design team

Hi Beth,
I believe our church is going to be 4 years old in January; it actually was birthed out of a young adult ministry (for several years before it became a church) at a larger church. (our mother church).
I started attending regularly last September. I was asked to be on the creative team (called fuZe) in December and I became a member of Cross Current in January.

Actually our creative team is kind of an interesting set up. Creative team is an invite only group.
The meeting is “run” by the leader of the writing team (volunteer). He just runs our meeting, writes on the whiteboard. Herds the cats. He loves to do this. He sits back and lets us run wild.

Current we design about 6 weeks out. Striving hard to be even further out. Especially since we do a lot of in house writing and filming/multi-media elements.

We start out doing a small amount of business. Then we read over the week(s) we are designing for. We worship together and spend some time in individual prayer.
Then we just throwing ideas out…
Then we come up with a group consensus on which elements we will do. Whoever pwn’s the element(s), then takes it to their team to complete it.

We work from a series synopsis from our pastor. Sometimes is detail, more often not. As you saw, we are currently starting a 52 week series entitled “The Jesus Experiment”. We will break it up into smaller series within this series.
We also had a creative retreat weekend in June where more people were invited (including members of all our individual teams. Where we had a free for all. We are using some of these ideas as a jumping point for elements this year.

Our worship leader is the only paid staff on our fuZe team, at the meeting she is a contributor and later liaisons with the pastor along with our meeting leader and the head of our production team.
Since she is full time staff and leads the worship teams, her responsibilities with our team tends more towards keeping us on track, helps us when we need it. For example, she’ll communicate with other church wide teams, she made arrangements for the printing of the large images this week and picked them up. two weeks ago she and I spent the day looking in our storage facility and shopping with me to get supplies for our tabernacle stage set.

She does this in addition to her leadership with the worship teams. We are blessed to have multiple players for almost all instruments (except for one rocking violinist), and she is currently our only worship leader. She also, works with the youth band and ministry. Though she serves there, because we do have a staff member for our youth ministry and a staff member for our kid’s ministry. She does too much.

Back to our team. The rest are volunteers, the majority are team leaders. Some team leaders are newer, others have been with Cross Current since they were a young adult (college) ministry. Our youngest member is 21, our oldest is 54.

Dance: (4-5)
Drama: (4-5) Just got a team leader.
Lighting: (2)
Multi-Media: (4 people) newly formed team. About 3 months.
Set design and experiential worship elements: I started that in January (have 4 regulars, two hubbies that help, including my husband who is not a Christian). I am intentionally reaching out to unchurched people right now to join the team. Two people I know are very interested, just haven’t been able to get the timing down right yet.
Sound: (3)
Worship Graphics/Media Shout: (3-4)
Writing: (2-3)

There is some cross over in teams. Currently each team is small and we are working on building our teams. This has always been a creative church. There have been times when the teams were fairly large and times when they’ve dwindled down to just one person.

What specifically are your challenges? Besides doing too much of everything? I do know and believe that the team has really grown in the few months I’ve been here. It’s because the leadership team and the prayer team were very focused on praying for leaders to emerge. I truly believe that is what led me to this church in particular.

Hope this helps, if not. Feel free to ask more specific questions.
Sorry this got long winded.

Dorothy