Designing the Series The Clash

In my role as Communications Pastor at Willow Creek I was able to bring together a wonderful creative team to assist with the design and development of our current sermon series The Clash. I was inspired by the latest edition of the Sunday Mag in which they describe in a series of posts one church's creative process in designing their Christmas service. This post won't go into the detail that the Sunday Mag did, but should give you a good idea of how we produced and designed our current sermon series.

The Series/Service

Here at Willow Creek we typically go through entire books of the Bible in our main morning service. Our current series, The Clash, is a series that examines the first part of 1st Corinthians.

In the beginning of the book the Apostle Paul addresses the dire situation in the church at Corinth. In the church there is a lot of conflict caused by a number of issues. The big idea our senior pastor wanted to convey was that God uses and actually designs conflict to help us grow and know Jesus more.

This sounds quite odd and it is indeed at first glance. Ultimately as we grow in maturity, the conflict that we've been through shapes and molds us so that we understand how to grow without the need for as much conflict.

The Planning

I brought our team together for our very first meeting on a Saturday. We could have met at the church in the conference room or something like that but as we are the "Creative Planning Team" I wanted to meet in someplace that that would inspire and be fun as well. In downtown Des Moines we have a place called West End Salvage that is run out of an old warehouse. It has four floors of antiques and architectural treasures along with a coffee shop. Needless to say it was perfect.

To get everyone's creative juices flowing and to get the team to know each other a little better I assigned everyone to explore the warehouse and find something they loved. We then walked around together and had each person explain what they chose and why they chose it.

After we reconvened on the bottom floor I passed out the "series idea sheet." On this sheet it lists the passage/book we are studying, a working title that the pastoral staff came up with and the main ideas the series will convey.

Our job was then to come up with a better title (if possible), service elements, promotions, and how we can encourage next steps.

The Title

The first part we tackled was the title of the series. We talked for quite a while about this going back and forth with what the big ideas were, what we really wanted to say and what was important. A lot of good ideas were given but its a pretty hard thing for 12 people to come up with a single title.

We ended up breaking into groups of two and brainstorming together about titles. This approach was much better and there were many great ideas presented.

The Feel

The Visuals

The Music

The Goal

The Challenges

Tech (lights and sets)