Blog

Be a hoarder (of good ideas).

Maybe for you it’s a drawer in your desk where you stash great print pieces from other churches or organizations that caught your eye, or a folder on your computer desktop where you dump song and video ideas. Maybe it’s a bulging cabinet about ready to overflow with stuff that inspires you. Maybe you create more Pinterest boards than what is considered healthy.

Whatever works for you—whether it’s digital or analog—you need a place to store good ideas. Stuff to look through when you’re stuck and can’t figure out how your next message series should look. Things to toss around when you’re coming up dry on ideas for how to explain something or craft a presentation. At Granger we have a few drawers and cabinets, both real and virtual, where we store stuff. Go to wherever your pile is, and you’ll be able to pull something out that will spark a new direction.

Looking for some ideas to get you going? You’ll find a variety of series graphics and other sermon materials at WiredChurches.com. Let the hoarding begin!

by Director of Music and Worship Trace Rorie

If you’ve spent any length of time on a worship team, at some point you have probably heard someone discuss the tension between worship and performance. For those of you who are unsure what I’m talking about, here’s a brief synopsis:

As artists on a platform we have a responsibility to lead others in worship—therefore we should be genuinely worshiping as well. We point others toward God, not ourselves. Therefore any conduct on stage that draws attention toward ourselves and away from God is a bad thing. Typically this is labeled as performance. It’s not the easiest of debates to find resolution to, because how can one argue against the above logic? But I think we’re labeling performance as a negative too quickly.

How many sermons, lectures or presentations have we all sat through in which the content was good, but the presentation was boring, disengaging and lifeless? If you’re able to look past a horrible delivery and focus on the content, you’re a better person than I am! In the church, we tend to focus on the content we’re delivering without giving equal attention to the way that we’re presenting it. At Granger, what we want from our artists is for the presentation to reflect the content. For example, if we’re singing about the grandeur of the glory of God, our visual presentation should be consistent with the magnitude of that idea. Why is this? Well, it’s primarily because the vast majority of people who are experiencing our services aren’t musical and therefore don’t understand musical things. Sure, they might sense that something is awry when the keyboard player misses some notes, but they likely can’t pinpoint the issue. But every single person in our services is an expert on human behavior. They can tell if that vocalist is on autopilot or the guitarist is unsure of where he’s at in the song. So delivering an engaging presentation is just as vital as the words we’re singing or the notes we’re playing, because oftentimes it speaks louder than anything else.

At Granger, we have come up with some guidelines that help us accomplish this goal. We’re a volunteer-driven arts ministry, so we can’t expect our team to be experts in this sort of thing. It’s our responsibility to help equip them so they can fulfill any expectations we have of them. We call it STEP. This is how we want our volunteers to prepare for, execute, and evaluate what they do in our worship experiences.

Continue reading on the GCC Creative Team’s Blog...

If you would like to learn more about Granger’s process for planning, promoting and executing weekend series come to our Creative & Communication Arts Workshop. In the morning, we’ll talk timelines, brainstorming, programming and decision making. In the afternoon, we’ll have small-group Q&A with your Granger staff/volunteer counterpart (like the Web Director, Production Director, Lighting Director, Worship Director, etc.), where you can ask any burning questions you have. Register today!

by Director of Story Kristin Baker

Yes, believe it or not, it’s time to talk about Christmas. After many years of having Christmas “surprise” us, we’ve started the discussions and planning earlier and earlier each year. We’ve come to realize the crucial timing of the season to bring in new people who would never step foot in a church for most of the year. To the Average Joe or Jane, taking your kids to see a Christmas show as a part of the natural rhythm of the season makes much more sense than dragging your family out of bed every Sunday morning and piling up an extra commitment to the rhythm of your week. So—we put a lot of thought, energy, creativity, and resources into our Christmas plans every year with Joe and Jane and their family in mind.

Here are a few samples of some of the Christmas productions we’ve done in past years:

2013 Scrooge: A Modern Musical

Our own spin on A Christmas Carol with recent hits on the billboard charts.

We held auditions for this and then wrote the show to the people we had, which provided a fun new spin and some interesting new characters. It was kind of an Annie meets Scrooge, since we had an army of talented kids audition. We figured God always makes the best of what we offer Him, so we’d better make the best of what He offered us. This fun, new take on a classic story was the result.

2012: Granger Commons Christmas Spectacular (Variety Show)

With the rising popularity of Christmas specials on TV, we thought we’d take a stab at a variety show, featuring our volunteers in their sweet spots. This was a fun show to put together, but we found the attendance wasn’t quite what we’d hoped. We found that, no matter how excellent the arts we were offering, story sells. People just weren’t sure what a “Christmas Spectacular” was. However, we had a blast!

2011: Let it Be Christmas

A full-length production telling the Christmas Story with Beatles music. We had originally produced a shorter version of this show in 2007, which sold out. We thought we’d try it again and expand it a bit. It sold out once again. Guess people like the Beatles, but we ended up showing them Jesus is even cooler. (Sorry, John Lennon.)

2010: Once Upon a Midnight Clear

A completely original full-length musical inspired by the movie Big Fish. What would the Christmas story look like if it took place in a vintage Circus? This was risky. Some loved it. Some, especially those who are afraid of clowns, didn’t like it so much. But I was incredibly proud of our team for trying something completely original. We grew and learned a lot from this show. At the end of Big Fish people told the author, “That’s my dad! I just didn’t know how to tell his story!” The manger scene gets lost in the clutter of Christmas, so we hoped a new setting for the manger might shed some new light. We hoped people would see our show and say “That’s my God! I just didn’t know how to tell His story!”

This summer we hope you’ll take some time to ask God what He wants to say to your community through you this Christmas. After all, it is His birthday!

To learn more about Granger’s process for planning, promoting and executing weekend series, come to the Creative & Communication Arts Workshop—one of many workshops happening October 13 & 14. Get your tickets now and save money with early bird discounts.

Winter is coming. And so is Christmas. We always strive to work ahead of schedule when it comes to series planning, but this year at Granger, we were planning Christmas pretty close to our printing deadlines. Hey, life happens.

Our Communications Team’s challenge? We knew that this year music would feature heavily in the series and that we were going to have a big band for some of the weekends. We wanted something that evoked the class and elegance of the big band era, and the smooth, art-deco feel of a classic like The Great Gatsby. As with every series, our graphic designers brainstormed together and then worked on several concepts to submit to the Lead Team. Since getting the green light on the one they chose, we’ve been hard at work plugging that look and feel into every media outlet and print vehicle—and at Christmas, there are a lot!

Here’s a sneak peek at a few samples of pieces we’re producing for Christmas 2014:

We hope you enjoyed a peek behind the scenes from the Communications Team here at Granger. We know all you busy elves are hard at work preparing for Christmas too, getting ready to tell a Story that gives us all reason to celebrate!

by Sean Bublitz, Creative Arts Director

As an organization grows, communication and alignment are two of the hardest things to maintain. Throw that into the mix of a bunch of creative people trying to stay on the same page and execute projects at the same time and you’ve got a difficult task.

Because of that we’ve developed a process to help us stay aligned with our weekend series development and planning. This system is the way that our communication, creative, production, teaching, and campus teams stay on task and aligned without having to meet every day and check in.

This is our process, the people involved, and the timeline we work to stick to. This is a guide for us, not a law. We have flexibility based on projects and pace. If it’s helpful to you, you can download the .psd for our timeline in the resources section of this site and create your own.

SeriesDevelopmentTimelineFN

10 weeks out

  • Our Lead Team (direction leadership team for our church) will agree on the series topic. The Lead Team doesn’t always come up with the topic. Our topic ideas come from many different sources. But the Lead Team will put a rubber stamp on the topic for us.
  • Our packaging team can then take the topic and start to brainstorm the branding, the series title, and the design and packaging.

Continue reading on the GCC Creative Arts Blog...

This is a great example of the kind of practical, behind-the-scenes learning we’ll be featuring at Innovate 2014. We’re finishing up the details of the elective offerings, but for now you can check out the speakers and main sessions. And if you register by September 14, we’ll reward your hustle with an early-bird discount.