Creative Meeting

We do our best to value creativity and collaboration as we plan series and Sunday services. Since my time at FBCSmyrna, we have had a few approaches for creative planning. First was a weekly meeting with Pat, a couple of other staff, and a few creative folks from the congregation that met consistently. Then we adjusted it to a per series or weekly meeting with staff. We have had some success with these approaches but we always felt we could improve.

Last night, I facilitated a creative meeting for our August series (the above pic is our creative board filled with ideas). The series that will be 3 weeks beginning August 10th is going to be huge, bold, daring, and exciting. Pat is going to share some bold steps in our continued mission to reach our community and world through effective and relevant strategies. For this creative meeting we took a new approach. I invited five key leaders from our congregation who creative, innovative, unified, and ready to go after God’s vision for our church. Instead of having the same people for every meeting, we decided to bring new people from outside our staff for fresh ideas. Also, in the creative meeting we are focusing on generating as many ideas as possible so we have moved the decision making to a Production Meeting with our Worship Programming staff. This way we separate the creativity from "I don’t think we can pull this off" in the same meeting.

We collaborated for about hour and half trying to generate as many creative ideas we could discover to create compelling, engaging services for the series. The meeting was a blast. I am thankful for each of the five folks who contributed and the incredible insight and creativity they gave. We generated some great stuff and I am anxious for the next steps in this creative process: for our senior team to narrow down some of the selections, then to a Production Meeting to refine the ideas and make decisions of what we are going to accomplish, then weekly check-in meetings until we launch the series on August 10, and more.