Tulsa Easter Church Services :: LifeChurch.tv and Church on the Move

For Easter 2008, I visited two Tulsa churches - LifeChurch.tv and Church on the Move. I thought you might be curious to see what each megachurch did for their Easter services. Here are some photos and a video.

LifeChurch.tv Tulsa

For Easter weekend, LifeChurch.tv began a new series called “Warrior.”

LifeChurch.tv Warrior Sermon Series

To promote the series, LifeChurch.tv equipped members with invite cards and fortune cookies. They also mailed postcards and even painted the sermon series graphic on the side of the Tulsa campus building.

Warrior Graphic on LifeChurch.tv Tulsa Campus’ Building

To kick off the service, worship pastor, Derrick Henslee, sported a Guitar Hero controller and performed “The Pretender” by Foo Fighters with his band, while video of the game played on the projection screen.

Derrick Henslee Playing Guitar Hero

A total of 3,088 people attended LifeChurch.tv Tulsa this Easter, and 43 hands were raised during the altar calls. And a grand total of 31,264 people attended all 13 LifeChurch.tv campuses this Easter weekend with 479 hands raised during altar calls.

Church on the Move

For Easter weekend, Church on the Move continued in their sermon series called “Gethsemane.”

Gethsemane

Church on the Move hung three large sheets of fabric around their stage and projected the sermon series graphics onto them before the service began.

Church on the Move Easter 2008

Church on the Move Easter 2008

During the beginning of the worship service, these sheets of projection screen fabric were used to project video footage of Jesus and motion graphics while music played. After about seven minutes, the sheets dropped to the floor, and the worship pastor, Andy Chrisman, began leading the congregation in worship. I managed to get a couple minutes of video footage showing the fabric panels in use.

Church on the Move had a total of five Easter church services.

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7 Innovative Church Buildings in America

Ministry Today has published a subjective list of the seven most innovative church buildings in America. The online article goes into detail about each church building but does not include any photos. So I scoured the Web for photos so you could have a glimpse at a few of these innovative church buildings.

#1 :: Northland A Church Distributed (Longwood, FL)
Photo Credits: Mark Beeson, G Jackson Lights, and the church website.

Northland A Church Distributed’s Worship

Northland A Church Distributed Auditorium

Northland A Church Distributed Auditorium

Northland A Church Distributed Auditorium

#2 :: Living Water Community Church (Bolingbrook, IL)
Photo Credit: Wildesign Group Architects via Flickr.
UDPATE: Original photos taken by Aspen Group.

Living Water Community Church Auditorium

Living Water Community Church Lobby

Living Water Community Church Children’s Ministry

#3 :: New Beginnings Christian Center (Portland, OR)
Photo Credit: Building God’s Way.

New Beginning Christian Center

#4 :: Victory Christian Center (Tulsa, OK)
Photo Credits: Daniels and Daniels Construction and the church website.

Victory Christian Center Exterior

Victory Christian Center Interior

#5 :: Parkway Christian Church (Surprise, AZ)
Photo Credit: CCBG Architects.

Parkway Christian Church Exterior

Parkway Christian Church Exterior

#6 :: The Vineyard Church (Urbana, IL)
Photo Credit: Aspen Group.

The Vineyard Church Auditorium

The Vineyard Church Lobby

#7 :: Cornerstone Christian Fellowship (Chandler, AZ)
Photo Credit: Rowland Companies.

Cornerstone Christian Fellowship Exterior

Cornerstone Christian Fellowship Interior

For explanations why Ministry Today calls these seven church buildings the “most innovative in America,” check out their online article. They certainly are some cutting-edge facilities, but I also know that there are quite a few other remarkably innovative church buildings around the world.

For Discussion:
- What are some other innovative church buildings that inspire you and why?

[via Preachers and Teachers]

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The Sticker Lamp

Looking for some church facility inspiration for your innovative youth group? Check out these two dimensional sticker lamps created by Italian designer Alicero Signoli.

Sticker Lamp

[via Trend Hunter]

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Extreme Makeover with Rust-Oleum Primer and Paint

Rust-Oleum offers several creative products that have great potential for student ministries and even the church office.

  1. Magnetic Primer
  2. Dry Erase Paint
  3. Chalkboard Paint
  4. Glow in the Dark Paint

So if you are looking to magnetize your walls, write on them, or even create patterns that glow in the dark, Rust-Oleum offers affordable solutions to make it happen. 

Rust-Oleum’s Creative Products

[via CoolBusinessIdeas.com]

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10 Principles of Effective Highway Signs That Your Church Signs Can Use

The New York Times reports that after using the same font on highway signs for over 50 years, America’s Federal Highway Administration has approved a new font, ClearviewHwy. Clearview is replacing Highway Gothic which has been in use since Eisenhower decided to expand the Interstate System in 1956.

Why the change?

Highway Gothic’s letter shapes were never tested for readability, but Clearview is the result of rigorous testing in the pursuit of a more legible font. So just how much better is Clearview than Highway Gothic?

Signs that you’d be hard pressed to read at 700 feet were legible at 900 or 1,000 feet.
-James Montalbano :: Founder :: Terminal Design

That is a 28% to 43% improvement.

Clearview vs Highway Gothic

What does this mean to the church?

Test your signage. Church graphic designers should always be mindful of how their aesthetic decisions will influence the effectiveness of their design’s purpose. Here are some tips to help you design and implement great church signs from Paco Underhill’s book Why We Buy. Note: I have replaced the word “store” with “church” and replaced “shoppers” and “customers” with “visitors.”

  • To say whether a sign or any in-church media works or not, there’s only one way to assess it — in place.
  • The difference between an inadvertent glance at a sign and a thorough reading might be two or three seconds.
  • If you’ve put the right sign in the wrong place, [it] is actually worse than putting a so-so sign in the perfect place.
  • If you don’t get their attention first, nothing else will register.
  • You can’t just look around your church, see where there are empty spots on the walls and put signs there.
  • Every church is a collection of zones, and you’ve got to map them out before you can place a single sign. You’ve got to get up and walk around, asking yourself with every step: What will visitors be doing here? Where will their eyes be focused when they stand here? And what will they be thinking about over there?
  • Each zone is right for one kind of message and wrong for all others. Putting a sign that requires twelve seconds to read in a place where visitors spend four seconds is just slightly more effective than putting it in your garage.
  • When it comes to positioning a sign, the difference between an ideal viewing spot and a terrible one is often just a few feet.

Paco Underhill also addresses 9 principles that make highway signs effective:

  1. no extra words
  2. the right sign at the right place
  3. enough signs that drivers don’t feel ignored or underinformed
  4. not so many signs that there’s clutter or confusion
  5. use a vocabulary of icons
  6. the color combination provides enough contrast
  7. the lettering is large
  8. the lighting is good
  9. the positioning is just so

And with the introduction of Clearview, principle #10 is “choosing the right font.”

Design and implement your church signs like they are highway signs. These are 10 principles that work.

[via Trend Hunter]

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Mount Paran Church of God’s New Children’s Ministry Sanctuary

Power House Sanctuary

This past February 4th, Mount Paran Church of God (Atlanta, GA) launched the grand opening of a new sanctuary for their children’s ministry, Power House.

Power House Grand Opening

The new sanctuary was designed and created by Richard Carver and his team at Little Mountain Productions.

 Power House Sanctuary Stage

Power House Sanctuary Close Up

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6 Parts of Your Church Building that Affect Your Worship Service

Rick Warren of Saddleback Church (Lake Forest, CA) recently shared with The Christian Post six physical factors about church buildings that affect a worship service. Here is a summary:

  1. Lighting
    Lighting has a profound effect on people’s moods. Inadequate lighting dampens the spirit of a service. Shadows across a speaker’s face reduce the impact of any message.
  2. Sound
    It doesn’t matter how persuasive the message is if people can’t hear it in a pleasing manner. A tinny, fuzzy sound system can undermine the most gifted musician and incapacitate the most profound preacher. And nothing can destroy a holy moment faster than a loud blast of feedback!
  3. Seating
    Both the comfort and the arrangement of your seating dramatically affect the mood of any service. The mind can only absorb what the seat can endure! Uncomfortable seating is a distraction that the Devil loves to use.
  4. Temperature
    The temperature can destroy the best planned service in a matter of minutes! When people are too hot or too cold they simply stop participating in a service. They mentally check-out and start hoping for everything to end quickly.
  5. Clean, Safe Nurseries
    If you want to reach young families, you’ve got to have sanitized and safe nurseries. There should be no mop-buckets in the corners and the toys should be cleaned each week.
  6. Clean Restrooms
    Visitors may forget your sermon but the memory of a foul smelling restroom lingers on … and on … and on! You can tell a lot about the morale of a church by checking out the quality of the restrooms.

Without question environment and atmospherics influence people’s behavior. But it is also worth noting that the quality of environment needed for a church to effectively reach someone is largely dependent on the average quality of life to which that person is accustomed.

In third world countries, people rarely are bothered by the quality of a sound system, and just having one is impressive enough. When I went to Africa, hot temperatures were expected. When I lived in Peru, strange restroom smells were considered normal. In these circumstances, less than ideal environments did not affect the impact of ministry because they were expected.

It comes down to the expectations of the people you want to reach. Although the United States has its share of poor areas, most U.S. churches are trying to reach people with high expectations compared to the rest of the world. And if your church is trying to reach the affluent who are accustomed to posh restrooms, there is a good chance that anything less than posh will turn them off.

The bottom line is:
Know who you are trying to reach and create an environment one step above their expectations.

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Light Up Your Church Facility with Solatube

Solatube

This past weekend was my first time to see a Solatube, and I was impressed. What is it?

It is a lighting system that reflects sunlight from the rooftop through a tube and into your building. It is the perfect solution to provide bright natural light to areas that skylights can not reach. You can even add on a dimmer switch to control the amount of light you want to let inside. Not only is it an innovative lighting solution but it can save your church money over time by replacing electricity.

[via Cool Hunting]

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