For the Invest series, I wanted the media to look and sound different. I wanted to tell stories in a different way. This proved harder to coordinate than I initially thought. I came up with the concept of just showing peoples lives instead of having them do a talking head testimony. We would send out a camera man and he would just document a day in the life of. Then…

When it came to defining the sound to our Good Friday service, we were inspired by one of the musicians in our church. Christian Larson had recently stepped up and started serving in one of your bands. While driving to work one day, I saw a dance in my head to go along with one of his songs. The story was about something beautiful and pure being destroyed and torn….

We decided to use the seven sayings of the cross as the framework for our Good Friday service this year. I had the idea to have a local poet, John Shirk, take them and re-write them poetically. I had an actor friend of mine, John Dowd, do the videos. I shot the videos with a ring light in a tiny room. It was the most intimate video shoot I have…

In thinking about the media that surrounds our new series, I wanted it to be something different. There are testimonies / stories from our body that we had chosen to go with the study. I wanted to get away from the talking head testimony that you often see. I also wanted to tell the story that investing in your community is not just a one time thing that we do…

“Make the most with what you have” has been my motto for the last 16 years. Some would argue that I have ‘a lot’. I often hear people talk about what they don’t have, and what they could do if they had more. I have found that ’a lot’ is relative. Regardless of how much you have, there is always someone who has a lot more than you do that you…

I was driving down Lake Shore Drive the other day, on my way to drop off my daughter at school. As I approached North Ave. beach I saw something that was amazing. The lake was rolling with waves – except the surface of the water was covered in broken chunks of ice. The effect was mesmerizing. The water seemed like syrup. After I dropped my daughter off, I went back…

Annual reports at a church are usually presented before an evening service or for 15 min during a service. The report is primarily centered around a Powerpoint presentation with graphs and lots of numbers. It is often presented by the administrative pastor who has very little, if any stage presence. We wanted to take a different approach to educating our people on the financials of the church. Our goal was…

So, every church I have ever work for always struggles with announcements. How many to have each week, live or video, do you let people walk up right before service and add announcements? These are just a few of the issues I have seen over the years. We try to consistently try to do Video announcements because of the control of the messaging and time. Since I have been at…

At Park, we are using texting to better connect with our people. We use many features of our provider, Jarbyco, to keep people informed and to find out what they are thinking. Tim Schraeder, Park’s communication director, manages all the texting options. I manage the implementation into our projection system. A couple of weeks ago, we did a texting poll. It was very useful for Jackson Crum to understand where…