Deep & Wide: Creating Churches Unchurched People Love to Attend by Andy Stanley

Author:Andy Stanley
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Religion, Christian Church, General
ISBN: 9780310494850
Publisher: Zondervan
Published: 2012-09-24T22:00:00+00:00

BEYOND TALKING HEADS

Engaging presentations are certainly not limited to talking heads. In fact, live preaching or teaching may be one of the least-engaging forms of presentation. As a general rule, if you can present something in any way other than someone standing on a stage and talking, do so! If you can communicate something via video, go video. One way we’ve applied this is by replacing the dreaded weekend announcements with a video segment we call the 10Before. The best way to understand the 10Before is to see it. If you go to our website and look down at the bottom right hand corner of the landing page, you can actually view the 10Before from this past weekend’s service (www.northpoint.org).

The 10Before is a short video that welcomes the crowd and orients them to the service. It also contains fun and informative video clips about upcoming opportunities for involvement. It is highly entertaining. Often funny. Our congregants look forward to the 10Before. This means, and please don’t let this get out, they look forward to the announcements.

Speaking of announcements. In the churches I grew up in, the education director did the Sunday morning announcements. Wanna know why? Because he was the education director and that’s what the education director did. It had absolutely nothing to do with an education director’s ability to present in an engaging manner. Some could. Most couldn’t. Doing the announcements was part of the role. Now, this next statement is so important I wish I could highlight it for you. Never assign a task that is gift-dependent to a staffing position. Never. Assign responsibility, not tasks. If we had assigned Kevin Ragsdale with the task of teaching our students, he would have failed as the student director. Actually, he is smart enough that he never would have taken the job to begin with. We assigned him the responsibility of making sure the students were taught well.

Now the astute readers and thinkers in the audience are wondering, “Does that mean a church shouldn’t assign the preaching responsibility to the pastor?” Ahhh. Good question. Here’s another one: Should a church assign the pastoring role to the pastor? How about this one: Should a church assign the leadership role of the church to the pastor? Public speaking, pastoring, and leading are all a bit gift-dependent, aren’t they? And finding one man or one woman who is competent in all three of those disciplines is difficult. Sounds like a recipe for disaster to me. We will come back to that in chapter fourteen.

There’s so much more we could talk about under this heading: visuals, interviews, note-taking outlines, pictures. All those things add an element of engagement to a verbal presentation. The bottom line is this: Do what it takes to create a culture characterized by a relentless commitment to engaging presentations at every level of the organization. Your message it too important to do anything less than that. The adults and children in your congregation and your community deserve your best efforts in this regard.

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