Weekend Quality Check (Part 2)
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Weekend quality is about more than creative excellence. It’s about how well you leverage that time to engage both insiders and outsiders—for people who know Jesus and people who don’t.
The sermon is a core component of any weekend experience. In the second part of our “Weekend Quality Check” series, Sean and I break down strategies for planning sermon series that really connect with both church-goers and newcomers. We’re also joined by Joel Thomas from North Point Ministries, who shares some insights and tips to help make your sermons even more impactful.
SERMON SERIES PREP
This episode features an interview with Joel Thomas from North Point Ministries, along with Sean and my tactics for sermon series prep.
- Planning series with people who don’t know Jesus—and those who do—in mind
- Effective sermon series planning strategies
- Insights from Joel Thomas from North Point Church in Alpharetta, GA
This episode is brought to you by Horizons Stewardship:
Did you know many capable households contribute more to their favorite charity than their local church? This trend is putting a significant financial strain on churches everywhere.
That’s why Horizons and The Unstuck Group have joined forces to create “The Financial Sustainability Crisis,” a guide designed to help you tackle these ongoing financial challenges.
In this invaluable resource, you’ll discover practical strategies to:
- Effectively budget and manage your financial resources
- Connect your giving to your discipleship journey
- Identify ways to ensure your ministry plan is fully funded
Don’t let financial challenges hold you back from realizing your God-inspired vision. Download “The Financial Sustainability Crisis” today at horizons.net/fundministry.
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More Episodes in This Series
- How Prepared is Your Church for Guests? – Episode 368
- Teaching That Transforms – Episode 370
- Evaluating Effectiveness – Episode 371
- Evaluating Your Online Service Experience – Episode 372
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Transcript
Sean:
Well, welcome to the Unstuck Church podcast. I’m Sean, and Amy Anderson is on the other microphone today. Amy, you’ve been back on the road helping more unstuck churches recently. Any churches that you wanna brag on?
Amy:
I’ve been working with several churches that are just in the midst of making some bold moves. A general thing I would just say is I’m just so proud of these lead pastors who are stepping into leading some big changes at their church. They’re in the midst of it, but one of them is a multi-site church I’m working with, and they are taking the bold move to kind re-engineer how they’re gonna do their teaching so that they can get ready to launch their third location. Those are big changes, but they’re doing the hard work. They’re getting ready, they’re leading through it well, at a good pace. Speaking of multi-site, Sean, I’m just getting excited for our Unstuck Church Report for Q4 that’s gonna be released here in a week or so. It’s all on multi-sites, so I’m excited to see those new trends and bring an update to our multi-site churches.
Sean:
Absolutely. It’s gonna be great to see, because so many churches have been experiencing health in this last season, and so excited to see the data and the trends for those churches in our unstuck tribe. Before we dive into the content today, I just wanna remind our listeners about the show notes and our leader conversation guide. Again, especially if you’re brand new to the podcast, you don’t wanna miss the free resources that we’re creating each week to support that week’s episode. If you’d like to get access to those, just go to theunstuckgroup.com/podcast and subscribe to get those in your email. Well, as we shared last week, many of the churches that we’re serving right now are telling us that they’re really encouraged by how many new people are showing up on the weekend of their churches. And there’s a real sense of momentum. In fact, our most recent Unstuck Church Report, the report from quarter three, said that attendance was up by 17% on average.
Amy:
That’s great! I’m hearing that too. And with this series, we wanna encourage you just to take a step back and look at how well you’re stewarding that momentum. Weekend quality is really more than just creative excellence. It’s really about how well you leverage that weekend time to engage both insiders at your church and outsiders. And if you’re clear on your mission, why your church exists, your weekend service has a purpose.
Sean:
That’s right. So we’re just taking some time over these next few weeks to share some practical ways that you can up the quality of your weekend planning, preparation, and execution. Last week we focused on preparing for guests in your environments and preparing your insiders specifically to expect guests. And this week, we wanna talk about sermon series planning. Amy, how would you describe the tension to manage when it comes to quality and sermon series planning specifically?
Amy:
I think every church has the opportunity to be a church for people who don’t know Jesus and for people who do. But how do we plan series with both of those audiences in mind? I also would like to relieve the tension a little bit. As we were talking about this series, we just keep coming back to often both believers and non-believers are asking the same questions. They’re struggling with the same things in life. But I have found that churches on either end of that spectrum where they feel like they’re just preaching to people outside the faith or just preaching to people who are already in the faith, I think they maybe have some false assumptions. I think believers and non-believers are more similar than we think we are.
Sean:
So let’s just spend a few minutes brainstorming a list of ways that we typically see churches struggle to manage this tension.
Amy:
When you set this up, you were talking about quality and sermon series planning when it relates to the teaching. So here’s some things that come to mind. I think sometimes there’s a lack of intentionality with series planning, meaning I still see churches doing 52 weeks on the book of Romans. I think that’s got some challenges both for insiders and outsiders. Another tension I see is just too much “teaching” that could be that the teaching is just too long. Sometimes there’s too much teaching without any breath. There’s no creativity or ways to kind of reengage the listener.
I had a church reach out to me and they asked me to kind of secret shop four weeks of their teaching, and all their teachers did this. They just talked and talked and talked, and there was never a break. There was never breath. Something to help me as a listener reset that gets to a quality issue. I think another tension in this is lack of application. My husband’s a lead pastor, and I think I annoy him when I ask him each week in advance of the weekend: “What’s the application this weekend?” Because there are some series that lend themselves more easily to application. But when you’re in a series that doesn’t, you still have to work it out because if people aren’t challenged to think or behave differently because of what they’ve heard, if you haven’t made that clear, that’s a quality issue with the teaching. And by the way, on the quality front, I’ve experienced churches where everyone kind of seems okay with mediocre or good enough. And I just think, what a miss.
Here’s one example: I went to a baby dedication on Mother’s Day. So the room was filled with so many family members who really are not connected to church – adult kids who went because mom wanted them to come to church, or family members related to the baby that was being dedicated. They had the worst speaker on baby dedication day on Mother’s Day. Their lead pastor was gone. And I was thinking, this is when the lead pastor needs to be there. This is when we want the best person in place. That’s just a lack of planning. And it really impacted the quality of that experience.
I also see sometimes speakers really dependent on the room’s reaction. So they’re like, “you guys get me” and we all have to say “yeah” or “can I get an amen?” And honestly, it’s just a lack of preparedness. And by the way, it’s probably also a lack of feedback, both a feedback process before and after the message delivery. That’s again, something that really affects the sermon quality. And sometimes you can’t avoid this. I remember a very well-known pastor, one of the best communicators on the planet, loves Jesus, leads so many people to Christ. When I secret shopped his church, unfortunately, he was in week five of a series on Revelation. And I actually gave him a red throughout, and he was teasing me like, “how could you give me a red?” But it was one of those things where he just didn’t quite do that extra work to help new people understand even the verbiage of Revelation or find the right application. So we just have to remember, we’re not competing with other churches. When we open up for this hour on Sunday, we get one shot and we’re being compared to a lot of other ways people could be spending their time.
Sean:
Yeah, that’s right. And delivering on that hour really takes some planning. It takes thinking about this in advance and planning ahead of time. And I would add to that, that sometimes we’re just not clear on what we’re talking about specifically. So as we plan for future weekend series, our series titles can sometimes become too creative. And we just miss the chance to overtly state what the felt need is, what we’re gonna talk about and what we’re trying to communicate. And again, many times the felt need is the same for insiders as it is for outsiders. I had this conversation with a church recently, and they did a series called Written in Stone that was on the 10 Commandments. And I completely understand why they titled it that way, and they had a great image to go along with it.
But is that really something, a topic that outsiders will lean into and be interested in and be a draw for them? Maybe it could have been something more like, are there really rules to get into heaven? Or something along those lines where it’s more compelling. I tend to lean in more and it really gets more at the heart of the question that I personally have. So I think there’s times like that where we can become too creative. And in our advanced planning for our weekends, we really need to be considering, you know, are we answering questions that people are asking?
Amy:
That’s right.
Sean:
Okay. So let’s talk about some effective ways to just up the quality of the series planning itself.
Amy:
Well, I think you actually just said it, Sean, the first one that comes to mind is just to be sure we’re actually addressing the questions people are asking. So I think our tendency sometimes is to only deliver the information that we want people to hear. But people aren’t gonna engage the teaching unless we’re actually addressing the issues that they’re facing in their daily life. You know, one of the exercises we do in our planning process is we talk about our mission field, right? Where’s God placed our church? Who should we primarily be reaching? Often it’s young families, it’s parents who are in that 30 to 45-year-old stage raising kids. They’re busy. And we think through what’s important to them, not what do we think is important for them, but just generally in their life right now, what’s important to them.
And then we flip it and say, how can we address that need? And it’s amazing when you think about their perspective first, and then how could we actually address it, it will help our teaching get much more focused on the people that we’re trying to reach. So we don’t wanna just deliver what we want people to hear. We wanna address the real needs in their life. And so there’s lots of ways you can get at this one, put together a little focus group or get a very diverse group around your preaching team and have conversations around what are the needs in our mission field right now. Draw it out. Read headlines and magazines to get a sense of topics that people are discussing in today’s culture. And again, remember what we said a couple times. I don’t think this needs to be an unbelievers thing because my guess is your believers are asking the same questions, have the same type of issues in their life as well. What would you add?
Sean:
Yeah. So just along those same lines of planning ahead, as a pastor, as someone who’s delivering the sermon, you might wanna wait until Saturday to finish your message. Although I wouldn’t encourage that. And I’ve worked with some of those pastors who like to wait until Saturday, but at the very least, try to outline your topics a couple of months in advance. So this is kind of baseline. And here’s the reason why. When you do that, you really free up other creative people to plan other elements of the series to make them more effective and impactful. Things like your series packaging, the look, the design, some of the visual elements, the elements that are actually in the service to plan those ahead of time to get creative about communications to enhance the topic and the teaching that you’re delivering that weekend. And you also provide time for an appropriate amount of promotions and marketing to occur for those series.
You’re most likely leveraging a volunteer team to help you implement these weekend services. And we all know this, but sometimes we don’t take it into consideration. It just takes volunteers longer to prepare because they have day jobs. They have other things in their life. So if you want a level of quality from your volunteers, and I am sure that your volunteers want to deliver a level of quality, you really need to give them an appropriate amount of time to prepare. The other thing I’d say, Amy, is just plan with a team.
Amy:
Absolutely.
Sean:
One team might drive topics that are addressed throughout the year. You may have a team that drives the series packaging and design and identifies the titles and visuals. You might have another team that develops the service elements and executes those services. Whatever the case is, the end result is always going to be better when you have the right people engaged in a team approach. And I would say even though you have people with individual gifting and contributions, don’t do that planning in silos. Make sure that there’s always someone that brings cohesion to the overall planning process. That was my role at the church, was all of our different teams who developed from topics to sermon direction to creative elements. There were different teams that did that, but I worked to bring cohesion and alignment with all of those teams. And so you’re going to need someone on your team that does that.
Amy:
Can I jump in there, Sean, for a minute? Because that was my role too. And again, with churches growing at 17% year over year, on average, at least the ones connected with Unstuck, somewhere around that 1500 to 2000 mark, that’s really the time to bring on a leader over your weekend. That is an off platform leader. Like, hopefully they’re able to be on the platform so they know what it’s like to have to carry the platform. But someone, I often talk about them, they lead the three Ps. This leader will lead the processes that produce excellent, reliable weekend services. Kind of what you’re talking about, bringing that cohesion. They’re leading the people, right. People in the teams and they’re overseeing your product, your weekend product, ensuring that it’s always hitting the mark. And so as you are growing, if you’re growing, if you’re already past those numbers, and you don’t have that role, I’d say that’s gotta be a priority. But if you’re breaking through that thousand barrier heading towards the 2000, that’s a role you’ll wanna keep on your radar.
Sean:
Yeah. That’s very good, Amy. The last thing I’d add to that list is just make sure that your team has good chemistry. I mean, we always want this, but you really want people who understand how you’re defining quality, what that means for your church specifically and really what you’re trying to accomplish through the weekend.
Amy:
I wanna jump on the series planning that you talked about a little bit, Sean. One way that we kind of managed, there’s a lot of series throughout the year, probably 10 series packages you’re going through. Not all series need to have the same priority. They all need to have quality. They still need to deliver on your brand, but they don’t all have to have the same priority. Here’s how I would work with our lead pastor. I would talk about once he went away and I got him to a place where annually he would lay out, here’s what I’m gonna do for the year. And by the way, I didn’t need every scripture. I didn’t need every follow up. I just wanted to kind of chunk out these four weeks. We’re gonna do a parenting season series. This next one we’re gonna do a study on the book of James. Then we’re gonna move into a vision series. And you know, the first half of the year was off in more clear than the back half.
But when he would get through that, then I could come alongside him and actually ask like, which of these series that you’ve brainstormed now for the year are gonna be our A series? An A series would be one where we’re like, we wanna fire up our church body to invite their friends and family. This is like an all play we wanna make. We want people outside the faith to understand and be connected with every weekend. But these ones, we’re gonna boost it a little bit. We’re probably gonna spend some marketing dollars on it. We’re gonna create some creative videos to promote the series. And I only gave them two.
Is that like the fall kickoff series? Is that the pre-Christmas? Is that the Christmas? Is that the post Easter? But those ones then I could get our artists on quickly. Like start thinking about these A’s, ’cause we need to come up with some creative ideas. ’cause creative ideas take time. So that’s why we had to lean on that. Then the B series were the kind of series that really integrated with our spiritual formation process. So that’s where I would partner with our ministry discipleship leader, show ’em kind of the layout of the land of the series that we were gonna be doing. And then I’d say, which of these you get two, maybe three, that really integrate with what you’re trying to get people to do as next steps beyond the weekend. So maybe we were gonna do a financial series, then ministry could go, that’s one of our B ones. We’re gonna bring in financial peace university to really help that one come off the page. Or I see we’re doing a relationship series, we wanna do a group link or launch small groups out of that.
And so those were the B’s and then the rest were C’s. And by the way, identifying those B’s gave our ministry leader a chance to really go, how can I plus this beyond the weekend service? And then all the rest were C’s. So you can do it however it works for you. But when I find when we had that focus, we knew when to fire up our church on those invite series, we knew when to really up the ante on helping people take their next steps and yet still having quality every weekend.
And just one more thing, I think it’s really important for those A series that I was talking about to remember that it’s really the church body that’s going to help new people come to your church. In other words, I mentioned marketing, so I just wanna qualify it. You can spend a lot of money on advertising, direct mailers. We use to do bus butts; we advertise on bathroom doors. You can do all those, but those are all like exposures that help people get familiar with your church. But if you want more people to show up, you need to have constant quality on the weekend; trust with your church that you can trust them with your friends. And then really challenging your body in those seasons where you wanna up the invite culture to actually be praying for and inviting their friends.
Sean:
Yeah. That’s really good, Amy. At my church we used to run a kind of a survey annually. And it wasn’t a survey asking people for feedback, it was more of a demographic survey just to know who’s in our church. And one of the questions we would ask is, how did you get to this church? How did you arrive here, what brought you here? And year after year, more than 90% of the people who responded said, I was invited by somebody, a friend.
Amy:
Ours was the same. Yep.
Sean:
And that is so true. Your primary promotions vehicle for your church is the people already connected to your church. Well, Amy, before we move on, I just wanna say a quick thanks to our sponsor for today. These podcasts take us quite a bit of time and resource to put together, and they really wouldn’t happen without each week’s podcast sponsor. This week’s sponsor is Horizons Stewardship. Here’s what we know to be true, Amy. Many of the capable giving households contribute more to their favorite charity than they do to their local church. And that puts a lot of strain, financial strain on churches everywhere. And that’s why we joined forces with Horizons to create the Financial Sustainability Crisis guide designed to help churches really everywhere tackle some ongoing financial challenges. So in the resource, we put together some practical strategies to effectively budget and manage financial resources, connect your giving to your discipleship journey, that’s so important. And then identify ways to ensure your ministry plan is fully funded. You can download the full Financial Sustainability Crisis guide today at horizons.net/fundministry. That’s horizons.net/fundministry. In each episode of this series, we’ve invited a pastor that we know who leads a church that’s really doing well in one of particular areas that we’re talking about in the weekend to share some of their insights. And in today’s episode, we invited Joel Thomas from North Point in Alpharetta, Georgia.
Amy:
Yeah. Joel Thomas is part of the North Point Ministries team, and he’s also the lead pastor at their Buckhead location Buckhead Church. And so I had a chance to sit down with him and talk about how they approach series planning and how they manage this tension of speaking to both believers and unbelievers. And lastly how they work to bring creativity into those experiences. So here’s my interview with Joel.
Well, we are in a series to encourage pastors to check the quality of weekend services and really assess if they need to raise the bar. Joel, your church does a great job with sermon series planning. Would you just share a little bit of the background on how you approach it?
Joel:
Yeah, sure. Well, we have a meeting that actually happens every week on Tuesdays, Tuesday afternoons. That’s the central team. So there’s somebody that actually works with all of our service program directors at all of our campuses. Her name’s Julie Simmons. And Julie leads that meeting, whoever’s gonna be communicating in a series if it’s so broadcast series, they’re in that meeting. Like I’ve been in these meetings with, for the Miracle Series upcoming. And then there’s people from creative services to help us create content. So there’s a team of people that meets every week centrally, and then there’s teams that meet every week on the campuses. The service program teams on the campuses, they all meet every week. And usually we look, we evaluate from the previous Sunday, we look ahead to the next Sunday, and then we look ahead to the next series or two, sometimes two series away.
And to give general idea, we like general direction for a upcoming series at least eight weeks out. So two months ahead, we’re looking for that big idea. What’s the big idea about what this series is gonna be about? And what’s the goal of the series? What that does is that gets other people thinking about, okay, now I know where the series is going. I’ve got the general direction. They can begin thinking in that direction, ideating in that direction. They don’t need to know all the individual messages. Those usually come a month, sometimes a little further out in that. ’cause oftentimes with the big idea comes several message ideas, but usually by a month out, we’ve got the details on each of the weeks. Now I know other people work further ahead, but we’ve just found it allows us to pivot when things change.
It allows us to change ideas. You get too locked in, too far in advance. You’ve already got assets created for things you don’t want people wasting their time. So you know, two months out, having the big idea and the goal of the series a month to six weeks out, having individual messages so that you can ideate and be creative. I know we’re gonna talk a little bit about creativity a little later, but that’s critical. You know, planning early like that is critical because there’s more freedom. You have more options on what you can do. And people can ideate more creatively when they got time and they got time to execute. Oftentimes it’s like, that’s a great idea. It would’ve been a great idea a month ago. But now we can’t make that happen.
Amy:
I think some of our pastors and listeners are gonna feel relieved that you’re just two months out, because I’m sure they get a lot of pressure to be even further out. Let me ask you this, Joel, what are a few of the series from the past maybe 12 to 18 months that you felt really seemed to yield great results?
Joel:
I’ll give you two recent ones. This past spring, around May timeframe, post-Easter, we did a longer series for us – a nine week series. Some were centrally broadcast, some were local, with a mix of that. It was called “What Our World Needs Now” and it was all about the fruit of the spirit. Looking ahead to the upcoming elections, post-Easter is when things really started hitting with the election. A lot of the ads started happening, political parties trying to get people’s attention, and we wanted to say, “Hey, you’re gonna get a lot of messages about what our world needs. What we think our world really needs as people who are following Jesus.” The fruit of the spirit being manifest in their lives – that was the big idea of the series. We reiterated that every week. We took the nine Fruit of the Spirit and covered one a week, talking about what those fruit of the spirit looked like and how we participate with the Holy Spirit in seeing that fruit being born in our lives. That’s one example of that, and again, we had that idea back in February for the series. We were able to figure out who wanted to preach what and what people had energy around different parts of that series. There’s this whole scheduling component when doing a nine-week series across eight campuses, trying to figure out which ones are going to be broadcast, which ones Andy will do, which ones we want the lead pastors to do. So there’s just things like that. So we, so that was planned a little further in advance than two months.
But another great example of this, which actually is a little more detailed for listeners, is Andy’s recent series called “The Responsibles.” This was a shorter three-week series. He wanted to talk about responsibility and taking responsibility for your life, which is rare in the world.
Amy:
Right?
Joel:
His big idea was “your irresponsibility always becomes somebody else’s responsibility.” So that was the big idea of the series. And we all, we’ve all experienced that. We all know that for sure. And so his whole thing was, he came with this idea of the responsibles, and sometimes the communicator has the creative idea. sometimes they don’t – sometimes we need the creative services team or the service program team to brainstorm the message ideas.
Andy had this idea that this is how people can be superheroes in the world – it’s not common. If you want to live uncommon, if you want as an average person to become super, this is how you do it: you take responsibility for your life, you take responsibility for your mistakes, you take responsibility for your past behavior. The whole idea of “The Responsibles” was a persona of somebody becoming super by doing something most people don’t do. The team thought, “okay, this is superhero-themed!”
Amy:
How fun.
Joel:
It was epic – they did such a great job creating the branding and the title package, which is like a little trailer before the message. It was all around these people being superheroes because they’re taking responsibility for life. It had an Incredibles feel to it, which was really fun. And it just created a lot of fun each week. So that’s a couple of examples.
Amy:
How do you approach creative when it comes to planning series? What’s your system for bringing creative elements into the mix?
Joel:
As I was mentioning in the beginning, it’s really connected to the first question because we have to plan early. As I said earlier, if you don’t plan early, you limit your ability to be creative. The further in advance you are now, again, you can start too early, but there is a deadline for creativity – and it’s not Sunday morning service. It’s whatever time you need to execute on a creative idea, which often is not days—it’s weeks.
Amy:
It’s not.
Joel:
I’ll give you an example. We just did a series at Buckhead Church, one of my favorite series we’ve done in a long time, called “The Power of a Made-Up Story.” It was three weeks on parables. We took three parables of Jesus, and we decided for those three weeks that we wanted people to experience something. The first week, I shrunk my message to 25 minutes, covering the Parable of Loss – the lost sheep, lost coin, lost son.
Amy:
So good.
Joel:
And we have this video, this short film that we created that is a made up story actually about a girl who last her way. And she did a bunch of things she wasn’t proud of. She thought about going home. It’s the parable of the prodigal son but sort of in a modern-day form.
The video ends; the short film ends. It’s only about nine minutes long. I preached my message, unpacked these three parables, then I pitch straight to the video. It’s very powerful, with some rough imagery. It’s very emotional. Anyway, she calls her dad. She realizes when she’s buying some, she’s buying some cigarettes, and she realizes it’s her birthday the next day. And she calls her dad and said, you know, she thought about stopping home, but she didn’t talk to him. It was late at night, left him a message, and then she hitches a ride in the back of a truck.
She gets the house and she turns to walk up the driveway, the camera pans, and you see these balloons like the all outside the house. I mean, just imagine the, the biggest number of bunches of balloons outside the house. And she’s just stunned. You see her face. And she’s just stunned. And her dad’s out there putting balloons and he doesn’t see her yet. And she’s walking up, when he turns and sees her, he is holding one of the sets of balloons and it, and it floats out of her, his hands. Like he sees her and he walks over and they embrace. And so we finished that. And what we wanted to do was to create that same feeling and experience for people in the room who may have lost their way, and they’re wanting to come home, but they’re not sure. You know, they’re missing home, but they’re not sure home’s missing them, is the idea.
And so we decided we wanted to do, was to fill the auditorium with massive bunches of balloons for to come in.
Amy:
What a great idea.
Joel:
So we finished the video, the song starts this, the, it’s actually a Hillsong song: You Love Me Where You Find Me. And then volunteers start coming out with these huge bunches of balloons all over the auditorium. Well, that takes weeks to execute on, to get sight lines. You still got cameras we gotta deal with, you got sight line issues. You’re gonna have these, but you want these bunches of balloons. You wanna come out at the right time, you wanna have the right song, you want to, you know, and with the video. So it was just, it’s stuff like that where if you’re gonna create an experience like that, and then we did it each week.
We, we try to create, I won’t bore you with all of them, but we try to create an experience, visual, experiential opportunity for people to engage with what we were teaching. And you know, that took, I finished those messages in the middle of June for September, because when we decided, Hey, that would be really fun to kind of do that in experiential way. I knew, I guess I was at the end of June, but they named, they needed a couple of months to know, and it’s just three weeks. But to know each of those messages so that they could not only come up with, but execute on the creative ideas at a high level. So, that’s, it’s typically, again, like that, it’s, we try to think what unique can we do with this series? You know, with the superhero thing, there’s just different opportunities. And we did some fun stuff in that series as well related to superhero stuff. So, I just think that’s the big, the biggest deal is you need time. You need time to not just come up with ideas, but execute on the ideas.
Sean:
Well, Amy, that was a great conversation with Joel. Love and appreciate his insights. Anything else you want to leave our listeners with today?
Amy:
We started off this series saying we want to help you steward the momentum you have. But I also want to say, upping the quality of your weekend can help spark momentum if you don’t currently have it. You have this event 52 times a year, and I think it’s easy because it’s every week for it to become rote. So I’m hoping this series is also spurring you on to take a few steps back and just saying, where are our opportunities to get just a little bit better in this weekend experience?
Sean:
Yeah. And each week in this series, we’re offering this tool we’ve created to help you do a quality check on your weekend. In the first phase of our Unstuck process, we work with churches, providing training to staff to learn to really self-assess the quality of their weekend services. That’s something we encourage churches to do regularly. When we’re onsite with a church, we facilitate group discussion around the team’s observations of their weekend. We’d like to give all our listeners a digital download to preview that tool. If you’re subscribed to the podcast, you’re getting it in your weekly email. If not, you can sign up at theunstuckgroup.com/podcast, and you’ll get that tool emailed to you.
Amy as we wrap up today, I just want to say thanks again to everybody who tunes in weekly to these conversations. We pray this content is helpful for you all, and next week we’ll continue this series with a conversation specifically on teaching. We’re going to dig into some aspects of teaching effectively in the weekend series. Until we’re back next week, have a great week.
