New Service…9 weeks in
VenuePM is now 9 weeks old. I’ve launched a few worship services before, but this one has taught me quite a bit more than the others. Here are some of my reflections on this time around…
1. Different is good. We have a successful Sunday AM service, but we were feeling the need to do something different. We didn’t want to simply replicate the same service again. We needed to find another way of expressing God’s love for people. The first most obvious difference is live preaching in the PM service, verse a simulcast message in the AM service. We also went out and hired a different worship leader for our evening service, which gives us a totally different musical experience. We want our worship services to foster a sense of community in and of themselves, and in order to accomplish this our services have to be different.
2. Good communication is vital. We really messed up on this one. There were all sorts of mis-communication happening. We had to post a note on Facebook, have some special meetings after we launched, and play general cleanup. If I had to do this one over, I would have started with some key conversations one on one, months before we made anything public.
3. New worship services are about new people. I greatly underestimated this fact in launching this service. Originally, our strategy was to try to get a good number of our morning congregation to “transplant” into this evening setting. The thinking here was that 11:00 AM on Sunday is still the desirable time for first time visitors. If we are full (or almost full) in the morning, we need to free up space. It turns out we have done too good of a job creating community in the morning that we did not get what we were asking from our people. At first, I was a little upset by this, but now I see this is a good thing because it is pushing us to think about how to get new people. I hate the idea of having to do marketing to attract people. That said, I have to confess, we are now starting to do outside marketing to try to get our name out there. The better model, I’m convinced, is to engage our members in spreading what God is doing because of this work. This is a cultural change for our people. I was relying on pre-conditioned practices, when in fact, we had to be willing to grow something from virtual scratch without the benefit of the critical mass of people that constitute our AM service.
4. Work with people who get what you’re doing. This is an area we have done well. Our team is made of Todd Craig, Ben Kilgore, and myself. This is a good team in that we’re all trying to figure out a new way of saying a really old message. We’re trying to connect with those who have been burned by the church and offer a place of confession and healing. I couldn’t ask for a better team.
5. Success does not begin and end with me. I’ll probably have to learn this one everytime I start something new. There are too many Saturday nights that I lie awake thinking, “will anyone come to VenuePM tomorrow?” When the success is about me I neglect prayer, don’t invest in people, and become depressed/or swelled with pride. God give me freedom from such thinking.
