Pastors
Picking the people who make up the Creative Planning Team for your church is a very important process. While there's not a specific set of personality types, staff positions or volunteer positions, there is a basic setup of the core group. Because each church is different, I'll list titles only because it gives context to the recommend roles involved in the team.

The Core Group

It's beneficial to have the following core members in the team:

• Senior Pastor/Teaching Pastor for the series/weekend - in charge of the message delivery
• Worship & Arts Pastor - in charge of choosing music, drama
• Tech/Media/Communications Pastor - in charge of the technical aspects (both pre- and post-production
• Worship Producer - A project manager who coordinates the volunteers and keep the service flowing smoothly

Now those titles might not fit your church, but the descriptions of their roles will allow you to substitute the personnel to your context.

As I stated in an earlier post, though there can be more, I think there are three main groups of people who can potentially fit your personnel needs for a Creative Planning Team:

• Staff
• Volunteers
• Other Christian leaders

The core group I described above are people who spend their week preparing for the weekend. But there's also a strong benefit of having "outsiders" join the group from time to time. Who you invite and when you invite them might be based around the upcoming sermon series, a holiday weekend or even a topical weekend based on current events. For each of these unique messages, bringing in members of your target audience into the planning can provide fresh perspective on how to communicate the message in a relevant way to that specific group.

For example, if you're doing a Series on dating, invite in youth, college singles or even an engaged couple to bring their perspective to the table. Cultural dynamics being what they are, some of the things you experienced when you were dating might be the same today. But there will always be a new spin on an old thing, and having those you want to reach involved in the creative planning process can be extremely valuable.

Sometimes you will have two or three really good ideas and a single leader doesn't emerge. They're all really good and possible, so getting the advice of another pastor can help you think through the concepts. Obviously, other pastors will be busy doing the same thing for their own church, so this could be a two way street for idea refinement.

Mix it up

With the exception of the core group, the remainder of your creative planning team should be cycled in and out frequently (at least every series). I think that churches that have tried creative planning teams but burned out their group have fallen away from it by not mixing up the participants. No matter how creative the individual, they'll hit a brick wall sooner or later. You need to give each person breaks - including the core group.

Creativity comes with a price: it's hard work. In fact, it's a lot harder to plan you weekends with a creative team than it is to go it alone. However, the results of a well organized team will not only generally provide better creative results, the shared responsibilities will also keep people from burning out and provide more lay leader involvement for plugging into the local church.

Tomorrow I'll deal with expanding your "go-to" resources and help you learn how to look both inside and outside the church for ways to take your weekends well beyond where they are today.