[00:00:00] Remember Contemporary Worship is beyond the music. It's about overall worship design. Here's what I mean. A successful contemporary worship service, I'm not going to say in such a generality that oh can never work but I've not seen it work yet where all you do is swap
[00:00:16] the music and you keep the bones of the same traditional service. Welcome to episode 345. Have you been thinking about adding a contemporary service in a traditional church or just improving one? This episode is for you. How to optimize your traditional space for contemporary worship.
[00:00:35] That's today, the Reclaimed Leader. Welcome to the Reclaimed Leader Podcast. We are two pastors in the trenches with you working to help our churches be as healthy as possible for the sake of the mission. I'm Jason Tucker back again with my PIC Jesse Skiffington. How's it going, Jesse?
[00:00:56] How do I do now, all right, Jason. Yeah, yeah, I don't know. Partner, is it criminal activity that we're anyway. I don't know if they. Yeah, some would be like, well you're leading change. You're
[00:01:06] running the church. You shouldn't. It does not want to change so yeah, I'm sure some of our folks over the years were US and Matt Category maybe I don't know but how do you do? How do you be a healthy
[00:01:17] church that needs to do the concept things and makes the kinds of changes that need to happen in order to flourish and continue to reach people with the good news about Jesus and to have a
[00:01:26] life together that reaches across generations and all of that. And in our denominational churches particularly this has been a long conversation over many decades of how do we do that? And frankly some churches have done a really good job other churches have really struggled
[00:01:41] and some churches like ours are somewhere in between got some things right and maybe some things that we wish we could take back and do differently. But sure's this constant process of managing change and navigating into some new ways of gathering and being the church together
[00:01:57] for the sake of what governments to do in this generation or in this moment in time. Yeah, and the need for revitalization is only going to get greater right? It's not like our churches
[00:02:07] everyone's rebounding and you know sort of magically going back to the numbers that we had and the mid part of the 20th century. And that's just not, that's just probably not in the card. So
[00:02:21] how to me it's all about faithfulness. Church revitalization is about faithfulness. How do we make sure we're not just playing church or doing the status quo for the sake of the status quo? How do
[00:02:31] we make sure we're doing everything we can to be faithful stewards of the gospel? And I think if we just keep that in front of us, that's the target. And you know the good news is as we said last week
[00:02:45] it's like it's a target rich environment like there's we're going to be doing this for a really long time because it took a long time for our churches all to get here and to expect that everything
[00:02:57] about it's just going to shift within a couple of years is probably not very realistic. So how do we do that over time? How do we as pastors have a sustainable pace of leadership? How do we help our
[00:03:08] churches see God in their own lives and in their own walk? How do they grow as disciples and the process grows a community together? So that's really what we're all about new listeners. If
[00:03:23] you're new with us this is your first time this probably good episode for you to join us. Welcome we are really glad that you're here especially young leaders who are trying to figure out
[00:03:33] because young leaders have all the answers just like just like when we were young Jesse I don't know you're like younger than me but you know we sort of knew everything and came in guns of blazing
[00:03:45] and it would have been helpful to know some things before before we did that. So I feel like we're in a day where it's like we sort of taken our lumps. We figured out those things that we did poorly
[00:03:58] and how do we adjust? So new listeners especially well glad that you're here with us today and if this podcast helps you to lead we'd love for you to leave us a review help others to find
[00:04:09] us and discover the reclaimed leader or share it with a friend or colleague we would love that. So today's episode is a little bit of a niche but I think it goes beyond the niche to help
[00:04:22] a lot of folks as you're thinking about your worship space because most of us don't have big warehouse churches we have you know traditional buildings and even if your building is built in the 1970s
[00:04:35] and has that kind of 70s look to it it's still traditional compared to some of our more modern church sanctuaries or auditoriums as they like to call them. And the topic is how do you optimize
[00:04:51] your traditional space for contemporary worship and how do you do it on a budget? Because that was the number one thing that we had to face as a church really. I mean that was the biggest project
[00:05:01] that we had in our in the time that I've been here in 12 years and it was the most important project that we took on. So today's a little bit about sharing some of that wisdom of going through
[00:05:12] that process but also kind of riffing on some talking points that we hit a lot that are really important for leaders and churches to understand. This came up shout out to my friends at Knox Presbyterian they were asking about hey you wrote something in your newsletter about changing
[00:05:31] between traditional and contemporary within 30 minutes and that you completely change your environment and we want to know more about that because that's something that we're interested in so it's our friends at Knox Press or the reason for this episode. So it was great we had a great
[00:05:45] conversation about that and again that newsletter article goes out to our subscribers every week where we share some thoughts and share the episode for each week so if you want to get in on
[00:05:56] that if you just go to reclaimedleader.com forward slash newsletter you can subscribe you make sure that you get all of those insights and articles. But basically this all came from you know I was
[00:06:08] hired here 12 years ago and how long you've been at Marineview is it the same? A little bit longer it's longer 15 years 15 years geez. Awesome so you can probably think back to when you were hired
[00:06:21] in what some of the hopes and dreams of the congregation were at least the nominating committee were that hired you but mine was definitely they hired me for very specific purpose they were losing young families for years to churches that had more contemporary worship
[00:06:39] styles this was you know tower hill was known as being a regional traditional church choir bell program, uh, organist and they would host concert series that were a big deal kind of like New York City level concerts here in the suburbs that's really what they were kind
[00:06:59] of known for all you know very traditional. Now I had had I was you know pretty new at a seminary just it was at my first church for three years and trying to learn how to how to
[00:07:10] how to be a pastor and um and I was I was I was looked at even as a candidate because I had a very particular set of skills as a good a good friendly in nascent says and that is I had experience planting
[00:07:26] contemporary worship styles in traditional churches and that was exactly what they were looking for but I was told point blank on numerous occasions do not touch the traditional by the way we want to make sure you know we don't need to change anything with traditional hey traditional's
[00:07:45] good as it is hey we're known for being traditional like I it was just looking for a garage yeah I got it I'm not gonna touch the traditional but they wanted to get going a new worship being
[00:08:00] style in addition to which I personally think is a great way to do it because I've seen a lot of churches crash and burn trying to replace traditional when now you just alienated all the people
[00:08:13] that are going there pretty much and why do that and that's necessarily you know try to sustain what they love so I was hired to do that and really what we're talking about today is a
[00:08:26] reflection of what came out of that process um Jesse what was the I mean what was the worship style when you got to maridion and talk about big worship changes we've done an episode on what
[00:08:39] you guys did but the rolling Sunday model which is that might be worth another shot soon but you know are we out of to come back around at some point I think but yeah basically before I got
[00:08:49] hired I was hired in as an associate pastor for a few years so I got to hide under the cover of a senior pastor that was making a lot of changes which was which was helpful as a leadership classroom
[00:08:59] but we had as a congregation before I arrived on the scene had decided to leave our traditional service behind and go to two contemporary services and it did exactly what you just said it left
[00:09:13] a lot of hurt feelings no matter how much there was an effort to work in some traditional aspects to our contemporary services it was just not the same and so there was sort of a and I
[00:09:24] think the error might have been instead of taking away we could have added and had that opportunity for both there was some other dynamics that were at play but I think that's one of those things where
[00:09:36] I saw the fallout of eliminating a traditional option in our midst and what some of the outcomes about what so yeah coming in I came in there was two contemporary-ish services that were going on
[00:09:50] now we're more of a blended style than then true contemporary but yeah so that was kind of our environment I think we had some things that we could have maybe done a little bit differently to not squash
[00:10:02] another opportunity for folks to worship in a traditional way. Yeah it's interesting a point that out it's like but you learn that lesson right so so later as you started to rethink things these are the things you're thinking about I know that you intentionally added some different
[00:10:18] musical style sets in a way to try to either bring some of those folks back or help people to stay. I think Arc Man Question it was instead of fighting the worship wars that had kind
[00:10:31] of already opened fought it was like how do we help people connect with the music, the style of worship that connects their hearts to God's heart the best and that could be a whole variety of things
[00:10:42] and so instead of getting so focused on change for changes sake or we got to reach younger so we have to make these changes at the expense of the more traditional crowd we shifted gears and said
[00:10:53] how do we meet everybody where they are let's be together when it makes sense but let's let's have these distinct types of worship opportunities because we know that everybody's got a different stylistic preference and that's not a some sort of spiritual fault it makes sense you know
[00:11:09] the songs we grew up singing from 18 to 25 or whatever those are the ones that we carry with us and so yeah we just tried to then work back from that and kind of undo some of the scars of that
[00:11:19] and move forward in a fresh way and it was actually really a great thing to be able to do that and I think you healed a lot of hurt yeah that's great so back to kind of when I was hired
[00:11:35] the funny part was I was just thinking about this is that when I told the the pastor nominating committee that I didn't do a robe they actually had to say we'll discuss it and get back to you
[00:11:49] like it was a thing but at least we cleared that up right in the beginning anyway yeah so here's pastor Teresa who has been working with us on staff you know since I've been here she was the
[00:12:02] default interim pastor because there's sort of a long story she ended up having to jump into that role and to her credit they said you know we at least got to get something going for the new pastor
[00:12:18] to to work with because we don't want him to have to fight the worship war fight so they they started a Sunday morning in the fellowship hall service contemporary service and
[00:12:32] man that's sped up the process for me because now I could come in and use my experience to be like well how can we make it better how could we you know shift and change things that was
[00:12:42] probably the biggest gift to me was that they is it Teresa made that happen and you know it was it was just a fledgling service but man it did make things like these are okay yeah so we just
[00:12:57] upon that point I think there's something here especially for younger leaders that are maybe looking if if a church has demonstrated a willingness to move toward change before they hire you
[00:13:07] that's a good thing yeah there's a lot of search committees will be like we want to change or we want to do this or do that but if the church hasn't demonstrated any movement toward that
[00:13:16] you gotta be a little cautious because I mean what Teresa did for you is get the ball rolling so you're not the one that's the new guy coming in introducing this change that people may or may
[00:13:26] not be excited about and so I always when I'm talking with the search committee or or someone that's in a transitional role I always say do whatever you can do now to set the new person up
[00:13:36] for success when they get here start plowing the road start making the changes now so that they can come in and take it and run with it just like happened for you and there's just so much
[00:13:46] wisdom there so if that's your church and you're looking for somebody start making the changes now so that they can come and give shape to it but they don't have to take all the bullets
[00:13:55] for introducing the change yeah absolutely so so when I started there was already a worship service that had maybe 35ish people and I'm like it didn't start from zero I had an opportunity to work
[00:14:08] with that which was great so we start off in our fellowship hall we continue to grow that service and within a year we saw that we were going to have grow it which was terribly exciting
[00:14:20] so that's about 150 to 175 in worship and we were getting to the max it was the 80 20 rules some of you know all about that but basically when your room's 80 percent full it's full
[00:14:32] and people will stop coming if it feels full for too long so we hit that was our number and we needed to figure out if we were going to add another service or renovate our biggest space
[00:14:42] our sanctuary which holds like 600 so that we can continue to grow and we had we put a task force together we looked at it deeply about you know should we add another service or maybe it made a lot
[00:14:55] of sense to invest in our sanctuary because theoretically let's say we got a new sound system which we did in lighting and so forth it would benefit both worshiping styles not just contemporary felt like a
[00:15:12] good use of our money and it's our largest space so you know having events having special things it made sense to invest in that space so that was our decision and there were two mandates
[00:15:25] and some of you can probably relate to this because you've felt these two mandates mandate number one it had to be the traditional sanctuary of very colonial sanctuary had to be contemporary enough it had to feel contemporary why because the fellowship hall was super cash
[00:15:47] you know we had some LED lights in there we had and it had a whole vibe to it that people loved and I knew that if we moved it into the sanctuary and it felt too stiff they would revolt and they would
[00:16:00] want to go back to the fellowship hall so I knew whatever it was we had to actually make contemporary better in the sanctuary then it was in the fellowship hall that was mandate number one
[00:16:11] many number two it had to be minimally disruptive to the traditional crowd of course so those two are totally at odds those two mandates but we were trying to think there's got to
[00:16:25] be a way to do this well and we you know we started looking at it started looking in the problem what do we do how can we change things so that when it's contemporary time it looks contemporary when it's traditional you wouldn't even notice that contemporary was sharing
[00:16:41] the same room that was sort of our standard how did we do it we're not going to get into all of it in this episode but we decided we had 30 minutes between service and actually there's a link so
[00:16:55] I put together a video that sort of tells all story including a time lapse of how we transition between traditional and contemporary every Sunday and the time lapse is four minutes but it
[00:17:07] it's usually takes about 15 so if you go to reclaimedleader.com slash worship you can have access to that video and I tell I do some time telling the story of all the things that we did but
[00:17:22] but the big idea was really thinking about contemporary as a portable church so how can we set up quickly and change the environment so if we had to bring all of our stuff in
[00:17:41] like a portable church what would that look like and how can we sustain it and do it fast so some of the big ideas we had the biggest one was inspired by north point when we were at the
[00:17:50] drive conference in 2015 I always talk about this Andy Stanley's up there talking he says a prayer I opened my eyes I think there's maybe a 30 second video opened my eyes and there's like a nine
[00:18:02] piece band where he was standing yeah he's gone and all of a sudden drums he's everything just appeared magically and I add my thought and I wrote it in my journal and said if he can do it in 30 seconds we could do it
[00:18:14] in 30 minutes probably about the ballpark approximately so we made our traditional furniture if you will hope it lectern, knee walls, community table we made it all movable so we either put it on
[00:18:32] wheels or we made like the knee walls detachable and we had places in the back of the chance where they get stored so they just kind of roll out of the way we expanded are the front of
[00:18:44] our chance so it's a bigger one level platform for the band and we made the band 90% wireless so it's a quick drill just for speed so we would have to worry about fussing with wires
[00:18:59] wireless to come in we went to a digital drum kit which is way faster to set up because you want to worry about biking it worrying about plexiglass or anything like that you just plug it in
[00:19:10] and you also have the bonuses you have sound control every drummer will hate it at first and then they'll start playing it and they'll discover it's actually pretty good yeah um
[00:19:20] so don't worry so if you have a drive if there's a drummer listening I promise it sounds bad as you think and then um we want to make sure that that we made the space field different and we
[00:19:31] accomplished that really easily with LED lighting so we have LED lights that shine onto our walls and they create like a color wash and then we have some other LED lights that sort of shoot up
[00:19:41] on this removable wall I'll talk about that in a minute but it's really LED lighting and a controller so we've now made this work for it's we're going on 10 years it'll be 10 years next year
[00:19:55] which I can't even believe and our you know that service is continued to grow it's really been a wonderful story we did end up adding another service because we outgrew this sanctuary which is
[00:20:06] fun but also disruptive and so you may be wondering so there's a lot of churches including you know our friends I just talked to last week saying okay how did you how do you actually do that
[00:20:21] how how do you get to this point and how do you do it when you don't have millions of dollars in the bag listen we were a big church but we had to do a capital came maybe we had no money for this
[00:20:32] and most churches don't have money for it so what do you do what does it look like to sort of create this pathway to think about optimizing your traditional worship space for contemporary worship
[00:20:47] so I'm just going to go through a couple of points that I haven't hopefully they help and I know Jesse you could probably weigh in all of these because you you've done the same thing
[00:20:56] alright number one actually and I'm just going to let you know ahead of time the first three points are not in the weeds about what to do but if you skip these three points you set yourself up
[00:21:11] for failure truly point number one you gotta get clarity on the vision what is your vision for the contemporary worship if your vision is blended worship you gotta know that going in if your vision
[00:21:26] is for a completely alternate contemporary service which is really what I'm talking about today you have to know that going in this is time well spent it feels like it's slowing everything down
[00:21:37] it's not you don't want to waste your money on things that you want to change or rip out and change later or your time or the excitement what is the mission purpose a new service will seek to accomplish
[00:21:53] that's really gotta be first right otherwise it's really tough to get clarity around it if you don't make that clear yeah well and you're gonna face rebellion and and Jen reasons why you made the wrong decision make yourself a target instead of getting people excited about the direction
[00:22:07] you're going so it always any change is gotta have a strong vision out in front of it and actually I think as a leader to it gives you some confidence of some clarity too you go okay that's what we're
[00:22:17] aiming for now and I think it brings up that set of questions for any leader how are we gonna move toward that what are the steps so actually does a lot of generating the kinds of questions and tools
[00:22:28] that you're gonna need to get there anyway yeah yeah and our vision was we want to reach the next generation we clearly weren't reaching them if they were in fact leaving the young families
[00:22:37] believing the church because they so it's like we want to reach the next generation who isn't reached by our traditional style and I think that's important to name because in the end I don't think
[00:22:49] what we're trying to do is to create an alternative worship style for the people already in the room I think some of those people will enjoy it and they'll come but that's not why we're doing it
[00:22:59] hopefully hopefully we're doing it because it's about the people we're not reaching yet yeah I think a really useful question there is who is representing the voices of those who aren't here yet like who's speaking up for them in your congregate because the people that are there are
[00:23:15] are there because they either they enjoy it or they tolerate it enough to be there so they're okay with it but who are the if there are people that you're trying to reach who's
[00:23:23] representing their voice what they would respond to and relate to and resonate with in the way that you do your worship service and if you don't have those people you might want to go find someone
[00:23:32] saying what is it what's working for you and your church you have a contemporary church what is it that draws you here so I think we can learn from others if we don't have some of those folks already
[00:23:41] in our minutes yeah all right number two is to remember contemporary worship is goes beyond the music it's about overall worship design here's what I mean a successful contemporary worship service
[00:23:55] you know I'm not gonna say in such a generality that oh can never work but I've not seen it work yet where all you do is swap the music and you keep the bones of the same traditional service
[00:24:07] I've never seen that work because that's not the format that it really works in it's a different animal so it says much about the environment the experience the worship flow as it is about the music style it's really you're starting from scratch you're saying okay if we
[00:24:28] were designing a contemporary worship service what could it look like right less if any liturgy most likely more video or multimedia elements it's not so pastor dependent to lead every part of the service there's an opportunity to invite a lot of people into leadership you have
[00:24:48] song sets as opposed to a single song or him and for us like we think we've talked about this before we think in terms of creating moments in the service how do we help people have an experience or
[00:25:02] have a moment with God in one way or another whether it's your prayer music preaching whatever that might be yeah because remember the reason you had a different styles because you feel the different styles gonna resonate with different people so it should be different so here's
[00:25:19] an example of this is our template that we've been using for a while we have an opening countdown video and the reason we do that is for streaming so so that it makes it seamless and easy for our
[00:25:32] operators to handle streaming live and and by the way all of our videos we get from worshiphousemedia.com and so we do opening countdown that leads to an opening video so it's like countdown goes into video
[00:25:50] and it's some sort of welcome video that's a minute and a half or less usually it's about a minute and it's like welcome to church kind of it's very upbeat high energy that leads into an upbeat
[00:26:00] high energy opening song all right everyone hey welcome in tower hill once stand and sing with us soon right and that's high energy then we go into a welcome time where we have a team a welcome
[00:26:14] team and they take turns they'll get up you were so glad you're here if you knew here this is who you ask about questions we're so glad you know and then a few announcements it's constant
[00:26:24] village vigilance to make sure the announcements don't get out of control because man that's really not great for a guest you don't want to crush them with announcements then the kids are invited to
[00:26:40] son is go we used to call this the passing of the piece until we until we realized one day that that the people in our contemporary service they were just sitting there and we didn't know why it's
[00:26:49] because they didn't know what we were talking about and so we had to say and now you know say hello to someone oh okay you know and they'll do that then a video starts that that happens while the
[00:27:01] kids are going to Sunday school when that video ends song 2 which is a slower song so we bring kind of everything down it's a more reflective kind of song that leads into a prayer time
[00:27:13] we do we invite people to take 90 seconds of silent prayer and then there's sometimes a reprise of the song maybe the chorus again or something so that whole section is kind of drawn together
[00:27:27] then we have a bumper video long enough for the band to get off and for me to get on with the the teaching TV then we have the message I say amen I invite the band up while I'm then I offer a prayer
[00:27:41] while I'm praying they're taking their positions I walk off they close they have the closing song and then I sneak around the side of the building and go to the front so that I could greet people when
[00:27:53] they walk out yeah that's that's our service so it has a totally different Evan flow than the traditional service and so I share that just to help maybe spark some ideas that
[00:28:06] it should be different and I know I mean you obviously you made some big changes in this area because you knew it had to be different yeah well I think you want to shift around I mean obviously
[00:28:15] you're thinking in terms of your people and your community what's going to resonate and relate so you might hear Jason Scott like I don't know how many videos do you have like four in there
[00:28:23] yeah we're kind of video heavy yeah so some you might go that's I don't know if we could pull that off yet or you know that kind of thing but I think what you're saying is you want to
[00:28:32] think through all the elements of the service and kind of blocks and go what are we what's happening at each of these things in a way that's different then we're following this you know this tried-and-trude order a liturgical order of service or something with what all those
[00:28:46] predictable elements and what we found is we went really far in this direction of a very conversational service countdown video into a welcome time and called a worship it's going to sound set up
[00:29:00] and and then the sermon time we dismiss the kids you know we do it so we're doing a lot of the in this very relational way that's predictable so that people when they show up they go
[00:29:12] okay I know I have an idea of what's going to happen but it's going to be in this kind of more laid-back sense even though they're still ordering purpose to it so yeah we have we could detail
[00:29:22] out our are some other time but I think it's thinking through what do you want to do what would be a service that you would want to be a part of that your people would enjoy being a part of
[00:29:32] how does it all fit together and flow and I think getting the multimedia piece dialed in if you haven't yet is an important part screens and contemporary just go together yeah so one of our
[00:29:43] challenges in our space we have capacity is more like 330 max if we really want to cramp people in and we didn't have a natural place for screens to go anywhere in the front of the sanctuary and so we
[00:29:55] had this awkward perfectly square screen that we then had tricked our projector into somehow displaying on a true square on this weird spot so one of my first things I was like how can we
[00:30:10] slowly move towards a 16 by 9 format and so we just started slowly working our way towards those kinds of things and so eventually though what happens we ended up putting two screens in the front
[00:30:22] of our sanctuary that overhang into the middle part of our sanctuary by a little bit but the quality of being of the sea the words on the screen and it gauge with the material they begin to actually
[00:30:32] disappear people won't even see them after a while and so what we found with our more traditionally minded people was at first they were like eroining the aesthetic of our sanctuary but it didn't take
[00:30:43] on for them to start to say I can read all the words and I can see what's going on and I'm glad so sometimes you got to just be bold and step out there to make some of the changes that you know
[00:30:53] are going to improve the experience and here's the thing this is an Andy Stanley thing but he talks about new and improved new for new sake that that's not getting cut it because it could be good about
[00:31:04] but new and show how it makes for something a better experience new and improved and then improving how can we continue to make it better so that when you're doing your changes imagine for the traditional
[00:31:15] you were thinking we're noticing this new and improved thing for our contemporary folks but let's make sure that it meets the needs of our traditional crowd if it's new and improved how are
[00:31:25] we improving their experience on being attentive to that too? Exactly right exactly right really the whole idea is you just want to make sure that worship is as dynamic as it can be and really for all styles of worship
[00:31:36] okay number three then it's time to get the people excited about the vision so inspiring the congregation this is going to be necessary when you're going to try to raise money people give to the things that
[00:31:48] they're excited about if you go to episode 259 we did an episode called funding the mission maybe give you some ideas on how to do that you know like a great restaurant excited people invite other people and it creates momentum and support always you know talk about the life
[00:32:06] transformation that can happen and how this new thing is all about being faithful to the great commission and when the time is right just make sure you have a very detailed well can see time stamp plan
[00:32:18] to move the vision forward that you can share and get people excited about. I think a great way in more traditionally minded churches to do that is to talk about vision and legacy. I found more
[00:32:29] by and by honoring the story of our history and thanking people for all their faithfulness and I can't wait to see what God will do next as we reach the next generations and so you're
[00:32:39] connecting this vision to this legacy of faithfulness that I think causes people to lean in and get excited where if you say well our traditional church is tired and out of date and so we need
[00:32:49] to do something new and it kind of I don't know just leaves not so good feeling so how do you honor but move forward and that'll serve them on traditional. Yes our friend Stanot always says bless and
[00:33:00] add bless and add yeah I think that's a great way to approach it so good and the leads are more of it Jason how are we yeah yeah so so number four and this is where we're going to camp out
[00:33:12] and get into the weeds a bit is how do you actually accomplish the vision so. Remember it's it's got to be I'm always thinking it's got to be on a budget right because we don't have unlimited resources
[00:33:24] and if you do you're probably not listening this podcast but before you spend any money on equipment there's a couple of things I recommend you do number one clear out and these aren't necessarily in order
[00:33:35] clear out your chancel worship space and create as much of a blank slate as you can move the fake plants even the flags you could the flags to go back if they need to but
[00:33:50] try to move everything out so it's sort of like emptying a room of a house where you start to have a new imagination for it and just start thinking what could it be? What if if we could make this
[00:34:03] a really great contemporary space what would it need to look like what are some of the elements? And to think about the overall experience of Sunday morning that's another thing is
[00:34:15] you know let's say for example our target is we want to reach young families but you don't have a Sunday school or anything to invite them to when they're here so you just want to think about
[00:34:25] what's the overall experience like it starts in the parking lot again we did a great episode of a gray gaskin sin episode 330 where he talks about first impressions you know does the church
[00:34:37] look look like you're ready to welcome them or did they just crash another family's weekly reunion right so that's really important and then here's here's a hack that could be the beginning of a great thing for your church and that is this contact an audio visual company
[00:34:56] to evaluate the sound video and lighting in your worship space. Well pastor we can't afford it don't worry about that yet. Usually pay them some fee to do this service for you and it's great
[00:35:11] they'll end up giving you a proposal of how they think you should spend money they'll ask you things like what's your budget or anything and you know you could figure out whatever you want to tell them
[00:35:20] but they're going to do some some acoustic analysis they're going to have some ideas of what kind of gear you need they're actually going to give you all the information you need to
[00:35:29] start putting your plan together and this was the way that we struck gold with our relationship with Somerset Median Michael Hade who's a friend of the podcast is you know we had a few
[00:35:41] AV companies come in and bid out a small project and we had them all do this analysis and we really loved keyhead work with churches before in fact he was a pastor he was a previous
[00:35:53] church organist like he got us in a way that nobody else did but reach out to a company and maybe you're like well I don't know who to even reach out to. Well here's here's an idea find a non-denom
[00:36:08] or a mega church within your area and ask who they use and they'll have some referrals for you so I mean really it's if you find a company come do this it's amazing the information that you get
[00:36:22] that now you can start thinking about okay well and you can even ask them say look can you give us the the Toyota Corolla and then can you give us the BMW and tell us how much of a cost to do right
[00:36:39] can you tear yeah you know exactly better breast all that stuff they'll do that for you because they know that you're working on a budget and yeah you don't know they're they're they're the support
[00:36:51] out effort so yeah yeah so that's that's I think like the first move of in the weeds is to get it get the pros in don't rely on your church volunteers to do this I'm just telling you from
[00:37:02] experience they don't they don't know what they don't know and then they're personally wounded if you don't go with what they suggest so and usually it's your sound operator you currently have
[00:37:13] if you go to them and say what do we need and they tell you something it turns out you do something different they're probably going to stop serving or they're going to be angry every time they
[00:37:21] serve um so if you already have that let's say you just want a couple pieces of gear I recommend going to sweetwater.com it's an AV gear company and they're all over the country and they have
[00:37:35] very knowledgeable sales reps for your area that can help you actually select a gear and they don't pay me to say that we do sweetwater a bunch of times um now they're the kind of AV company they
[00:37:46] don't do the work but they can do some recommending to get you going if you don't need a company to come in and do what I just said and remember you can have a plan that you grow into our last
[00:37:58] project had three phases were just finishing phase three after two years so it's okay phase it out because again it's helping to generate excitement and it's getting you on a plan to get where you want to be
[00:38:10] yeah well if you go back I mean drill down into that a little bit because what where would you start or you start on the audio side the visual side or is it kind of got to be both at once or
[00:38:20] how how different does an environment need to be in order to to launch you know like yeah you don't want to create a fall start but you also might not be able to go to the BMW
[00:38:32] full experience allusely right or what would you recommend like what's a first add well I would say this spend as much as you could possibly afford because this is the most important one of the most important things you're going to do
[00:38:50] as far as the quality of your contemporary worship the sound is number one so I would say lean towards the BMW on sound if you can and go with the curl on lighting
[00:39:07] for now but have a plan to get better yeah I think you're going to need some lighting to change a traditional environment there's really no way around that you need to get control of the lighting
[00:39:16] so you could do that strategically through LEDs and you don't need that many to start to change the environment so get all the lights on to one board if possible if you can get your existing
[00:39:27] house lights and new LED lights talking onto the same light board that's ideal not always possible because very different kinds of lighting but make sure you can control it you're going to need
[00:39:38] several lights you could just buy flights that sit on the floor you don't have to go with the ceiling mounted lights yet those are more expensive I you'll want those eventually because you're
[00:39:48] want to do some other things with lighting but let's say for budget concerns you start with four to six on the floor in the back of the chancel LED lights with different colors you could
[00:39:59] shoot a color wash onto the walls and change your environment pretty dramatically but I would spend your money on spending much you can on your sound because that really is going to matter especially
[00:40:10] for both in person and online online it's not going away you're going to want to make sure your sounds as good as it can possibly be yeah so the qualitative aspect of sound over lighting
[00:40:20] lighting can be you can grow into but the sound piece is in for any musician that's going to want to be a part of it or people that are that kind of into with that you got to have that gear that
[00:40:30] can keep up with the needs of a contemporary service and so I'm sure there's way more detail to get into that with that I would also just add on the visual side having high definition
[00:40:42] where you're you know you're not washing out the images on the screen with light that's hitting it and all that kind of stuff you just got to make sure that it's it feels credible you know as
[00:40:52] you're going you like you might have to start with simple graphics and different kinds of things but make sure it feels credible and like you know it was thought about and not just an after it
[00:41:02] thought yeah so um and again I've seen more traditional sanctuaries use you know let's say that they're just getting started but they want to accentuate the band and maybe you have a choir
[00:41:14] loft on the chants or somewhere and you just want to bring the lights down I've seen them used sort of like a purple or dark blue light that they shine onto the fire loft and and brighter
[00:41:26] whiteer lights up front and it really helps to differentiate the space. Now do you guys do a screen during your traditional worship or not? We do not. We're up and we're up and we're up and
[00:41:36] be 20 right? Yeah we have one that that comes down it lives in a box at the top of the ceiling that was the only thing you could see uh incidentally from our thing as you could see the box
[00:41:47] after a few weeks people didn't even notice it. You're awesome um and they just that you just got a couple quick points as we land uh this episode but one is one thing that we did that we love
[00:41:58] is we explored creating a new look through portable quick walls like they do at trade shows where they have a vending boost that you know they could set up this sort of pipe and drape style
[00:42:09] walls there's a company called stretchshapes.com that we use these aren't necessarily cheap but they last a long time and you could get custom sizes so we wanted a way to cover up
[00:42:22] the choir loft in the organ to just really make it look like a more contemporary space and it's that like Spandex material. It looks like a wood wall and we had them custom make one for
[00:42:34] us and we just replaced the Spandex part and it's not because it's broken because we were getting nervous that it might so we wanted to have a backup. So really it lasts it lasts a long time.
[00:42:46] And then tips on changing your environment fast is the number one hack is probably the most obvious you got to have a team that's willing to do it every week and if it could be the same team that's
[00:42:56] even better. So we have a team of I want to say 7 7 to 10 people that volunteer and the coolest part is I would say 7 out of those 10 are all traditional worshippers that want to help.
[00:43:15] Which I just think is so cool. They're there every week and they're doing it. So again if you want to see all of that and hear more the story and just see how it changes reclaimed leader.com
[00:43:26] slash worship and you get access to that video but I know it's a lot but I thought it would be cool to just share this for an episode because I know there's churches thinking about this all the time.
[00:43:35] And I think I think it's so important to remember that we want everybody to win here. That's that's what you're after and I think that was the right question. How do we create a contemporary experience without completely demolishing what other people are valuing here? And I like that
[00:43:51] kind of thinking. I love that at Marimdi with some of the changes we made over the year. That our older crowd or more traditional crowd heard the contemporary music going on and they
[00:44:00] were glad because they knew that meant their young families and young people at our church worshiping. And as our younger people were leaving and we're turning over into our more traditional part of our morning with Newstieke and things, the hands are going, the organs playing,
[00:44:14] the piano, whatever the instruments. And the younger crowd is happy and glad that there's a place for those people to be where they can worship in a way that connects their heart to God's heart.
[00:44:22] So let's be on each other side here with this and create spaces for both of those experiences. I think there's just so much wisdom in that and you give this a roadmap for how to do that
[00:44:32] in a traditional space. And I think it's pretty cool. So you got to check out the video that Jason has, how they do that and then hopefully it'll spark some ideas and dreams for you about what
[00:44:41] what it might look like in your space. All right everyone. Hey, thanks so much for listening. I know that this one was a little on the longer side but hopefully it's helpful for you. And as we say,
[00:44:51] I mean this we live and breathe this. His ministry is hard. It is so much better when we do it together. Take care everyone.