If you follow this blog, you know that I’m deep into a fairly large building project for our biggest campus. We had the architect, General Contractor and AVL company taken care of, but one area we had not dealt with yet was Kids Ministry Theming. We decided to hire Plain Joe Studios to do the work. Let me tell you why.
I think it’s important to not take ourselves too seriously, and be willing to have a little fun, even poking fun at our own ministries. April Fool’s Day provides a great opportunity to do so, and I took it! One of our churches little quirks is that we start all of our gatherings :02 minutes later than logic would dictate. So, it’s 9:02, not 9:00. It’s 11:17, not 11:15. Our founding pastor will tell you that he did it just to make it stand out and catch your eye a bit more as you drove by a sign. It’s one of those silly things that people remember, and plenty of us make fun of it as well. A couple of years ago, we actually considered changing it due to the cheese factor, but decided that at this point, it’s just a part of who we are. We are the :02 church. But what if suddenly, we decided to become the :03 church? That was the basis of my April Fool’s Day post that went on our website and throughout our social media. People had a lot of fun with it. Here is the article I wrote:
Like most churches, ours has a couple of announcements each week, generally tied in as a closer to the gathering. One of our staff members plays gate-keeper on what gets announced and when. For the weekends, she creates a cheat sheet for us to bring on stage with the list and key information so we aren’t doing that annoying thing where you turn around to look at the screen because you forgot the dates of the women’s retreat or whatever. Recently our cheat sheets got a major upgrade.
We all know that our churches need to serve our communities, but let’s be honest, that can often degenerate into offering things at your buildings, and hoping that people will show up and “be served”. A few years ago, we took this to a whole new level with Mission Serve:Local. It has grown each year and last Saturday, over 600 people who call Mosaic Church home fanned out into the community to serve in over 50 projects, then returned for lunch together. Here is a full post about it. Having promoted this event for several weeks, we wanted to celebrate it right away, the very next day at all of our services with a video. That meant having one of our video people do a super fast turnaround on a video by editing all of the content in just a few hours. It also meant sending our story team around to multiple projects to capture video and pictures. I think it turned out well. Check it out.
Last week I had the opportunity to spend the week with 175 middle and high school students from Mosaic Church. It’s not something I would usually do. Was it worth my time? I don’t have a particular calling to students and I have no unique gifting with teenagers. But when our student ministry pastor asked me to consider going, I prayed about it, and decided that it was in fact, a good use of my time even though I’m in one of the busiest seasons of my working life.
Gospel centered vision + Spirit led implementation leads to health. Health leads to growth. Growth leads to lack of space. Lack of space leads to a call for more space. Call for more space leads to a need for more financial fuel. The need for more financial fuel leads to . . . well, that’s where the real confusion sets in. Do you hire a generosity company or go it alone? How much will it cost? Is it really worth it? These are hard questions that every growing church faces.
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Phil Taylor
My name is Phil. I spent 20 years pastoring (mostly executive pastoring) and now I serve churches all over through consulting on buildings and brands at Plain Joe Studios and coaching Executive Pastors. My wife and I have three kids and one grandchild. I’m into running and kayaking.