The Big Idea
I just finished bombing through the book "The Big Idea" and I loved it! I got through this sucker in a few hours and I only do that with books that are good (and easy to read). The whole premise of the book is to focus everything that you do as a faith community around 1 idea. Stop sending out tons of little ideas (which is just usually disorganization in my opinion) and focus on one thing. From the kids to the adults, worship to speaking, small groups and outreach events, one idea. Obviously this will change but lets say you are in a series for a month. That whole month should be dedicated to communicating one idea in a multitude of different ways.
We've been doing this from the start at TXC. We aren't where we'd like to be but we are doing our best to communicate one idea each Sunday with the adults and the kids. Once our UnderCurrents get fired up we'll see what happens there. We may start some up that are simply a deeper study of what we talked about on Sunday. I think Sunday isn't a very good venue for group interaction (lots of people don't want it either) whereas an UnderCurrent provides a place where people have volunteered themselves to be in a small community of people and will feel more free to discuss what the theme on Sunday was. ( I bet we could have had some heated discussion in our UnderCurrents regarding this last Sunday's theme. This Sunday will be even better!)
We've had a dream from the beginning of TXC to be a church that plants other churches as well as becoming a multisite church in Mission. Sounds like a crazy psychotic dream...I know. Mission only as 35k people so it will be an interesting journey but we won't let that stop us. We've still got a long ways to go but we're getting closer and as we go that route I think taking the good stuff from the Big Idea will definitely aid us in keeping us all on the same page.
One of the things I love is the teaching team. My friend Jeremy Postal calls it sermonizing (I think that's another one of his invented words?) Basically it's a group of people that get together and brainstorm for an upcoming series. With the Big Idea each time you get together you are brainstorming 9 weeks in advance (maybe longer?) so you are always way ahead of the game. I love this because it enables you to get insight from more people that just yourself. Right now Donovan and I comprise the teaching team and he's got some crazy insights that I could use. Everytime we get together my jaw drops to the floor because of something he's said. I also love the idea of being so far ahead as it gives you way more time to prepare and change things up if need be.
I'm stoked to get the process moving a little bit further down the road. We've got all our series' planned till September and in June we're going on a Staff Retreat where we'll plan out another whole year in advance. I think that the more we can get ahead, the more freedom we'll have.
