The power of transitional statements
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
- Telling a life-change story in under 2 minutes
- the Hole in our Gospel
- The role of the artist as disciple-maker
- Using the storying method
- 10 ways I might fail this year
