Let’s imagine a street corner in your average American suburb. Actually, it could be a small town, a city—it doesn’t matter where. This particular intersection (created by Church Street and Chapel Road) has a church on each of its four corners.
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Let’s also imagine that each of our corner churches is significantly different from the others in style, but that each church is similar in that they use projected visual media to supplement the live elements of their services. Around Thanksgiving, people are going to walk in the doors of these churches to worship, to learn—or maybe because they were dragged there. In each church, plans for worship are being put together and various processes are taking place to make decisions as to what visual media will be used. Let’s take a look at each of our churches and how they are getting ready to make Thanksgiving something special for their congregations:
Church A: The “contemporary” church
We’ll call our first church “Church A.” Church A considers themselves to be the most contemporary of the four. The leadership of Church A does their best to be relevant to today’s society and to reach out to those who are far from Christ. They consider top-notch visual media to be an excellent tool to make those connections, and so they have invested quite a bit of both human and financial resources to make sure their video “kicks.”
The planning for this year’s Thanksgiving service at Church A is being done by the church’s creative team. The team’s makeup is both multi-ethnic and multi-generational, and does its best to stay on top of demographic shifts, trends in popular culture, and advancements in media technology. The church has a full-time tech director and a part-time “video jockey,” as well as several other media-savvy staff to be able to meet the demand of constant video production.
Church A’s creative team, however, is currently at an impasse. Half of the team favors a high-energy service built around a celebration of everything that God has done for us: A “Let’s show people that we mean it when we say we’re thankful” mentality. They envision a simple video with black text on a white background, projecting words of things to be thankful for, such as “LIFE,” “FAMILY, “HOPE,” and so on. As music steadily swelled, words would increase in speed, eventually moving faster than the eye can see—representing the fact that God blesses us more than we could ever thank him for. The worship team would then kick in with a high-energy praise song with words of praise continuing to be projected onto a screen behind the band. The service would also contain a number of short personal interviews with congregational members on video. These videos would be used as transitions between the other service elements, and would consist of the individuals excitedly expressing thanks for something that God has done in their lives.
The other half of the team wants to build—literally—service into the worship time by taking part of it to put together food baskets for poor families in the area. They want to send video teams into distressed neighborhoods to interview the people there, in the hopes that Church A’s congregation will get fired up to help. Another possibility raised by this group would be to do a “person on the street” interview on what it means to share, with the idea of helping the congregation to realize that God has blessed them so that they might be a blessing to others. The next creative team meeting will determine which direction things go.
Church B: The “traditional” church
“Church B,” on the other end of the spectrum from Church A, is the most traditional of the four. The pastor of Church B takes care of most of the planning of worship services himself, with occasional help on the music side from the choir director and the organist. The pastor usually makes use of planning resources provided by his denomination to determine a direction for each service, but this Thanksgiving he has chosen to go his own way. His goal is to instill a reverent feel—to produce a quiet Thanksgiving.
The church council does not allow candles in Church B, after a potentially catastrophic fire was narrowly avoided. The pastor hopes to create the “vibe” without the risk by having candles on video as the congregation enters. The pastor then plans on closing the service by taking the words of a famous public domain hymn on thankfulness and finding images that will match it. He’ll leave the in-between sections to his video guy.
Church B is fortunate to have a video volunteer that knows exactly what the pastor likes. The volunteer is a local wedding videographer with pretty decent equipment, as well as a reserved, artistic style. He has amassed quite a collection of worship stills and very slowly moving worship backdrops that he uses throughout many of the church’s services. The images fade into each other, providing a sort of video wallpaper that is symbolically powerful yet unobtrusive. For Thanksgiving, the video volunteer has found numerous autumn scenes, which he will mix with Christian symbols, images of family tables, hearths, and food to help the congregation to remember Thanksgivings that have been special to them—and to praise God for them.
Church C: The “college” church
“Church C” is unique from the other two in a couple of different ways. It is the oldest church in town and has a long history of association with the town’s prestigious college. Planning in Church C is done by the senior pastor and his two associates, with input often coming from the college president and a well-known theology professor from the school. The pastor of Church C has decided, as has been common in the past, to give a historical perspective to this year’s Thanksgiving service. For the past two years, the Thanksgiving emphasis at Church C has been on the holiday’s place in America’s history, with a particular emphasis on how thanks has been offered to God at specific times in our nation’s past.
This year, the pastor has asked the theology professor (also an ordained minister) to preach as a guest. Instead of an emphasis on Thanksgiving in America, the professor will focus on thanksgiving throughout the Bible. In particular, he’ll talk about the idea of “Ebenezer Stones”—stones that were erected by the ancient Israelites to give thanksgiving to God for acting on their behalf.
The pastor is also good friends with the college’s media director, and enlists her help to create graphics and video whenever her busy schedule allows. Her class schedule has not enabled her to make herself available much this fall—however, she introduced the pastor to one of her most gifted students, who works with the theology professor to prepare all of this year’s graphics and video for a set commission. This has been a fairly in-depth project for the young student, as it has required the use of an advanced 3-D graphics design program to recreate various historical places, items, and symbols (including historical replicas of what the Ebenezer Stones might have looked like), as well as an exhaustive search for available public domain images of artwork based on the scripture passages being used.
Church D: The family church
Finally, on the southeast corner of the intersection, we have “Church D.” Church D calls itself a “family church,” and with good reason. Its thriving Sunday School program has grown to the point where the church building is hopping most evenings with activities for children and families. Most of the services reflect the family feel of the church, with kids joining in the first 15 minutes of the services.
The husband and wife pastoral team of Church D use an informal planning process for their services: sometimes they figure everything out themselves, sometimes they put together a team, and sometimes they delegate. They’ve even opened the planning process to the general congregation on multiple occasions.
This year, the pastors are hardly involved in the planning process at all. The K-5 Sunday School leaders have worked for the past two months to create a unique and heart-felt Thanksgiving service. All of the video elements and graphics (and there are a lot of them) for the service are in the process of being made by students of varying ages and abilities.
The Sunday School planners have come up with a Thanksgiving celebration that they feel will be both fun and worshipful. A “turkey trivia” pre-service slideshow will run into a one-minute countdown video, with each second of the countdown being spoken by a different Sunday School-aged child. In fact, the teachers made sure to tell the parents that their children were in the video, in the hopes that they would arrive and be seated on time!
Instead of a sermon, the team decided to have a spunky first-grader interview one of the oldest members of the congregation to list things that she is thankful for in her life. The video (already completed) ended up being extremely touching, as 93 years of God’s blessings—many in the midst of hardship—were expressed. As folks are leaving this year, the team plans on handing out slices of hot apple pie, along with a DVD that includes the interview, and many interesting and fun Thanksgiving activities that the families could try during the holiday weekend.
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You may or may not have recognized your particular congregation among those at the intersection of Church and Chapel. Each of our imaginary churches has gone its own way, adapting video and other media to best serve the needs and expectations of its congregation. A multitude of other options might include:
- Projecting Thanksgiving scenes on walls, ceilings, in hallways, and so on;
- A slide show of famous quotes about Thanksgiving;
- A humorous reenactment of the Pilgrims’ first Thanksgiving (or a serious one);
- A stop motion thanksgiving feast (for ambitious video teams);
- Clips from classic holiday movies (with the proper license, of course);
- Anything else that would work well in your church.
The key: choose what’s right to help your congregation to be able to turn to God and say “For everything you are and for everything you’ve done—thanks!”
Check out the entire FaithVisuals.com Thanksgiving Collection.
