Since the dubious crash of the original accesselevation.com and its hostile takeover by some weak purple blog our readership has narrowed to the hard core. It’s mostly church planters looking to learn from mistakes we’ve made in an effort to avoid them for themselves.

In honor of the loyal readers, I want to open up the blog to questions. Ask away. Anything you want to know about who, what, where, when, and why we do what we do at Elevation. Please send all questions to syates@elevationchurch.org. No promises we’ll answer it on the blog. It may be easier to just email you back. We are just looking for some topics to blog about that is relevant to the readers. Thanks.

Chunks Corbett, Executive Pastor �

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The title is, of course, a subtle reference to an 80’s sitcom that I can sing the theme song to on cue. But it’s also a description of our last 2 weeks at Elevation.

June 1st was a thing of beauty (you take the good). It was a day that makes you think the church can remain portable forever. Everything from set up to tear down went perfect. The stage looked great, Pastor preached the house down, 146 people gave their lives to Christ. It was just an all around great day.

We had 4 separate groups of church planters in on our Backstage Elevation tours on the 1st and we made it look easy. Sometimes you can give the wrong impression of a portable church when everything goes right.

Then June 8th happened (you take the bad). It wasn’t a disaster by any means, but it was a day that we got some crisis management practice. It started with the air conditioner being broken at one of our campuses (a high school) on the hottest day of the year. We made the adjustment and got 800 bottles of ice cold water for people along with a big fan and nobody passed out.

We also had a guest Worship Leader that came in unprepared. No big deal, fortunately we had our Worship Pastor available to fill his shoes.

Well, then 10 minutes before our first service (8:30 at the other H.S. campus with AC working), our $35,000 switcher decided to reset. That meant that all inputs to the device had to be reset. The net effect was we started late, lost our center screen and TV’s onstage for the first service and had to cut out a song to get the service out on time.

We thought we were through the worst of it all and then our generator that powers our production trailer shut off for no reason 1 minute before Pastor finished his sermon at 8:30. This caused us to loose power to all video equipment. This happened during the service that we have to get right because we play that sermon back at our second campus. Since it only cut off 1 minute of the sermon we were able to have a live person take over when the tape cut off when played back and it seemed to work well.

The generator shut off again during the 10 O’clock service which forced us to use the same sermon that was cut off 1 minute short for all the video sermons of the day.

Finally, we had a normal 11:30 service. This was after the generator cut off during 2 services and the other 2 services down the street with no AC had a video sermon that was cut 1 minute short. We thought we would coast through the rest of the day. Only the 1 PM service to go and Pastor was live.

That is as long as the camera operators have eaten and not given blood. Just minutes before Pastor was going to close the last sermon of the day, our camera operator who was fasting and had blood taken that morning passed out (the camera was live) and came crashing to the floor in the back of the auditorium. The audience watched the screens and saw it all through the camera which ended up on the floor facing the ceiling. The EMS came and took her to the hospital where, fortunately, all tests were negative.

So she was OK and in the end so was the Sunday and the church. But it was definitely not the way we planned it out in our production meetings. And it was certainly a little different than the week before.

Chunks Corbett, Executive Pastor� � �

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One thing we like to do at Elevation is learn from other churches. This weekend I took a group of men from our church on a marathon Sunday. The guys I took make up the church’s Acquisition Team and they are currently helping us pursue our next facility step.

The goal of the trip was to stretch our vision and see other churches doing ministry with excellence in permanent facilities. Here is a quick itinerary of the day: We left Charlotte at 5 AM, arrived at Northpoint’s Browns Bridge campus in time for the 9AM service and had a tour afterwards. We then headed down to Buckhead for a tour and time with David McDaniel (Genius). We finished the day by stopping at Newspring for some time with their Facilities Director and caught their 5 PM service. We were back in Charlotte at 9:30 PM.

One of the big reasons we wanted to catch the 9AM service at Brown’s Bridge was to see how they do their video campuses. They use a very sophisticated 24 ft. wide center screen that really gives the appearance that Andy Stanley is actually live. They have traditional image magnification on the side screens that are close ups that you spend a majority of the time watching just as you would in a big venue if the sermon was live.

It’s not a magic trick, but it is ministry done with excellence. I’ve experienced it before but couldn’t explain it to my team so they had to experience it for themselves.

So there we were in the center of the auditorium, a little over half way back. The worship ended and a bumper fired before the sermon. The huge center screen came down as the stage was cleared. It was pretty dark so you could barely see the screen coming down. I had a pretty large group with me but when Andy popped up on the center screen the guys closest to me were blown away with how good it looked.

Andy concluded another superb message; I was relieved to see my Acquisition Team finally get what I had been trying to tell them about for months. They finally understood just how excellent we could do video in a permanent facility. That is, all except for one of my guys. He leaned over to another guy with our group as we were exiting the sanctuary and said “Chunks is going to be disappointed that we drove all the way to Atlanta to see the video and Andy was live”.

So there you have it. Nothpoint does video so good that one of my sharpest guys in the church drove all the way to Atlanta to see the “Video Preacher” and was disappointed by thinking that it was actually live. That’s video done “too good”.

Chunks Corbett, Executive Pastor

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The last time I posted on Access Elevation, I wrote about reports.� Since I got more response from that post than I have gotten from any other post I’ve written I thought it might be helpful to take it to the next level.

In the last post I emphasized having good content, making your conclusions obvious, and sticking to a consistent format.� In this post I’m going to dive a little deeper into what I meant by making your conclusions obvious.�

First, let me point out that there are different levels of reports:

• Vertical - reports to your boss
• Horizontal - reports to your peers
• Internal - reports to people that know your ministry details (staff and team members)
• External - reports to people that don’t know your ministry details (volunteers)�

The information is this post assumes a vertical report and would not necessarily apply to the other types of reports.

Making your conclusions obvious is not always easy.� Chip and Dan Heath wrote about the “curse of knowledge” in their book Made to Stick (114).� Basically, as someone who spends their entire time buried in the details of your ministry, (finances, small groups, children’s ministry, volunteers etc…) it’s going to be hard for you to recognize what’s really important; to you, it’s all important.�

Every time someone asks you about the number of people on your small group rosters you say, “this week there are 1050…but we have also drastically improved our systems to get people plugged in, and we eliminated a lot of people from the rosters that weren’t really going to their group, and we just had several leaders quit, and we’re heading toward the summer, and, and, and…”

Your curse is the same as mine, you know too much about your area so when you produce a report you’re tempted to give too much information, or to qualify the information you’re giving…�

What I’ve learned is that whatever metric you consistently show includes all that stuff – that is, if it’s the right metric!� Sure, 1050 doesn’t tell every detail of the Small Group Ministry, but if that number is the right metric it will reveal the plot line, and for someone that doesn’t understand all of the nuances of your ministry, getting them to understand the plot is a HUGE win for your ministry.

John Bishop, Ministries Pastor

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