Resources For “This Is My Church?” Series

This past October PMC hosted a non-traditional evangelistic series called This Is My Church?  Yes, with a question mark. The speaker was Pastor David Asscherick. The goal of the series was to connect with and reach the crowd on the campus of Andrews University that is cynical and disconnected towards church. So the title is from their perspective.

I’ve had a few requests regarding putting up the resources on here, so in as much as it might help to fuel some creativity for other people, here they are:

1. Main Poster

To download the full size PDF of the poster click here.

2. Invite Cards

These were handed out in several venues: university chapel, vespers, door to door in the dorms, and also in the different worship services, which are held on campus.

Here’s the front of the card. 

Here’s the back of the card.

To download the set click here.

3. Decision Card For Friday Night

The front of the card has the same series graphic as the others.

Here’s the back of the card. Sadly, I just noticed that we published this with a typo. *sigh*

To download that set click here.

4. Final Decision Card

Here’s the front of the card. You might notice that it looks a little different from the others.

Back of the card:

So how did the appeal work on the final night? The entire week we had been asking the question: “This is my church?” On the last night, then, we thought it would be interesting to leave a space where they could a) leave a question mark  b) put an exclamation mark or c) perhaps put a period there. We didn’t collect this card. Instead, each person brought it home with them.

I’d love to say that we planned this last appeal card in this way from the beginning, but that wouldn’t be true. Every night, after everything was done, some of the planning crew would gather with the speaker to discuss how things went. It was in one of those meetings, the night before the final, that the idea came. We quickly emailed the idea to the designer around 10pm, and he promised that he’d have it ready for us by 10am in the morning. We had just enough time to send it to the printer and have it ready for the evening. By the way, the idea also came to the group to have the decision cards in envelopes taped under the pews. This way, when the appeal time came, the speaker could let people know that there was something under their seats for them. It created an interested dynamic.

4. Set Design

We worked with Digital Paradigm to help us with set design.

This picture will give you an idea of what we did:

The overall look we were going for is that of a living room. We had two chairs and a little table in between them. There was also a rug on the floor that helped to center things. Concerning what we put on the walls, Digital Paradigm helped us set up what’s called Projector Mapping. This helped us to tweak a little of what the stage actually looked like. You can see, for example, that there was an outline on the walls. What was inside the outline changed just a little every night.

5. Promo Video

6. Format

The format for the series was fairly simple. We had 15 minutes of music. The message was around 45 minutes in length. It was followed by a 15 Q & A. As David Asscherick was speaking, we had a number that people could text in their questions to as well as a hashtag that people could tweet questions to. By the way, using a hashtag   created the most engagement out of any option we had. You can read more about that here. We did a live Q & A based upon the message, which proved to be very popular. After the Q & A we’d close out with one song and that was it.

So what was the response?

There was an incredible response to this series. The church hadn’t been this packed since…I don’t know when, but I think it’s been awhile. God did something big and we’re all grateful for it.

That’s the gist of it.

If you want to see the whole series on video you can begin with the first one here:

Questions?

(To leave a comment click here.)