Maximizing Your Service Content
Churches put a lot of resources into crafting weekly services. But that effort often isn’t utilized beyond Sunday morning. So I want to help you maximize your service content for maximum kingdom impact. We will first examine why you should maximize your content then what content to maximize and lastly how to go about doing it. Also, if you’re looking for coaching on this topic beyond this article then visit benstapley.com/coach to schedule a free consultation. I would love to help you determine the obstacles you're facing and if I’m the best person to help you overcome them.
WHY YOU SHOULD MAXIMIZE YOUR SERVICE CONTENT
To Increase Your ROI - ROI is a business term that stands for return on investment. Some people think that business principles don't have any place in the church. I agree that business best practices shouldn't run the church, but they should influence the church. So we need to figure out how to maximize our efforts and leverage service content into the week. Most pastors spend 10-20 hours preparing their message. On average, those fifteen hours of effort equate to a third of their work week. If so much time is spent creating services and crafting messages, then we need to increase the return on this incredible effort. Let's remember that churches are non-profits. We need to make the most out of every dollar.
167 Hours - Most people will come to a church service on Christmas or Easter. A bunch of people will come once a month or even every other week. And a small handful of people will come to church every week. So if people are coming to church for only one hour a week, or one hour a month, how do we engage them beyond that hour? We do this by leveraging the other 167 hours in the week by trickling out service content to them. Think of it this way, on Sunday morning people spiritually feast on the happy meal you provided them. Continue to feed them during the week with spiritual McNuggets. Make sure to leverage the 167 hours.
It Gets The Content Out - Maximizing your service gets the content out of your sanctuary. It helps to share the experience with new guests, with people outside of your four walls. This is helpful because your Sunday morning reach is limited to your physical space. Limited by your parking lot, limited by your auditorium seating and limited by your campuses. But your reach during the week is unlimited because the digital environment is pretty much boundless. So connect with people off your campus during the week by getting the content out. When I was a Christ Fellowship Miami we developed a webpage for people to access the content to get it out.
Follow The Model Of Jesus - Jesus didn't limit the spread of his gospel, his good news that you and all or creation could be made right with God, to himself. During his ministry he passed on intimate knowledge and experiences to his inner circle of Peter, James and John. He also led all 12 disciples in the core truths of his movement. He then commissioned the 70 to take these truths beyond where he could individually and physically go. Jesus utilized as many communication channels as he could to share His love with as many as possible. Now if Jesus doesn't convince you to maximize your content, then I don't know what will 🙂.
WHAT TYPE OF SERVICE CONTENT SHOULD YOU MAXIMIZE
Maximize Your Music - A lot of churches share their setlist AFTER the service. This is wrong. Share it BEFORE the services so people can listen to the tunes and be a little more prepared to sing. Share the Spotify playlist, or if you have a new song, then post the music video of it. All this pre-Sunday posting will build anticipation and increase participation on Sunday. Then after Sunday share a couple lines of lyrics from a song. This could allow the meaning to sink in deeper throughout the week.
Maximize Individual Messages Before Sunday - Any preacher will tell you that half of the content they considered putting into the message ended up on the cutting room floor. This is because they cut out good content to make sure the message is filled with great content. But there is still good content to be used. You can use this good extra content to promote the upcoming message in an email or Facebook live.
Maximize Individual Messages After Sunday - Most churches are so busy preparing for the next Sunday they forget to leverage the past Sunday. There are a boatload of ways to do this. First pull quotes and scripture from the message and share socially. Here are three ways you can do that, from the easiest and least dynamic to the hardest and most dynamic. Text, image and video. With text you can just cut and paste from the manuscript. With image you can use a basic and free app like Canva or Adobe Spark to create a graphic. With video you could cut up clips from the message with iMovie or another basic video editing application.
Blogposts, Podcasts & Action Steps - Other ways to maximize individual messages after Sunday is with blogposts, podcast and actions steps. Blogposts and podcasts should be pretty straight forward. The action step is a little tricky but attainable - and here it is - whatever action step your message has, make sure to call people to it on stage and in email. So if you call people to sign up for the Christmas outreach on your stage, you have to call them to it via email. That email should be delivered right after the message ends. That way, people will have the action step waiting for them in their inbox.
Maximize Message Series - Not only can individual messages be maximized, so too can the whole series. One way to do this is with a small group curriculum. Most churches have their small groups go through a curriculum from another church. Instead of borrowing someone else's content, use your message series as the backbone to create your own curriculum. Another way to maximize a series is to compile a book out of it. If you look back on your series, I'm sure some of them are robust enough to create a book. Outsource this to a ghost writer and you have a resource to sell or give away as a lead magnet. When I was at Liquid Church Pastor Tim Lucas grabbed content from his past relationship series and used it to write You Married The Wrong Person. This eye-catching title implies that we all married the 'wrong' person because none of us are perfect. We used this book to generate increased attendance on Valentines' Day by giving it away to any new guest on that Sunday.
Maximize Your Service - There are tons of different ways to get your whole service online. Figure out which way is best for your church based upon ministry philosophy and budget and DO IT! The easiest way to do this is by posting your full service during the week on Youtube or Vimeo and then embedding it on your website. The next step would be to stream your full service live on Sunday morning on Facebook with an iPhone. This is a step up but only requires a small budget, limited tech know-how and a minimized volunteer base. The next step would be to consider starting church online. Church online looks to replicate a physical campus experience online thus creating a spiritual community in a digital environment.
HOW TO MAXIMIZE YOUR SERVICE CONTENT
Get Volunteers - You want to get a volunteer team in place first to distribute this content. I say get the volunteers in place first because if you start doing this yourself as a staff member then it will be hard to find the time to recruit, resource and release the volunteers. So don't start until the volunteers are in place. If you start posting all this content yourself then you will achieve short-term gains (posted content) at the expense of long-term consequences (burnout). I am hammering this drum hard because it is a principle that I've had to repeatedly re-learn over my 20 years in ministry work.
Start Slow - Remember that ministry is a marathon. Not a sprint. Jesus didn't try to transform the world overnight. He slowly and systematically recruited 12 disciples and then built up to 70 disciples. He knew that these disciples needed to reach Jerusalem, Judea and then Samaria. He started local, then went regionally, then went globally. I would rather see you set up to succeed by starting with incremental steps than crash and burn in a fire of disappointment. So figure out how you're gonna incrementally maximize your message this week, this quarter and this year. Then slowly start pursuing it.
CONCLUSION
Hopefully this article on maximizing your service content helps you take steps forward at your church. Hopefully, in the end, it helps you reach more people with the transforming love of Jesus. Let me know what best practices I missed. I would love to hear from you and learn from you. And if you want additional help in this area then visit benstapley.com/coach to schedule a free consultation. I would love to help you win. Have an awesome day.