Adding creativiity into services is my favorite thing to do. But I cannot do it all by myself. That is why I love the way we do our creative meetings. Everyone by themselves has a good idea, but working through it with others turns that good idea into a GREAT idea and everyone benefits from it. Here are some key things we do for our creative process for HSM.

We break our creative meetings into 3 parts, but I will just explain the first part for now. Here are some key areas of our big creative meetings:

  • Make them count- We do one big meeting once a month. We want to have ideas for the following month. For example, we will meet in May and think of ideas for services for all of June. We do only one a month because we can get more people, it is an exciting environment to be in because everyone feeds off each other, and all ideas are welcome and developed right then and there and leaves you not being able to wait until the next one.
  • Bring ’em all in- In this meeting we invite anyone who wants to be involved. It has staff, weekend volunteers, students from all schools and grades (there are usually around 20-30 people). Everyone has good ideas, but with everyone, a good idea can turn into a GREAT idea. It is fun community and team building and the energy is super high.
  • Make it fun- Meetings more the most part are boring, but they dont have to be. We have pizza and drinks all around and spend the first part of the meeting just hanging out. We buy little toys and Play-doh for everyone to play with while we meet. I read somewhere that if your hands have something to do while you are thinking creativly, it allows your mind to be free (I do not know if this is completely true, but it’s fun and it seems to be working). We also have gift cards for the best ideas that we hand out after the meeting to the best ideas, and then one bigger giftcard to the BEST idea of the night voted on by everyone.
  • No dumb ideas– At this point, we just want ideas flowing. If it is in their mind, we want it on the board. This is not the area where we want to stunt any idea flows. Get it up on the board.
  • Be focused- We lay out all of the weekend topics across the entire wall, and then color code the different categories for each week. (Topics include: songs to play, videos, set design, take aways, I can;t believe they did that at church, sermon illustrations, Bible, etc). We give everyone 15 minutes to come up with as many ideas as possible and go and tape them under the right week and category. After time is up, there should be a whole wall filed with ideas, then we go through all of them and start taking down ideas that a majority do not have energy towards, and we keep up the ones everyone is pumped for.

From here there are a few other meetings in which we break down these ideas and start to place them into services on the weekends, but I will post those up next week. For now, I hope a little insight of how we do our big creative meetings helps in any way.

What are some things you do for creative meetings? Who is involved in them? What do you do that we do not?