If your church has a creative team budget that is substantially bigger than most countries operating budgets it's easy to be creative! Well that might be too much of a blanket statement, so lets just say it can be easier. The challenge in being creative within the scope of a weekend service is to use the element to enhance the overall service, elevate God and worship Him. After all He is the author creativity. It should not be intended to show people how creative you or your church is.
This past week we launched into our weekend series, "The Grind". The series is about each of lives our day to day lives finding a routine that works but in doing so we truly miss living. We wanted to go with something simple but yet emphasized the existence of day to day. We needed to do 3 things:
Add Texture To The Stage
Create Depth On The Stage
Create A Relevant Design To Enhance The Theme
We did by doing a few things. The first thing we did was to bring out our black backdrop and cover the entire back wall. We also added our black stage extensions. In doing both of these we were able to create depth on our stage. This allowed us to have various instruments and staging elements at different places on the stage, and they would still be visible from any seat in the sanctuary.
In addition, we were able to add texture by hanging our scrims again. We have not used our scrims in over 5 months which was an indicator that it might be time to bring them out again. The scrims can be expensive depending on your budget, but we got ours from a company called Rosebrand. (www.rosebrand.com) With the scrims being the only thing white on the stage we were able to use them to project colored lights onto. For the sake of this service we went with the color purple because it matched our graphic. (Note - When color matching it is always a good thing to coordinate with any graphics you are using. This is never a standard rule but we have found that consistency across the board is very effective.)
Texture on the stage can be done in various ways, and another way we did it was to add a 4x8 stage riser towards the back center of the platform. On top of this we put an 8x8 board made out of 1/4 inch plywood. This board as well as the two walls on the side of the stage were covered with newspaper. The two side ones had the series name painted in red, while the center one had a few sentences describing the theme of the series. We went with red paint and the newspaper because it not only was metaphorical and symbolic to life but it also added great texture. All of these elements put together were very inexpensive. We actually only spent money on the newspaper, as all the other things we used we re-cycled from materials we had used before. Remember, you don't have to break your back or budget by going over the top. Keep it simple and people will remember it.
In our next blog we will show you what we did with the newspaper during our opening song. It was done pretty well and people got a lot out of it!!
Nirup
Thanks for what you are doing! I am passing your link around to Worship leaders and Pastors. Thanks for not "doing" church!
Posted by: Bill Simpson | 09/17/2009 at 10:28 AM