For Pastors

Let me start out in love and with respect to all of you teaching pastors: I respect that your role is incredibly time-consuming and that shepherding your flock takes time away from purely studying for messages.

No two ways about it, you have a tough job and you're held accountable for how well you manage your time and your pulpit. 1 Timothy 5:17-18 deals with this directly:

17The elders who direct the affairs of the church well are worthy of double honor, especially those whose work is preaching and teaching. 18For the Scripture says, "Do not muzzle the ox while it is treading out the grain," and "The worker deserves his wages."

That double honor can also be translated "double pay", a premise I have no problem with - heck, who wants to be held double accountable by choice except for Pastors!? - but it also means that we should respect the difficulty of ministering to staff, volunteers and attendees while also preparing for a dynamic, relevant and engaging Biblical message. Here me clearly, pastors: Those of us who support you need to give you a lot of latitude, grace and trust.

Hopefully, you'll understand that we as media & communications staff and volunteers respect what you do and want to help support and enhance your message.

The other shoe drops
However (you knew it was too good to last!), in many (most?) churches, we feel hamstrung and left out when it comes to using our gifts, tools and time to help you with crafting a weekend experience instead of just another weekend service. Usually, this happens for a few consistent reasons:

1. You don't finish (or even really start) creating a full outline and support scripture for your message until Friday, leaving us without the time to create compelling media support and enhancement for your message.
2. You don't think about including us in the creative brainstorming process for upcoming messages/series.
3. You don't want to lose the spur-of-the-moment inspiration from the Holy Spirit, so you resist too much planning in the interest of being authentic and timely.

I've got to be honest with you, Pastors. This all comes down to trust issues that you have.

Trust Issues
You don't trust God enough. You don't trust yourself enough. You don't trust us enough.

Yes, I still love you, so I'm trying to speak the truth in love and open up an honest dialogue so that we can use our creative synergies to make more impactful weekend experiences.

Trust God
All the way back in the first chapter of the Bible, God starts out by showing us that anything worth doing well is worth taking the time to plan and implement. The omniscient, omnipresent and omnipotent God of everything could have just snapped his celestial fingers and been done with all of creation in a nano-instant. But that's not what He did. Instead, he took his time, planned and handled all of creation over time. There's a lesson for us in that!

Go ahead and trust God to inspire you on Fridays - but make that four or five Fridays in advance! God is big enough and smart enough to give you the inspiration you need well before Sunday rolls around!

Trust yourself
Habits - even well-intentioned ones - are hard to break. But hear me clearly: the future impact-fullness and growth of your church will be directly influenced by how you adopt better methods for creating weekend experiences. The old adage "If it is to be, it is up to me" doesn't apply here! Yes, you are ultimately responsible for the sermon and we should never tell you what or how to preach it - but you must also stop limiting the quality of the entire weekend experience by being a spiritual "Lone Ranger"!

Yes, you CAN change. In fact, you MUST change.

Trust us
We as media & communications staff and/or volunteers must earn your trust and provide helpful, critical input in the development of weekend experiences.

For some of us, that means we have to spend time with you before 9 AM on Sunday morning. It is critical that you make the time to get to know us and learn about our skills and passions so that we can be helpful resources for creating excellent, interactive and memorable services. We must take the time to meet with you early on in the creative planning process so that enough time and resources can be devoted to doing more than turning on PowerPoint and hoping for the best!

If you've not done so yet, please take the time to read and print out the articles I did on Creative Team Planning. They're all on my Blog, and you can read them here:

Creative Meetings: Overcoming the Fears

Creative Meetings: When and Where

Creative Meetings: Picking the Team

Creative Meetings: Expanding "Go-To" Resources

Creative Meetings: Controlling the Meeting

The Chaos of Creative Meetings Comes to Order!

So Why Aren't You Doing This Yet?
This is where you (anyone, not just pastors) get to tell me why you're not doing this yet. Seriously, put in a comment below and let's have some honest dialogue about this - I really do want to know!

You don't have to figure this out on your own
No matter where you are in this process, I'd like to help. Shoot me an email and let's find a time for me to visit with your church leadership on how to transition from weekend services to weekend experiences through the implementation of Creative Team Planning. I've helped others make this critical change, so I not only know that it's possible, I know that it works!

I hope that my heart for helping and my passion for improvement have come through loud and clear! I love ya, Pastors! Let's make the change together and increase the effectiveness of your local church.