HSM Weekend in Review: Volume 34

on January 5th, 2009

Weekend Teaching Series: Best Year Ever (Week 2 of 2)
Sermon in a Sentence: Casting the vision for where HSM is heading in 2009 – a look at how we will reach, connect, grow, discover and honor.

Key Verse: Genesis 37-44 The story of Joseph

Weekend Scale of Difficulty: 8 out of 10. Multiple videos, stage setup, music, live bits, extra slides, costumes and lots of timing issues. 

Attendance: down 1% from last weekend, up 62% from same weekend last year
Service Length: 75 minutes

Understandable Message: This weekend we took a huge departure from normal and went with a late night talk show setup. We had a producer come on stage and talk to the live studio audience, then the show went “live.” I came out and did a monologue of sorts, we had the band play a fun cover then we went through a succession of special guests on the program, who each highlighted various upcoming events, resources and plans HSM has for 2009. We went through each purpose, framing them all under the banner of worship, and talked about the new events and activities to invite friends to, how to get in a small group, highlighted a few resources to help them grow on their own and showed videos and told stories of students serving in the church and on mission trips. Huge departure from typical, but I’m glad we took the programming risk and gave it a shot.

Volunteer/Student Involvement: Students made up the band and also did lights, cameras and sound. Some students were also involved in the program, we interviewed several during the sections on small groups and serving. Volunteers were involved in the audience keeping a positive environtment and greeting students inside the room. Students also were asked to fill out a postcard we would mail them in a few months reminding them of the decisions they made as they started the New Year.

Element of Fun/Positive Environment: The significant format differences made for a fun change from the typical. We had some fun images of 2008 that we put on the screen and had them cheer or boo – Miley Cyrus always got the most mixed reaction. We also had a few images of students and volnteers and aged them 30 years as we “looked into the future” that got some laughs, too. And we had 4 little The More You Know videos as well that played as commercials during the show.

Music Playlist: New Year (Def Cab cover), [I forget one other song we did], We Shine

Favorite Moment: Last year we started off 2008 with a Best Year Ever vision mesage, it was exciting to do it again – HSM is ready to take on 2009. And there was a ton of excitement announcing a return to our Spring Break trip to Ensenada, Mexico and a new trip to the Dominican Republic. Excited!


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anthony at 10:05am March 8

How did you get aged pictures?

Josh at 11:29pm March 8

We just found pictures (Google Image Search) that looked like reasonably aged shots of the people in the crowd.

JG