So last night I saw the Bourne Ultimatum. It was a great movie. What was even better about the screening was that the director Paul Greengrass was there for Q&A afterwards. The moderator asked all the "fan" questions and Paul would answer them but kind of directed the conversation elsewhere. You could tell that he was there more to speak to the screeners and have kind of a heart to heart with us. As the "real" questions started to come in, Paul would share more and more of his take on film making and even life. One thing he started to talk about was the Franchise Film. He was explaining the difficulties and paradigms. And while he was explaining it, i thought about how it's the same in church. Paul was saying in a franchise film people want to experience the same thing as the 1st movie, but different!!! And i started to think about church. People are coming week after week to experience or learn about God in some way. And it's our job to give them that experience (and hopefully a new one) each week. So what's difficulty? I think it's that people want to be moved like the very 1st time they gave their life to Christ. But if we recreate that experience every Sunday it might lose its specialness. However, if we try to do some over the top abstract things, people might not get it and feel like we're just about a show. This is probably the biggest struggle for us as a CAM team. We want to add these elements to create a response/reaction, yet we don't want to manipulate the people. This is a topic that we could all probably talk about alot. Really i wanted to pitch the idea of a "franchise church service". And i'm not thinking of this monetarily. What i mean is, how do we give people the same experience that they had in one service, but make it different the next week!!! I want to encourage all of the ministries to reflect on this idea!
