Calvary Church Communications Blog

Perspective Paintings

For our Perspective series we tried a new art form that consisted of painting a large image (eight 5' x 4' canvasses) and then painting a second image using UV paint on top of the original. We then revealed parts of the image throughout the series in the services. The idea was on the last Sunday of the series, the congregation sees the entire normal image and thinks they have the full 'perspective' on it, then we did a reveal of the UV image using blacklights with a live song performance and hopefully taught the congregation that even when we think we see the full picture, there may be even more there that God sees that we miss. Thus, we need a "God Perspective." I think it worked out pretty well.

It's really difficult to capture the UV image on a regular digital camera, but here's a photo (taken from a camera phone) of the 8 canvasses with the regular image on them.

If you were there and experienced this service, let us know what you thought about it in the comments.
And, major thanks to Kyle Bradley, who took the time to paint all of the images for all of our venues!

Video From Service Today

Today we played a video in the services that Beau (our Senior High Ministries Director, who also is a great worship leader and an awesome video producer) produced about the story of one of the ladies in our youth ministry. It is a great example of God's faithfulness. It's also a very well produced video from a script-writing/story-telling point of view. Nice job, Beau (and thanks for taking this one off of our plate).

In Christ

We just completed this video for week one of our "inX" (in Christ) message series which begins the weekend of June 27-28.

Mother's Day - Success or Failure

For Mother's Day, we (Calvary's Creative Team) had the idea to shoot a video of the wives of well-known staffers discussing the difficulties of being a mom. Our goal was to take some of the cultural pressure to be "perfect" off of moms in the congregation by showing some vulnerability in staff wives, who generally are perceived to "have it all together."

We ended up shooting with three moms and got over 160 min (40 min x 4 cameras) of tape. All said and done it was edited down to the 5 min video below. After the editing was done, there was some apprehension about whether it spoke the right message or if it just seemed like staff wives angry about being a staff wife. Let us know your thoughts. We paired the song with an original work by our worship pastor, Dave Milliken: Greater Scheme, Grander Plan. Let me know your thoughts in the comments. Do you think this piece is effective or does it come across the wrong way?

What We Do

We get a lot of people asking, "What Is Communications Ministry?" So, we recently created a diagram to show what all we do in the Communications Ministry at Calvary Church. It's not exhaustive, but it gives an idea. I thought you might enjoy it.


Click to enlarge

Good Friday & Easter In Communications

For Good Friday and Easter, we did a couple of things in the Communications / Video world that I thought might be of interest.

For Good Friday, we used a 30 ft wide by 10 ft tall screen in the center of our stage. We projected motion backgrounds on it during worship and also used it for a video / drama combo piece. It required us to create separately exported content for the big center screen and the side screens - which required a lot of rendering and exporting. Here are some photos of the middle screen video from our balcony. These photos are on my facebook account...so you get some bonus photos of my family nailing their "thank you" prayer to Jesus on the cross).

For Easter (and for the weeks leading up to Easter), we used a similar set up with 3 smaller center screens. Again, lots of rendering and exporting.

To accomplish the sync between the center screens and side screens content, we used several Macs with Renewed Vision's Pro Video Player (and PVP Network Node). It worked exactly as billed and after a little set-up time, it was great!

One thing that we didn't do this year that we typically do was a big newspaper advertising campaign. It will be interesting to see as things shake out as to whether that was a good idea. I have a feeling with all of the noise that is happening in the world that newspaper advertising isn't as beneficial as it once was and that word-of-mouth (viral) marketing will be our avenue of choice for the future.

All in all, it was a great Holy Week, though exhausting for our ministry, and we saw lots of lifechange.

March & April Update

We've been busy in the Calvary Communications Ministry this past month. We are excited about the things God allowed us to see in do.

We were privileged to support the candidacy and announcement of Pastor Terry as our new Lead Pastor. His blog has recently launched (www.TerrySanderson.com) to help you hear from his heart. 

We've also been busy with some exciting things with the Prayers of Jesus message series. We assisted with the creation of a very cool stage design using Renewed Vision's Pro Video Player multiple screen controlling system. It works very well and I highly recommend it. Creating content for the multiple screens was a lot of fun and I'm excited about the ideas that our Creative Team has for using that system in the near future.

We also launched Calvary Church's Facebook and Twitter (@calvaryonline for all you Tweeps out there) online presence. We're looking forward to exploring ways that we can use these tools to keep connected with the Calvary family.

A couple of us also made the journey to Ontario Canada to make a video with Pastor Terry that you'll be seeing very soon. It was a great experience to hear and see what the future holds for Calvary and for North Park Church in Canada.

Currently, we're in the middle of video and graphics production to support our Good Friday and Easter services. I'm confident that God is going to do an amazing work for His reknown this Easter. Isn't it an awesome thing to serve a Risen Savior!

Coming soon is Calvary's Esther message series. We've already begun the planning for that series and we will begin the work on the communications elements very soon.  Stay tuned, we'll be in touch!

Terry Sanderson Candidacy

If you haven't heard, Calvary has a candidate for our Lead Pastor position. I'm very excited about the possibility of working with Terry Sanderson. He is a very Godly, genuine leader.

I hope you get the opportunity to come to the Q & A session tonight to meet Terry and hear from his heart (7:00 pm in the Chapel).  I also hope you'll come to one of the weekend services at the Mid Rivers Campus this weekend and hear him teach.

For more information, click here.

Calvary Church 2.0

Calvary is now on the social media scene: Twitter & Facebook.

Right now, we're only posting/tweeting/updating a couple of times a week. If we get lots and lots of followers/friends, it could become a valuable way for us to let you now about what God is up to at Calvary Church.

Service Planning Process & Tools

Today, I thought I'd give you a glimpse into our service planning process...and share some things we're looking at moving forward.  For attenders of Calvary, hopefully this encourages you by letting you know that we are intentional and prayerful in our planning of services and are making our best effort to honor God and serve you through the planning process.  For other church leaders, my goal is to let you in on our process and to invite you to share what your team does for service planning.

Pre-Brainstorm
Our service planning usually begins a year or so out when our Teaching Team, in partnership with the Senior Leadership Team, determines the topics for the messages for the next year.  Six weeks prior to the beginning of the series, the Teaching Team provides the Creative Team with a synopsis of all the messages in the series. 

Brainstorm
From there, the Creative Team has a brainstorming meeting and considers all of the options for supporting the services - either by supporting the content of the message (the overall message or a single point in the message), the theme of the service, or a particular element in the service.  The team also brainstorms stage design, logos & branding, or any other special support elements.

Post-Brainstorm
After the brainstorm meeting, all the parties involved go and determine which ideas are actually doable or worth doing.  After a week or so, the Creative Team meets back together for a follow-up meeting to make the actual plan for the services.  Then, a representative from the Creative Team gets together with the Teaching Team to dialogue about the ideas and to hear if there are any concerns, additional thoughts, push-backs, etc. from the Teaching Team.  If all is agreed upon, each member of the Creative Team works in their area and/or with their teams of volunteers to do carry out their part of the plan.

Weekly
On a weekly basis, the Creative Team meets to review the previous week's services - to address any problems or discuss things to do better or to avoid in the future.  The team also meets weekly to make sure everything is done and everyone is on the same page for the upcoming week.

Project Management
Currently, we use a Word document that we call the "Teaching Schedule" to make sure everyone is on the same page.  We link in message transcripts, drama scripts, videos for preview, etc.  We also note in the document who is teaching and who is leading worship at each of our venues.  The document contains any special elements that might be a part of a particular service (communion, choir, dances, special stage design elements, etc.

We're currently looking for a better solution (preferably something web-based) for team collaboration.  Some of the options we're considering are Planning Center Online, Google Sites, 5pm, Basecamp, Teamwork Live, and Sharepoint...just to name a few.  If you have any experience with any of these or any other service planning / team collaboration tools - please feel free to comment or shoot me an email.

If you're a church leader, we'd love to hear about your church's service planning process!  If you're a Calvary attender, we'd love to hear from you too!  Let us know how Calvary's services have impacted you.