Brett Eastman | Lifetogether

How to Produce Your Own In-House 40 Day Campaign this Year

by Brett Eastman | Nov 11, 2019 | Main Blog

Church members love studying with resources created by their own church and leadership team. Additionally, creating your own studies can reinforce your theological framework, your vision and values, and your culture.

That’s why we work with churches around the country to help them produce their own in-house campaigns that include teaching, testimonies, and training by the church’s staff and leadership team! Take a look at the video below of Brett detailing how we make this happen for churches all across the country!

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

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.

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

We’ll write a small group curriculum based on the teaching of the senior pastor with additional resources including leadership training, group worksheets, and helpful tips.

DESIGN

PUBLISH/DUPLICATE

We’ll do all the post-production editing and provide you with duplication-ready masters and print-ready files, or broker the duplication and printing of the curriculum for you.

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

Whether it’s coming out to do a personal assessment, coaching for a Fall major campaign, or starting your first video curriculum production, contact us today for a free consultation!

6 step process to connect your congregation this Christmas!

by Brett Eastman | Nov 7, 2019 | Main Blog

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!

Proven ways to prepare, launch and get exponential results with your capital campaign

by Brett Eastman | Aug 8, 2019 | Main Blog

This past year we were able to play a small but strategic role in helping secure over $100 million dollars in between capital campaign commitments and increases in the weekly tithes and offerings in churches all around the country.

For years we evaluated the success of our ministry by the percentage increase in the number of people connected, the number of new leaders and the quality of our production. But that will forever be changed as a result of this year’s harvest.

Most of the churches we have worked with over the years are either gearing up for a capital campaign or winding one down. Growing churches require resources, and when I served on the staff at Willow Creek and then at Saddleback, I learned that if we could connect a person into a small group, their giving would increase exponentially–in some cases doubling and even tripling. In addition, small group leaders actually gave an additional 20% simply because they became “owners,” not just group attendees. So the goal of getting people into community became not just a spiritual initiative but a financial growth opportunity.

When I was first approached by Kenton Beshore, the senior pastor at Mariners Church in Southern California, to align a capital campaign with the launch of small groups, it felt like a mixed message, but I’ve come to realize this is a great way to help people grow spiritually, relationally, and help fulfill the financial goals of the church.

Mariners went from 1,500 to 6,000 people in groups that year, in part because Kenton and his staff were motivated to get people aligned with the mission, vision and values of the capital campaign, allowing it to be a spiritual adventure and not just a financial expectation.

Since that time, we have produced dozens of church campaigns and professionally published curriculum series that are designed from the ground up to renew the vision and values of a church AND seek to increase the annual giving levels of its members. We did one for Greg Surratt called “I See a Church” that connected over 10,000 people into groups, and another with Jim and Jen Cowart at Harvest Church called “Livingthe Five” that launched 300 groups, and yet another called “What Am I Here For?” with Josh Peigh at Heartland Church, best known for being the first multisite church in America, that launched 350 groups.

In a previous season, I met with J.D. Greear at The Summit Church in Raleigh, NC where we developed the first fully-integrated full-color curriculum and sermon alignment series for a capital campaign. We helped them not only develop the curriculum, but also launch groups during the capital campaign season. The results were far and above what they’d hoped for and attributed the alignment with the series as a critical role in its success. It was then that I began to realize a greater opportunity.

Then last fall, we worked with Miles McPherson at Rock Church in San Diego to help them develop a breakthrough town hall curriculum production that engaged a live conversation with 40 members of his congregation all captured on video to watch in home in the comforts of a living room. In addition, we produced a music video featuring their entire worship team in the new town hall format and an off campus video driven worship experience–you have to see it to believe it! Finally, we produced a full-color magazine style print curriculum that had hundreds of photos from their congregation. They had never imagined the first impression and momentum if would create. They went on to launch 400 new groups and connect 8,000 people. See the full All In case study here!

We also partnered with Dr. David Jeremiah at Shadow Mountain Church to kick off 2016 with a church-wide stewardship and generosity series titled Generosity for the Generations designed to keep these concepts “top of mind” for his congregation at the start of the new year. We loved producing his town hall video shoot and even shot companion editions for Spanish, Youth, and Children. Check out the Adult English print curriculum and companion

Spanish print curriculum.

Over the years we have partnered with most of the major capital campaign companies including RSI, John Maxwell’s group and, most recently, Generis and the Gage Group. Our process and resources work hand-in-hand with any capital campaign ministry or consulting service.

One of the other developments is to partner with a church to write and produce a financial video curriculum series based on a past or present sermon series by a pastor. This is like their own version of Financial Peace, Good Sense or Howard Dayton’s material taught by the pastor. The advantage here is that it is a timeless resource to bring back year after year as a core curriculum class at a church.

We also have a pre-written stewardship series which has become one of our leading semi-custom curriculum series used by churches for a basic stewardship emphasis. This four-week series on time, talent, treasure, and trust is guaranteed to raise the level of your regular giving. It can be a perfect companion to a four-week series anytime in the year, a fall kick-off series, a January stewardship initiative, or aligned with a capital campaign. Check out how we customized it for Dale Oquist’s series, “Crazy Generosity” . With this series, you can see weekend teaching sample sermons and small group scripts. All you need is a week window and you would be ready to roll.

We have Capital Campaign Packages that include not only the video-based sermon series but also daily video devotions captured from the senior staff and church leaders and a full-color study guide with hundreds of photographs from your ministry. We can shoot in a town hall formatand can even produce live worship from your worship team.

If you are interested in doing a capital campaign or stewardship series, contact us today!

A Dozen Ways We Are Better Together

by Brett Eastman | Jul 30, 2019 | Main Blog, Partnerships, Programs

I’m excited to have this opportunity to introduce to you 12 different packages and new programs that LifeTogether is rolling out. I’m guessing that in at least one of these brief descriptions you’ll find a good next step for your church.

1. New Year’s Vision 2020 Campaign/Fall Campaign

You choose the focus and start time, and LifeTogether will help you develop a campaign that unifies your church and sparks in your congregation a renewed passion for their faith. It’s not too late to develop a Fall 2019 campaign even if you’ve never done a campaign before. In fact, most churches we work with take a sermon series from the archives and hand it over to us. After all, the church staff is busy, and the pastor’s dance card is full. So we make the campaign happen for them: we revitalize the teaching, film a video series, find testimonials from church members, and/or create a beautiful curriculum for small groups. And don’t miss out on the opportunity to present a 20/20 vision for your church as we start the year 2020. This is a one-time-only event that marks not only a new year but a new decade! Use this moment to reflect on what God has done in your church’s life in the past ten years and to present the vision He has given you for the next ten. The start of the year 2020 is a killer time to have a churchwide campaign.

2. Starter Campaign + Sustainer Series Package

It happens because people are people…. A lot of churches do campaigns, fire up the members, and launch more small groups than they expected—and after a while the leaders realize the church has lost momentum. We at LifeTogether have a breakthrough way of addressing this common situation. We work with you to produce major churchwide starter campaign in multiple formats, some very creative, some very simple, and all of them effective, including a video shoot at your place or ours, here in Southern California. We offer leader training and often incorporate testimonies from your own church members in whatever we do for you. After this campaign we then produce the perfect follow-up: a sustainer series. We add a little consulting to help you really maximize the impact of your campaign. We want you not just to start strong, but also to continue strong!

3. Partnership Options: Train the Trainer, 50/50 & Executive Producer Package

Whether start-to-finish guidance and production from LifeTogether, or a partnership that has us doing some fine-tuning, or training in video production or small-group leadership for staff and volunteers—whatever your church needs and whatever fits your budget, LifeTogether will make it happen.

Our Executive Producer Package is full-service: we come to you for pregame planning, on game day we produce the videos at your site, and then we take care of the post-production for you.
Perhaps you have an amazing video staff and the latest equipment, but you’re not getting the cinematic quality you’re after. Or maybe you’d like a better design for a popular home-grown curriculum. In a 50/50 Team Production Package, we share the load. We can step in with graphics, designers, writers, videographers, or directors and help with whatever needs to be done.
In this very popular Train the Trainer package, LifeTogether trains church leaders—especially small-group leaders but also the video production team—to be able to train others. For either six or twelve months, we train your leaders and then offer support as the newly trained trainers train others. It’s gratifying for everyone involved.

4. Small-Group University

This popular program is exactly what its name says: we offer basic, intermediate, and advanced training classes for small-group leaders. We’ve developed a template that can be customized to your people and your needs. After years of doing this, we have version 1.0 for you to load to a teleprompter and get started. Using set curriculum and/or role playing , you can develop new small-group leaders and sharpen the skills of your experienced ones. A comfortable and confident leader can make all the difference in your people’s small-group experiences. Join us for our free webinar this Wednesday to discuss more.

5. Publishing Digital Media and Small-Group Curriculum

Is this the year you want to build your video library? Help church members get connected? Or reignite excitement about small groups? We’d love to come alongside you and produce three, four, five, or even six video series for you in the next twelve months. You’ll be able to spark and sustain spiritual growth in your people, strengthen their relationship with Jesus and one another, and enable them to be disciplers. A video series is an effective way to enable further conversation about the weekend sermon. Send us video or transcripts of a weekend series, and we’ll prepare a custom curriculum and script for video. You know your church, its vision, and its heart, so you decide the topics and the number of series you want to do—and we’ll make it happen!

6. Mission, Vision, and Values Series

Every church is unique in its expression of its mission, vision, and values. Once set forth by the church leaders, these essentials are important for members to not lose sight of and for newcomers who want to get to know your church. We could do a week on each aspect of your church’s purpose or on one of your key values. Or we could do a multiple-week series on a new direction the church is taking. LifeTogether can take sermons you’ve preached on your church’s mission, vision, and values, turn them into a video scripts, and develop a small-group curriculum. Or you could take the templates we have for sermons, curriculum, and video scripts, plug in your specifics, and be good to go. We can customize the package by featuring your church’s pastors, people, testimonies, and campus in the full-color study guide. You know the breadth and capacity of your team, so you know how LifeTogether can best help, whether it’s video, writing, design, layout, or strategy. Whatever you need and want, let’s make this happen! Click here to see more.

7. Next Step Program

So what’s the next step for your congregation? What gap in biblical knowledge do you want to address? What call to action is most important in this season? What messages would help them get more involved in mission work in local communities? Your church’s Next Step may be to better connect with one another or with nonbelievers. Maybe it’s time to motivate your people to go out and share more openly the gospel message. You might focus on spiritual disciplines or Bible study how-tos to prompt growth. You might be passionate about Jesus coming as a servant and want to help congregants marvel at that choice and adopt the attitude of a servant so they can discover the joy of serving. Or maybe it’s time to review what worship is all about. Whatever your next step, we can help you develop a small-group curriculum or an exciting Conversation Series, a new approach to church that features interaction and discussion between the pastor and those in attendance. We’d love to help you take your Next Step! Join us for our free webinar this Wednesday to discuss more.

8. Book Publishing

Almost every pastor has a book—or five—in him. In this publishing package, LifeTogether can help you create your first or your next book. We no longer offer just consulting. We’ve developed a process and a team to help your book get into print. The first step is to bring you out to California. We’ll hang out for a day, pull out your life message, and put together a general outline that ideally integrates sermons you’ve preached. We have professional designers, writers, and editors to help you bring your book to life. And once we publish it, we resell it to other churches in our 25,000-church network. Those sales can help you recoup some of the costs. We only have a few more spots on our dance card if you want to kick off the new year with a new book—but a new book will generate excitement at your church any time of the year! Click here to see more.

9. Stewardship/Capital Campaign

Let us help you talk about the sometimes-hard-to-talk-about issues of stewardship, tithing, and capital campaigns. We can use messages you’ve already written—or help you develop new ones—as the basis for videos and small-group curriculum. Finances and stewardship continues to be one of the most popular subjects in top churches in America even when the video series stretches over an 18- to 24-month period . Generate excitement about goals, a sense of community, and a greater passion for God’s work through a Stewardship/Capital Campaign series. Whatever the size of your church, we’re here to help. Click here to see more.

10. Sermon Curator Program

You’ve been preaching for decades. So of course it can be hard to come up with new approaches to the material you want to cover—and just how many ways can you talk about Easter or Christmas? Other times you need some ideas as you consider what content to address over the next six, 12, or 18 months. LifeTogether has hundreds of sermons that you can mine. You will also benefit from all that we have learned from hundreds of the country’s largest and fastest growing churches about what they’re preaching, when they’re preaching it, and why they’re preaching it. Click here to see more.

11. Church Innovations

After working with small groups for more than twenty years, we are now broadening our offerings so we can help more churches in more ways. Right now we have seven core categories and 18 elective topics. We truly do have something for everybody—and that includes you! Click here to see more.

12. Content Champion

Let us come alongside you and help you look back at your sermon library and assess what you could repurpose for an upcoming sermon series, what you might turn into a small-group curriculum, what might become that book you’ve considered writing, and what material could become digital assets for social media, daily email devotions, and countless other options. We want to help pastors like you look backward to see what you can leverage from your years of ministry. What you produce may actually serve as a legacy that honors God and furthers His kingdom. Click here to see more.

The LifeTogether team would love to learn which of these twelve offerings you’d like to pursue initially and how we can help you make that happen. Our partnership might involve a visit to your church or your visit to SoCal. Let’s start with a conference call between your team and ours to see which one, or two, or three offerings we might work on together.

Thanks for taking the time to read this newsletter and get to know LifeTogether better! We look forward to working with you!

Let’s continue the conversation this Wednesday during our free webinar.

If you have any questions about the topics above, please join us for a 30 minute call or request a private, no obligation conversation with our team. Click here to register.

We look forward to hearing from you!

Better Together,
Brett Eastman
brett@lifetogether.com

17 Proven Connection Strategies for your Post-Easter Season

by Brett Eastman | Apr 24, 2019 | Main Blog

It’s been a week since Easter Sunday, can you believe it? We know that the last several months have been hectic (to say the least), you have endured some sleepless nights (no doubt), and poured your heart and soul out service after service, all in preparation for the most important day of your year. It’s hard to believe that Easter has yet again come and gone by so fast.

At Lifetogether we know our hundreds of church partners & pastors just like yourself, are now left with two big questions: “How should I follow up?” and of course, “What’s next?”

For over 25 years, Lifetogether has successfully partnered with churches and pastors to connect north of 100% of their entire congregation into groups & have produced over 500 award winning video curriculum and church wide campaigns. We undoubtedly have the proven solutions and strategies you need to answer these along with any of your Post-Easter questions!

So as we come out of one season and head into another, we recognize that we are now in the perfect season to help you plan, prepare, & produce enough material that will sustain your church for the next year. Even better, we can do it all in one day’s time.

As we are continuing to connect congregations in some of these most exponential ways, here is a rapid-fire overview of our top proven strategies you should consider for your post Easter follow up & next steps.

Discover more in this video of Brett breaking down the top 17 proven strategies for connecting and engaging your congregation post-Easter.

NEXT STEP SERIES

This series is designed for new believers, what we like to call a fresh start or starting point, that is a next step off a weekend service, especially off the momentum of your Easter service. It would be a 4-part video series with the Senior pastor teaching in a direct-to-camera style amidst a small group of people as the audience.

SMALL GROUP STARTER SERIES

Most churches will wait for the next semester or other seasons in order to start a fresh campaign, but the small group starter curriculum series would allow your ministry to catalyze groups amidst any season or timing. It would be a video-driven, walking through and casting vision for your small groups in a plug and play format. Your existing small groups simply play the video and invite friends out, catalyzing the next round of groups.

MEMBERSHIP IN A BOX

We would partner with your ministry in the membership process in creating a four week set, producing video series for classes, discipleship, and more. This is great for larger churches where the pastor can’t attend every single membership class, and especially for multisites where it can be a volume series that is print-based but also contains companion video curriculum.

SUMMERTIME DINNER PARTY

Yes, we said party! This generation of church loves connecting with one another. The Summer dinner parties would be geographically catalyzed, with the flexibility of hosts mixing and matching based on their schedules without having to put on a more costly and scheduled church event. This application is timeless, proven, and very effective, particularly among millennials, that creates relational momentum inspired from Easter.

JULY 4TH BBQ

Everyone loves a good barbecue! This is a great way to challenge your congregation to host a neighborhood BBQ or potluck, that can be extended even for Labor Day as well. People could pair up to partner in hosting or you could cast vision to have your small groups launch it. You could even create a simple and short video that introduces your church and allows for greater outreach potential in gathering people into community.

SUMMERTIME CURRICULUM LIBRARY

This remedies the struggle of communicating with a third party publisher, especially since your congregation would rather hear relational messages from the Senior Pastor and church staff themselves. You would use the weekend service as a catalyst, and in one day (yes only one day!) produce 3 different video curriculum. The library would include transcriptions, small group editions and curriculum, full color study guides, DVD packages, and so much more. The content could transform and build into a teaching team, mission-vision-values series, fall campaign preparation, life message, testimonies, and the list goes on and on. This is another great application that can be done in a short amount of time and that can be used repeatedly for years to come.

WEEKLY CURRICULUM PRODUCTION

Learn to write and produce curriculum on a weekly basis, building up content 52 weeks a year. The content would be based off of the core ideas of an existing weekend message. You could use GoPros, digital cameras, even an iPhone, plus a simple audio mic, and just have an interactive conversation on the big idea for about 10 minutes. Then, make a complementing video to give to existing groups that would propel a greater application from the inspiration of a weekend service. Essentially, you can produce this off the weekend service and even for the weekend service, utilizing existing worship stage lighting or sets in the background. Learning to consistently write and produce curriculum on a weekly basis is a great application and asset that will catalyze groups and make disciples in your ministry.

FACEBOOK LIVE

We understand the desire to keep the conversation going even after the weekend service or small group time. By leveraging Facebook Live and social media outlets, your ministry can simply re-purpose the footage that is already saved on the platform. This footage can then be used to further catalyze groups off of the Facebook Live content.

MOTHER’S DAY AND FATHER’S DAY SERIES

These family holidays are perfect opportunities to catalyze small groups, such as individual women’s and men’s small groups, that would be welcoming to all stages of life. This would be a four week series taught by key ministry leaders that focus on not just bringing, but going.

VIDEO DEVOTIONALS

Video devotions are another fantastic method of taking advantage of social media and taking church to your community. You simply take the top influencers or key leaders in your church, i.e. youth leaders, women’s ministry leaders, etc., and record a short 60 to 90 second video. These clips could be sent out Monday to Friday or Monday to Sunday across various social media platforms. The content would include an greeting the viewers, then introducing the passage, and lastly painting a picture of an application. We like to call this format the “passage-principle picture” or “scripture-story-step” method. The goal is to encourage viewers to share this as well on their own social media networks. Lifetogether can even partner with you in taking these short clips, editing them and send them back.

SUMMERTIME BOOK SERIES

Whether you’ve already written a book or have ideas in the works, a Summer book series is a great catalyst for launching groups. Lifetogether would partner with you in even producing a companion video curriculum for your Spring and Summer seasons.

FIRST VIDEO CURRICULUM PRODUCTION AT LIFETOGETHER

We invite you out to the Lifetogether office in California to produce your very first video curriculum. The curriculum would be based off a weekend alignment series or maybe a past or future sermon series that you felt would be most influential. A featured benefit is that you wouldn’t have to bring out any equipment and we would use our own to shoot your production on the beach, in our studio, the mountains, and so many other great locations.

NEW VIDEO CURRICULUM COACHING PROGRAM

Lifetogether would provide training on how to produce weekly video curriculum in our new coaching programs, where we come out and coach your team on your first production, i.e. recruiting and discipleship making, select series campaigns, choosing equipment, and so much more.

SUMMER CONVERSATION SERVICE PILOT

The Summer is a great time to do a conversation service pilot. This is in an interview format or smaller group, or even could be a panel or large group, filmed in different environments such as a home or local setting. In addition, Lifetogether could help coach and do even a one day training. The conversation service is essentially a service in-the-round, complete with teaching and dialogue rather than a monologue, that would be an effective addition to the weekend service model. This type of service is proven to be more engaging and interactive in catalyzing spiritual conversations with your Senior pastor and church staff.

SUMMER LEADERSHIP TRAINING SERIES

Live training orientations don’t allow for a substantial amount of time to do true and thorough training. Thus, we’ve put together a leadership training series that sets up a one-a-week video training session. First, you would shoot training segments featuring existing key opinion leaders. Second, you would film your Senior pastor and core staff in a training in-the-round format, i.e tell stories, provide inspiration, offer strategies, and more. The training could be further broken down into tiers of beginning, intermediate, or advanced sessions that would be used for years to come.

DOING LIFE TOGETHER SERIES

This is a small group training that details how to be a healthy small group, how to train a healthy leader or leaders, and how to train a healthy coach or supervisor group. Similar to the leadership training series above, the “Doing Life Together” series could further be categorized into tiers such as basic, intermediate, and advanced group training sessions. This series is another great example of an application that is quick and easy to prepare and film for future use.

FALL CAMPAIGN SERIES

As you well know, Fall is right around the corner. Lifetogether would love to partner with you in preparing a Fall campaign series. Whether it’s coming out to do a personal assessment, coaching for a Fall major campaign, or producing video curriculum that with the weekend service, we will partner with you every step of the way in getting your community connected. We also offer free consultations, so feel free to contact us below.

For more resources, reach out to us today using the Contact button below!

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