[Worship] RE: 40 Days of Purpose

["Steve Hanson" <shanson@speakeasy.net>]

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Hello all!

We are also doing the campaign this fall, and have been building up to it by
putting it in the mindset of our congregation well ahead of time.  I have
already gone through the campaign with another church, so we'll do things a
little differently (yet very much the same) this time around.  Our
congregation is primarily young families, used to a contemporary service.

We've done promotion on video by making our own commercials.  Pretty easy to
do with a digital camcorder...  A short series of commercials where normal
churchgoers confuse other themes with the campaign.  Examples:
--On location shot at Marine World with our own Steve Irwin character,
explaining 40 Days of Porpoise
--Two women at the annual Nordstrom's sales, talking about the advantages of
40 days of purse-pose
--Two high schoolers at the local mini mart, discussing 40 days of
slurp-pose (the high school team has a 'burp-pose' version)
-- Two cowboys explaining 40 days of spur-pose.

All designed with a refocus at the ends of the 60-90 second spots in order
to properly explain what's coming.  It's worked great, as we had (in a
congregation of about 280) 20 new people sign up to lead the small groups
for the campaign.  Woo hoo!

Musically, we're probably going a different route than Rick Muchow went with
Saddleback, simply because our congregation is in a different place when
we'll start the campaign. We may pull out some old stand-bys for
community/vision stuff like "Great Adventure" or "Burn the Ships" (both
Steven Curtis Chapman) as specials.  We don't normally use choir on Sundays,
so we're putting together stuff for the celebration service at the end of
the 40 days, which signifies a 'big deal'.  When your choir is over 10% of
your congregation, it tends to get noticed!

Praying for those of you out there going thru the campaign this fall - enjoy
the ride.  God has done and continues to do great things in 40 days!

In His grip,

STEVE HANSON
Creekside Christian Church - Brentwood, CA
www.creeksidelife.org