Targeting the Message on the Weekend

Josh on March 27th, 2008

Got a question into the blog this week about ensuring we have an “understandable and targeted message” at our weekend entry-level service. Josh, one of our weekend programmers, wrote some good stuff in his response and allowed me to post it here:

• The preparation for our weekends is a collaborative effort. Usually, by the time a talk is done, at least 3 or 4 people on staff have had some kind of involvement in it. Often a part of our discussion revolves around “does this challenge our core students, but connect with our seeker students.” Smaller churches can do this too. I know one guy who had a group of volunteers he met with each week to plan out the weekend.

• The second thing we do well is that after our first service we do a pretty rigorous debrief of how everything went, including the talk, and how things could be better. I love this because we have a few people on our staff – especially our volunteer coordinator – who are GREAT at seeing things through un-churched eyes. For a lifelong Baptist brat like myself, this is SUPER helpful.

• The third thing is that we are fairly intentional on having a plan for our teaching schedule. When I was at my old church my boss and I would often be teaching on whatever hit us that week. While that’s fine every once in a while, overall we weren’t strategic about identifying what students needed to hear. When we set out our teaching calendar we did at least two things really well: 1) we designed series that were VERY outsider-friendly and 2) we focused on the two purposes where our ministry was weak. For us, obviously, the 5 purposes are how we strategically focus our messages.

JG

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sam at 9:24pm March 27

we have a very similar process… on a smaller scale. We have a team of people who help put together the series topics and the thoughts behind it… we make sure that we hit both seeker and core. I think the team approach and scheduling out @ least 4-6 months in advance helps build direction to your student ministry when it comes to programming and teaching. kudos.