Over the years, this simple strategy has been used over and over again to produce hundreds of church-wide campaigns with video curriculum and the teaching of the senior or lead pastor.

Here’s a quick Next Steps Guide that shows how we do it:

SELECT

We’ll help you select a 40 day campaign series from previous years, or a new one you’re getting ready to kick off, that could be a good candidate for a church-wide curriculum. You can also choose from any of our pre-written semi-custom series.

SCRIPT

PRODUCE

We’ll work with you to select a  great location for the video shoot. We can come with our crew and gear and direct and produce your entire shoot or we can do a collaboration of our team and your team and produce a curriculum in a training format so that you can learn to do your own. 

WRITE

DESIGN

We’ll write a small group edition of each of the weekend sermons for video production or provide you pre-scripted outlines for our existing semi-custom series. We can also work with you to create video testimonies, devotionals, and other video features. 

PUBLISH/DUPLICATE

LAUNCH

We’ll help you launch your 40 day campaign and coach you through the process, including ideas on promotional clips, recruiting leaders for new groups, building community, and developing existing groups. Here is a great example of a trailer for a series called “All In” that we did with the Rock Church. 

NEXT STEPS

In most churches the focus of the Christmas and Easter services are designed to re-engage the unconnected and unchurched attendees into the life and ministry of the church.  By starting with a simple gospel message in a creative format, we can encourage them to come back the following week.

But we want to consider not just addressing the 20% of those that are attending the holiday services but still challenge the 80% of the rest of the congregation to a simple and strategic next step opportunity.

The strategy is wrapped around a simple 6-step process that has turned out to be a more successful “evangelistic connection” strategy than I have ever experienced before.

Here’s a breakdown of those 6 things:

Recruit a group of what may be 10% of the average adult attendance to open their home to host a simple cookie exchange, neighborhood Christmas party or some holiday gathering for their friends and family including the children.

• Produce a simple 5-7 minute explanation of the true meaning of Christmas taught by your senior pastor. Simply shoot this in the home of a church member that is decorated well for the holidays. This can be done as the only segment on the DVD or add to the other items below.

• Have your worship leader sing a short set of Christmas carols on a piano or guitar. Shoot this on a single camera with natural holiday lighting and have them record easy sing-along songs. Do this with low volume and lights dimly lit. Christmas carols are the easiest songs to sing by Christians and non-Christians alike.

• Have the host simply invite their friends, family, and neighbors to come over for an evening together. Give a simple invitation for a one-hour meet and greet and they will come. The average home will have almost 20 people attending and only 50% will have ever attended the church before (Optional: You can have the pastor create the reading of the Christmas story to a few kids for a “Reading” or “Storytelling” time, all on camera. We had one pastor host his grandkids gather around for this segment, which made for a fun blooper reel later. It truly works!)

• Finally, have people share one thing they are thankful about this last year and one thing they hope for next year.

• The other thing we have done is help churches produce 25-30 Daily Christmas Video Devotionals that get sent out to your entire email list. These can be 1-2 minutes long and can be taught by your pastors or by the rest of your staff.

All of this is light, fun and produces a taste of Christmas along with a bit of shared cookies and desserts. People who have hosted something like this have loved it and those who attended loved it. It is a great precursor to attending the church’s Christmas service and sustaining them over the weekend–and the best part is that so many of those who attend are typically those that have never stepped foot in the church before! Can you imagine what happened at the church services? Yes, a wonderful attendance from many of those family and friends.

The beauty of this event is the idea of “connecting into the community” that warmed things up for a full-feature curriculum and teaching that you can launch in the New Year and then in the spring.

Want to know how we can help you this upcoming season?  Contact us today!