Part of the Glue

Last year in a post I wrote about creating transitional statements when incorporating video into worship services.  I felt a need to write about this again because this is something our church has failed to do and I know others must be wrestling with this as well.  The idea behind creating a transitional statement is carefully crafting a well thought out sentence before or after a video during a service to segue into a message or after a special video. This statement depending on how it is crafted could potentially help the medium to loose or gain power in the context of the rest of the service.  Whether a youth pastor is speaking to teenagers or a pastor speaking to his congregation, a majority of the time the people sitting in the pews or chairs trust these pastors and in so doing trust what they say.  They not only trust what they say as part of their message they trust what they endorse.  If a pastor endorses what a video says, this video for some odd reason will have more potential for impact than if it was played with no explanation or endorsement.  Now this endorsement or explanation doesn’t have to be long in fact the shorter the better a lot of times.

Below are some thoughts to incorporate this idea.

Do:
treat the video as a message or a story not a video
ask a question after the video that can transition to what you are going to say
agree with a certain part of the video
write the transitional statement down and practice it

Don’t:
Don’t call attention to the video as amazing
Don’t call attention to whoever made it and brag on that person
Don’t ignore the video as if it has nothing to do with the message

Transitional Statement Examples:
Sound a little familiar?
Can’t we all relate with that?
Have you ever felt that way before?
What an incredible story of life change…isn’t God doing amazing things in this church

In the New Testament Jesus gives us the command to go and make disciples.  1 Thess 2:8 says that our desire was to share not only the gospel but our lives as well.  Discipleship is a foundational relational process and in my opinion is the most time-consuming, inconvenient and messy part of the Christian Life.  It requires intimacy, time and accountability and in the end may not always work out as planned. Discipleship is sharing your life and sharing your life is hard work.

As an artist for a church my job is to create and tell stories both fiction and non-fiction that inspire and move people in their faith and part of that being the work of discipleship. “Artists” in the generic being are often times looked at as someone who has something to say and thus uses their medium to say it. Whether writer, singer, film-maker all want to say something using their own creative medium or canvas.  The question I have been pondering however is can an artist really truly say something profound about anything they themselves have never experienced.  If I were to make a video about evangelism and had never shared my faith I would probably feel that I would not be doing this video justice by trying to say something about a subject in which I had no personal experience. Certainly this is not the case for everything, however the more and more I practice discipleship and the more I practice film-making the more I realize how to tell better stories about discipleship because of my personal experience.

When an artists creates something out of nothing a lot of times they draw from a well. The well figuratively speaking is filled with knowledge and personal experience. Now they can create with knowledge about a subject, however personal experience is part of the well that allows the artist the ability to critique the subject so that in telling the story they are not only telling a story they are saying something about that story.

Recently with our move from announcements to stories we were faced with a predicament…. that being time. When you tell some-one’s story a lot of times we have found a sweet spot of time that is typically rather lengthy. In the past we have felt that we could tell stories of life-change in 5-6 minutes, however showing a 5 minute video during a worship service can feel like a lifetime if you know what I mean. This week we attempted to tell a story in under 2 minutes. One of the things I did when shooting this video was to really help our talent re-tell parts of his story in smaller more concise parts. He would explain something that might take a minute long and then we would ask him to say the same thing only with fewer words. Another thing we did was try to break up his story into 3 different segments. Doing this allowed for different angles and overall made the story feel longer even though it was still pretty short. Below is the video. Let me know your thoughts….

For as long as I have been on staff at Sugar Creek there has been a love/hate relationship with part of my job.  That part being…. creating video announcements.  Sometimes we have made it fun and been real creative and other times it has been reduced to a series of slides with a voice over and a soundtrack.  We have always wondered how effective announcements really are and to be honest I always dread when our pastor says take a look at these video announcements.  Well recently there have been people that have left our church to attend a church that is “doing something.”   We realized this was a problem because we are doing a ton and doing a bad job at informing the church of what we are actually doing.    All that being said we decided to replace the two minutes worth of video announcements with stories.  As of right now the plan is to tell life-change stories every other week and in conjunction with that every other week we will either promote or recap an event through stories as well.  I’m really excited about this new direction and look forward to posting some of the stories on this blog.

Recently for our student ministry we decided to create a series of instructional videos using that 50′s look.  These videos are meant to help students in their approach to studying God’s Word.  Below is the first one we shot.