Photo courtesy of LifeMission Church, Olathe, Kansas.
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Very often the notion is that we should put our best foot forward—start planning something wildly creative way ahead of time in September (but August is probably better), reserve our best operators, plan out every little detail of the production (usually down to the second), schedule three or four or five or six rehearsals, push our team to their limits in the name of creative growth and so on. I know what that’s like; I did it for quite a few years. You could say I became disillusioned with that notion after year three or four, because I realized that we weren’t doing much more than herding as many butts into as many seats as we could in as many services as we could, and the win came at staff meeting after Christmas break when we read off the attendance numbers. I mean, it feels good to have helped a rebooted church grow from a few hundred to nearly 1,000 attendees during my tenure, but when I look back at all the stress I put myself and my team through, I have a sneaking suspicion those attendees would have shown up anyway.
Replacing entertainment with engagement moves us from a “look-at-me” posture to a “look-at-Him” posture…
The numbers always dropped off a few weeks after Christmas and the people who stayed did so because they found the Presence, community, and help, not because the production was just so good. I suppose one could make the case that they might not have come without the big Christmas production, but I don’t think so. We had already developed a reputation in our small city for quality production regardless of any Christmas program. People came because it was Christmas and that was the thing to do.
Our staff realized this toward the end of my tenure and we decided to switch things up. We abandoned the “big show” idea and decided to simply “Christmas up” our normal services. We focused on scripture and worship instead of lights, TSO covers, and otherwise intense production. Lo and behold, attendance didn’t drop off. Just as many visitors, well… visited. The same number dropped off as usual, and we picked up the hundred or so extra that we had the five or six years prior, no show needed, and the church grew just as it had been growing.
Here are my key takeaways from those last couple of years revamping our Christmas productions:
Be Present over Perfect
Photo courtesy of LifeMission Church, Olathe, Kansas.
Part of our calling as the church is to be the salt of the earth. We are meant to dwell in our communities as lights in a dark room, be little carriers of Holy Spirit everywhere we go. This should start with our weekend gatherings where we rehearse love, joy, peace, and dwelling in the words of God. People who visit those gatherings should always find us loving as Jesus loved and praying as Jesus prayed, and we can do that while singing simple hymns in a small sanctuary with a few par cans and a piano, or we can do that with massive LED walls, haze, a lot of lights, and a big PA system bumping worship bangers at 100 dB. I’m not sure Jesus has a preference either way, but I know he loves it when we love, which means that as much as we want to really nail our productions, it’s more important to absorb some mistakes and miscues if people who enjoy serving get to serve and we love them well while they serve. In fact, our mistakes and miscues make us more approachable to visitors because they see us just being humans and a few hiccups here and there communicate that we try hard, but we’re really just normal people worshipping God together, and that’s the more important thing.
If we’re honest with ourselves, we’re doing a disservice to visitors if we give them a show on the one or two weeks of the year we’re sure they’re visiting.
There Is No “A Team”
Photo courtesy of LifeMission Church, Olathe, Kansas.
This one is tough because our instinct as production leaders is to schedule only our most competent people for our “most important” services, but we live in an upside-down Kingdom where the last are first and the first are last. When we schedule teams for our Christmas productions, our first thought shouldn’t be, how do I get my best operators to serve that weekend? Instead, we should be asking ourselves, I know all my people will want to participate in this special weekend with their families, so how do I make that happen? This will require some scheduling prowess of us, but that’s why we were volunteered or were otherwise hired to lead the production ministry. It’s our job to solve problems, and we get the opportunity to help our team members serve and be with their families on big weekends like Christmas.
Obviously, everyone on our team has different levels of skill, and we must take that into account when planning for our more intricate productions, but we should prioritize those skills in a balanced way. Who do we actually need to have things go smoothly? We’ll find that in every service, regardless of the production that there’s space for all levels of skill, so long as we’re build our team according to the 70% rule.
There Is No Best Foot to put Forward
There’s just you. Or rather, there’s just you and your church and its team and who you all are, week in and week out. If we’re honest with ourselves, we’re doing a disservice to visitors if we give them a show on the one or two weeks of the year we’re sure they’re visiting. Why go to all the trouble to attract and impress when we could just simply introduce visitors to the family as the family actually is?
Culture is king; we all know that (or should), so it makes no sense to switch up our culture from worship and preaching to something more extravagant and over-produced on Christmas. Yes, Christmas services will be different, but it doesn’t need to be wild. We need to show visitors who we actually are, just in a Christmasy way. The bait and switch might get butts in seats for a couple of weeks, but it won’t make them stay.
Remember Who This Is For
Photo courtesy of LifeMission Church, Olathe, Kansas.
Maybe you’re expecting me to say “Jesus,” here. Everything we do is for him, right? Well, ultimately, yes, but we need to consider the more immediate purpose of our ministry as production leaders—we’re here to serve God’s people by facilitating their prayer, worship and listening. We create the atmosphere for the body of Christ to connect with itself and its creator. In this way, we ultimately honor Jesus by honoring his body.
Why go to all the trouble to attract and impress when we could just simply introduce visitors to the family as the family actually is?
Placing an entertaining and flashy Christmas production in that context doesn’t make a ton of sense. We could force it to make sense, but justification is usually a big red flag. Entertainment has its place in the world, for sure, but I believe it has little place in the church. We don’t entertain; we engage. Our production ministries should seek to engage people in worship, in prayer, in fellowship, and in the hearing of the word. Replacing entertainment with engagement moves us from a “look-at-me” posture to a “look-at-Him” posture, so we support prayer. We support worship. We support the hearing of the word. Everything we do should be artful and beautiful and tasteful, but all with the purpose of pointing people to the face of God, not attendance numbers or a grand show.
My prayer for us this Christmas is that we seek to engage.
Let us come to house of Lord with gladness and singing, with the deep reverence and longing of Advent, doing nothing more than celebrating his coming once and his coming again. May all of our visitors see us filled with that longing, filled with love, and filled joy so that they might want what we have, the abiding presence of the love of God.
