Chameleon Spaces

Often times when the church sets out to build a new space they need it to be many things for several different groups. They are building a gym but that gym will also play host to the Boy Scout troop meetings on Monday nights, the women’s ministry monthly social, the next youth group lock-in, and a plethora of other events.

These types of constraints play a large role in determining the ultimate design of the building. How do you make a space that meets everyone’s needs and compromises no one else’s? Take some time in the planning stages and determine what groups will utilize the space. Consult with these groups and find out what they need incorporated into the space both now and in the future.

Next, dream about the possible uses for the space within the next 5+ years and make sure you build in the infrastructure to support those needs as well. You don’t have to finish the space out so that it meets all your future desires, but laying the groundwork will allow you the flexibility to more easily do what you want down the road.

Finally, sit with your designer and go over your dreams for the space. Determine with them what is essential in phase one of the building and then create a plan for the next stages. Determine time lines or other criteria that will trigger implementation of the following phases. Remember to lay the groundwork in phase one for the completion of the subsequent phases to come.

Not all spaces need to be dedicated to one specific purpose. Creating a space that meets several group’s needs is a good use of available space and money and by pre-planning for the future you will save time in the long run.

Gizmos and Gadgets and Gurus, Oh My!

In  a little less than 20 days I will be speaking at the Gurus Of Tech Conference in Louisville, KY. Its going to be a great event. If you are involved in tech arts at your church you should consider attending. Gurus is interesting for several reasons; #1: It’s FREE!… Yeah I know, its a free, 3 day conference (whoever heard of such a thing?) #2: Not only do you get to hear from some really great speakers but their is time built in the schedule for everyone to talk amongst themselves and learn from each other. After all no one knows what its like to be on tech staff at a church like someone else on tech staff. #3 There is going to be some awesome gear there to check out (who among us doesn’t like to play with new gear?)

All in all Gurus is worth way more than the price of admission. Sign up here: Registration and let me know if your coming.

Missions Communication

Almost every church in the country supports an over seas missionary, but how do you communicate with them? Does the congregation suffer through a 3 hour slide show every other year during missions emphasis week or do you insert the missionary’s newsletter into the bulletin every quarter doomed to be simply discarded without being read?

If you really want to keep missions in the minds of the congregation why not give them a chance to interact with that missionary in realtime. In this day and age it’s easier than ever to keep in touch with people all over the world. Even in Africa where landlines are severely unstable or non-existent mobile phones abound. Why not leverage the available technology? Instead of only hearing from the missionary when they are home on furlough, give them a call during your service and give the congregation a chance to hear from the missionary in the field. You could even give people the chance to ask questions and interact with the missionary.

Missionaries get homesick like anyone else and an audio or video interaction with home could be just what they need to lift their spirits. On the flipside getting to see the missionary in their daily environment and creating a more personal connection between them and the congregation might even increase missions giving among the congregation and thereby increasing what the missionary is able to do for the people to whom they are ministering.

Green Is The New Black

Many churches today are opting to create satellite campuses instead of building ever larger new facilities. There are several reasons for the strategy. Some churches are prohibited by the city from building larger buildings not to mention the amount of funding and time required to do so. By creating satellite campuses the church can expand much more quickly than if they had to wait on the construction of new property. This also eliminates the possibility of going into debt to build and then have a mortgage for years to come. And eliminates the need for large scale, time consuming capital campaigns.

Beyond the practical reasons for expanding via multiple campuses there are several green reasons to consider as well. “Reduce, Reuse, Recycle” is the mantra and it fits in perfectly with the multisite trend.

Reduce: By introducing campuses all around the metro area you can reduce the church carbon footprint because church goers will have less distance to travel to get to the service.

Re-use: Many churches are using movie theaters and school auditoriums as their additional locations. Any place that holds people and isn’t used on Sunday’s is a great option for additional sites and if they have seating, and/or sound and lighting built in, all the better.

Recycle: There are empty and abandoned buildings everywhere these days. There’s no reason to create something new when an existing structure will work just as well.

Going green is all the rage these days. Its the trendy thing to do and be and being green isn’t just restricted to recycling your drink cans anymore. It’s permeated many aspects of our daily lives. City dwellers are especially keen on being green, so if that is who you are targeting why not emphasize that aspect of your church?

After all green is the new black.

EPIC Idea

Read a twitter post a while back that said “Just found out there’s wifi in the edu building at church. Will help me surf the internet faster during Sunday school.” It got me thinking, with the iPhone and other web enabled phones becoming so prevalent, even with those in attendance, the church is losing people’s attention. Hardly anyone focuses on one thing at a time anymore, and if they try they feel bored and like they are wasting time. We are constantly being bombarded by stimuli and information and its changed our attention patterns. Email, cell phones, twitter, facebook, websites, RSS feeds, there is always something new to draw our attention and now more than ever we have the tools at our disposal to chase down the answer to every fleeting question that pops into our heads. Web browsers now come standard with tabs; we don’t go from one page to another in a linear fashion anymore, we hop, skip, and jump from page to page and juggle multiple subjects at one time. We surf for information on one page while another page is loading in the next tab.

Author and speaker Leonard Sweet talks about EPIC experiences (Experiential, Participatory, Image-driven, Connectedness). If you want to capture the attention of your information inundated, smart phone wielding, A-D-D congregation you will have to do more than simply talk at them. Whether you like it or not they are all going to be multitasking so instead of trying to fight their natural tendencies why not channel them into something productive to help them understand the sermon better. I was at dinner last night with a friend who had recently attended a conference where at one point they asked everyone to close their laptops, turn off their phones and to not twitter and blog about the sessions that day. My friend was pretty upset by this. In their mind if they aren’t able to “participate and interact with the talk and instead are simply being lectured to” then they weren’t paying attention to the speaker. 

With the rise of social media people really feel the need to participate in and not just passively listen to conference sessions and sermons, etc. With that in mind, why not consider installing a wifi hotspot in the sanctuary so they can surf faster on their phone, e-mail them links to the scripture references that will open in the YouVersion app on their iPhone. Devise a twitter hash tag for your church so people can tweet from service and follow what everyone else is tweeting too. Create a Facebook page with additional content about the sermon topic, things they can explore, or post a blog entry about the sermon topic each week where they are encouraged to comment and ask questions.

You can sit in a room full of people and still be all alone and this generation craves connectedness. In the sunday morning setting this can be created physically or technologically. I was in a service once where the pastor was using rock, paper, scissors to make a point but instead of just talking about it he actually had the crowd play the game and the last two standing won giftcards to Starbucks. The exercise got everyone engaged and helped him more effectively drive his point home.

While it may not be feasible to have people shouting out questions or comments in the middle of a sermon, they could be tweeting them. It would be simple to have a feed of the tweets scrolling on a screen behind the speaker in real time. The speaker could integrate some of those questions and comments into the sermon. There are many ways to integrate the audience, brainstorm with your staff and see what interesting and creative ideas you come up with. Becoming EPIC can be scary because it requires releasing a certain amount of control, but if they are spending the service surfing Google, checking email and playing with the Urban Spoon app on their iPhone to figure out where to go for lunch, then you’ve already lost them.

For additional thoughts check out what Think Christian had to say in a recent post on the same subject.  

The Day The Earth Stood Still

So, I rented “The Day The Earth Stood Still” (new version) from my local redbox last night. (Spoiler Alert: I’m about to reveal the end of the movie so if you don’t already know and don’t want to, read no further) The movie ends with everything electrical shutting down, and between the movie and thinking about the fact that Earth Day just passed, it got me thinking… What would happen to church if everything electrical stopped working? Now I don’t think aliens are coming to zap the planet of electricity, but its not out of the realm of possibility that something could happen that would cause your campus to lose power, possibly for an extended period of time. How would you handle something like that? Would you just have to cancel church or do you have plan?

I love technology, I’m in the business of equipping churches with technology to help them do church, but what if all of that got stripped away? Could you still have a meaningful service? Connect with people? Make a difference in your community? How would you go about it?

Now Playing

Youth pastors are always on the lookout for fun and interesting things to do with their students. They rack their brains, buy books and attend conferences. Not to mention that students today have their attention more divided than ever before.

Want to try something different?

For the next youth group lock in or fundraiser, why not do a film festival. Most computers sold today come with some sort of video editing software or it is downloadable for free on the net. Likewise, you don’t have to search very long or hard to come up with video cameras (you can even get HD video cameras for less that $200).

So how does it work?

First advertise the festival so you ensure a good turnout at the event. Next entice the kids to participate by providing prizes for the winners. On filming day divide the kids up into groups. You might consider using a format similar to the 48 hour film project where each team gets a genre, and a character, prop, and line that must appear in the film. Or perhaps have everyone create a film based on a theme like missions or compassion. Once they have their assignments its off to the races, they have 48 hours to shoot, edit, and output their completed films.

Encourage them to be creative and to think outside the box. One way to bring out creativity is to impose limits like a 48 hour time frame for completion or by limiting the length of the completed film (this also keeps the bad ones from dragging on and on). These types of restrictions force the kids to come up with creative solutions to their problems while also teaching teamwork and patience.

Once everyone has handed in their projects you can début them all together as a film festival, charge a small admissions fee and let everyone vote on their favorite. In the end everyone should a good time and maybe even learn something, the youth group will make some cash for their next mission trip or project and everyone will have way more fun doing it than washing cars. 

Mashing

So I was listening to Thomas Freidman give a talk at MIT, and he mentioned that the NYTimes needed IT folks, but not just any IT person, rather an IT person that actually read the NY Times, better yet an IT person who read three papers a day. Friedman mentioned that it’s the mashing together of two things (IT and reading newspapers) that make the employee successful in the organization.

So that got me thinking…am I mashing effectively? Are you mashing effectively?  Are you encouraging your team to mash? When looking for a video volunteer are you just looking for a mercenary video guy, or someone who also has animation, photography, IT, painting, or some other background or hobby that they can bring to the table and mash those 2 ideas and passions into something great.

Think of the possibilities: contractor/artist; audio guy/photographer; video editor/painter; lighting pro/surfer; stage manager/gardener.

Encourage your team to mash, to exploit their interests and they may surprise you!

To Build Or Not To Build…

Growing churches often face the dilemma of exceeding their current meeting space. When that happens there are about three options: 1. Build a bigger building 2. Go to multiple or additional services 3. Move to multiple locations.

Often building a bigger building isn’t an option. Perhaps there isn’t enough money or time. Also you may not be able to cram another service time into the weekend. When that happens, the only option left is to expand to multiple locations. If you have a gym or other large space on campus you can begin by turning that into an overflow room. Outfit the room with a projector, sound equipment and some chairs and you’re ready to go. It’s the quickest option.

Once you’ve exceeded the overflow space you may need to branch out into other locations around town. One of the big trends right now is to utilize a local theater. They are already equipped with auditoriums that include top notch projectors and sound systems which should limit setup/teardown time as well as the amount of extra equipment you will need to have and store. Another great choice is the auditorium of a nearby school. You may have to provide more of your own equipment but it still comes with many of the features you need built in.

Things to consider

1. How and where are you going to store your equipment?
2. How are you going to handle the facilitation of the services? (i.e. live satellite downlink or delay one week and play the service back via a DVD)
3. Will the satellite locations provide childcare and children’s ministry? If so where will that be?
4. Are you going to have a live worship band at each site or do worship via video as well?
5. Will there be a pastor or leader for each new location?  

Capturing The Big Day

If you have a center isle and decent colored carpet I’m betting your church plays host to its fair share of weddings. With that in mind, why not drop power cable in the stage floor where cameras would be positioned for such an event? That way you can capture the proceeding without cable strung across the stage or placing the cameras in the way of the ceremony.

A multi-camera set up means you’ll need to edit the footage. Are you going edit it live or in post? If you do it live you can practically give the couple the video before they leave for the honeymoon. However, if you don’t have anyone comfortable directing a live event like that you can do the edit in post. Whichever way you go make sure you have the necessary equipment for the edit and to output the final product to DVD and duplicate it. 

How do you capture the big day at your facility? What issues have you run across and how did you solve them?