This past weekend, LifeChurch.tv’s Tulsa campus sermon branded their church facilities to promote their annual summer sermon series “At the Movies.” They themed their facilities after the Indiana Jones adventures.

As guests approach the church, a military vehicle with ammo crates appears to have “broken” through a mural spray painted by a local graffiti artist.

The church entrance is converted into a cobweb covered cave.

Above the cave is a giant rolling boulder like the one featured in Raiders of the Lost Ark.

One corner of the lobby has a jungle waterfall.

Another corner has the Ark of the Covenant nestled among military crates as seen at the beginning of The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.

And a third corner has converted a coffee bar into a foreign marketplace.

A mine cart with Short Round from The Temple of Doom sits over the other lobby entrance.

Between the auditorium doors rests a large “stone” skull that breathes fog.

The auditorium did not continue the Indiana Jones theme, but some extra lights were added for the sermon series.

LifeChurch.tv Tulsa staff and volunteers spent four days creating the Indiana Jones environment. And churchgoers are encouraged to invite their friends to come enjoy the fun. Each year “At the Movies” proves to be an effective outreach series for LifeChurch.tv.

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.”

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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]

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

[via Trend Hunter]

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. 

[via CoolBusinessIdeas.com]

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.

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]

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.

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

 

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.