why designing for Philistines...

why designing for Philistines?

I thought I had explained my thought process behind designing for Philistines and I didn't. Doh!

This is a repost from June 2008, about why I blog here at "designing for Philistines".
What happened I started blogging when it occured to me couple major running themes going on in my blog…

1. The biggest one being that:
I am a freaky designer of cutting edge and culturally relevant (read something relevant to people after Jimmy Hendrix, Prince, the Spice Girls and after 9/11)
5S (using all 5 senses)
experiential worship elements...
I am obsessed with this concept. I spend hours and hours research, searching youtube and such.

2. AND I REALLY dislike terms like “seeker” and “lost”, unless you are referring to the t.v. show. I find them extremely condescending and churchy sounding and actually so do they.

Why Philistines? It’s all Jon - of scl fame’s fault…he’s one of my fav (and prolific) bloggers. In his post "Calling People Seekers" – he discusses what “we” Christians call “people who do not go to church”. It really resonated with what I have been feeling for a long time AND from what I hear from those wonderful “people who do not go to church”.

3. I spend a lot of time with those who hang out at the well (read: people who do not go to church), and I love them to pieces. Those are the people who I feel compelled to design for. I want them to get a chance to know this guy named Jesus.

I have tried to find an online community that is like minded and have not been able to find one, so I decided to start one.
This blog is geared to researching, designing and implementing culturally relevant elements for worship. I may be blogging for myself, then again there may be 17 more people like me out there in the blogsphere who are “seeking” this type of information.

We will see. So welcome...
this is designing for Philistines...

faux mirror...

Our stage design team (called pPod) has only been working together for 5 months and we are working on creating a mobile modular system for staging elements and stage sets. We are a totally mobile church whose venue is a junior high school auditorium. Here are a couple pics of making the base for a walk through - faux mirror (total cost $28) for the dance team to use onstage.
For a little more on the construction…

And this is the final result along with the dancers…

I have a goal of using this team to draw in unchurched skeptics. It’s starting to work. One husband and one father (both unchurched skeptics) have helped us on this project. A couple more gals who I work with are interested in coming and helping us out on our next project (stage set).

“God gifts the called…”

Submitted to Creative Chaos, July 31, 2008 Thursdays at Ragamuffin Soul…