wrappers with every card valued at $10 or more. We’d lose money on cards that are $5 or less. There are currently only about 5 cards that we sell that are below that threshold.
Look for the finished product in a church mailbox near you this weekend. In case others would like to use our work, grab the originals in Illustrator (Front) and Publisher (Back).
Scrip Improvements, Take 2
Thanks for all the feedback on the Scrip program over the past couple days! Here’s a summary of what I heard, both online and off, from this group of readers and research in other programs:
- Increased visibility of point-of-sale. It’s hard to find it and when you do, it’s really crowded. A sign would be helpful. Also signs to help navigate from the information center to the ministry support center.
- Increased awareness. People forget it exists, don’t know it exists, or just plain don’t know what it is. Fliers, skits, video commercials and more are options to help here. We also want ways to easily share the information with friends/family that might be interested in partnering with us. Quick access to what’s in stock and what needs to be ordered is helpful as well.
- Incentives. Gift card wrappers at Christmas (and possibly other times), key-chain Sharpie marker with purchases over X dollars, one entry into a drawing for a $25 gift card of your choice for every X dollars.
Today’s questions then:
- Check out these gift card wrappers. Most are 16 cents per wrapper when ordering 1000. At best, we can order two designs. Do we go with one more generic “A gift for you” type card, a Christmas themed one, or one of both?
- Here’s a flier about the Gift Card Ministry. It answers three basic questions about the program: Why, What and How. It’s intentionally emphasizing the “why” we do it and frames profits in terms of how many trips it paid for. It also draws the “why” into the “what” and the “how” using the recurring phrase “serve others in Jesus’ Name.” We do it to help students serve in Jesus’ Name and when you purchase gift cards, you serve in Jesus’ Name through us. The back side is not done yet. Any wording that’s confusing? If you can, show it to someone who’s never heard of Scrip and see what they think about it.
- Which incentives would get you buying cards? Most are self-explanatory. The marker idea was so that people could have it with them to track the balance. Also, what should X be for pens and drawing entries? Markers cost around $1.20, so we’d lose money on sales of $25/50. We’d make money at $100 on all cards except Wegmans/Tims/Target where we essentially break even.
Reducing Word Count
One of the interesting things about our recent super series titled People Matter was the daily devotional. We asked people to limit their devotions to 500 words or less. Having a cap on the text forced people to get to the point—to trim the fat and leave the meat.
I find that I use lots of unnecessary words. I’m trying to be better at self-editing, especially on long emails or letters. Trim the fat and keep the meat. I believe people are so over-exposed to information that they’ll thank me for it. (Unnecessary aside: please don’t actually thank me for short emails.) Whenever possible, I like to follow the five.sentenc.es way of doing email.
As a church, we probably need to “trim some fat” from our communications. The extra words can sometimes cause the message to be lost. We’re working on it, by the way. We’re still working with a consultant to improve our communications strategy. It’s an incredibly long (and sometimes frustrating) process. But I think it will help us communicate more effectively.
So here’s the theological question: Are there areas of our life where we need to “trim the fat” to better communicate the Gospel?
St. Francis of Assisi thinks so. He wrote:
Preach the Gospel at all times and when necessary use words.
By the way, this post has 228 words, including these.
Intersections 