Creating Excitement in a Church Service
Want to create some excitement in a church service? Do something really different. Perhaps something you’ve never done before. So what’s something we (leaders) never do in a church service? We never ask people to pull out their cell phones and actually turn them on!
This past weekend we kicked of a brand new sermon series for Easter called “He Still Moves Stones.” And as an opening illustration we did an interactive social experiment where we asked people to pull our their cell phones, and to vote live on what their greatest struggle is.
Here’s a picture of what they voted on:
They would vote by sending a text message to whatever struggle they were dealing with the most. And how did they react? It was electric. It just took about 2 minutes, but it was a lot of fun for me (and for them) seeing the numbers change live. After all was said and done, this ended up being the final tally. And I told them that these would be the four topics we’d be covering for the next four weeks, so people already had an interest in learning more, since these were things that they voted on as being significant struggles in their life.
You can’t do do something like this every week, but the reaction and the interest it created in the series was priceless. To learn more about using this feature go to www.polleverywhere.com
What about you? Have you tried something that has helped to create some excitement in a church service? What about the opposite? Have you tried something and found it to suck the air out of the room in an awkward experiment gone bad?
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That's pretty cool. You must have a young church. I don't think my parents know they even have the option to send text messages with their cell phones.
Yeah, Luke, we had a good time doing it. There are a good amount of young adults in the church, so it worked well. There were still some older people that didn't know how to do it, but they still got a kick out of it….
I wanted to post a partial reply to someone that asked me about how to set up a poll everywhere works and how I set it up. Here's the answer: If you go to the website, polleverywhere.com, you can set up an account, and you choose the level that you want to accept texts from. With the free account you can accept up to 35 texts, and the next level up is $15, then $65 per month. I think we did the $65, which allows you to receive 250 texts. Then you can create your chart/voting options. From there you can actually do it from a computer connected to the internet. It allows you to go full screen, or you can actually download the chart into your powerpoint or keynote slide. Start a free account for yourself and check it out. It's quite easy. Yeah, you can only use these things once for these kind of things, so save it for a good spot! hehe. For me I thought is was worth wayy more than the investment for the reaction from the people. They were still talking about it after the service.