Photo courtesy of Church of the Highlands. Design credit: Brian Worster.
Rick Warren, the former senior pastor of megachurch Saddleback Church, was well known in pastoral leadership circles for making his sermons and teaching materials available to other pastors who needed ideas, guidance, and inspiration. He’s credited with telling at least one other pastor, “If my bullet fits your gun, then shoot it!” Meaning: if one of my ideas works for you, then adapt it, make it your own, and use it.
“It’s easy to get caught up in how out-of-reach it is what some large churches or theaters do for their Christmas productions. We’ve made effective use of scaling what others do to fit our available budget, staff, and production infrastructure.”
—Adam Dye, Media Director, Brentwood Baptist Church, Nashville, TN
For many churches across the country, this is the time of year when Creative, Worship, and Production teams are looking for new sources of inspiration, hoping they can find a great idea to create a memorable and dynamic Christmas experience. They may have an idea of the target they’re aiming for, but it’s just a question of finding the right tools and resources to hit that target.
The good news is that inspiration can come from just about anywhere.
Traditionally, when planning a big show or experience, it’s natural to look to other shows for creative guidance. Concert tours and Broadway shows are easy sources of ideas for churches looking for ways to do big lighting, staging/scenic, or LED wall displays.
Mike Austin, the production director at Michigan’s 242 Community Church, also noted that EDM music festivals can also be a source of inspiration for lighting and visual effects.
For Pensacola, Florida’s Olive Baptist Church (OBC), some visual influence for this year’s Christmas services was inspired in part by shows Celine Dion used to do in Las Vegas. However, as OBC’s Director of Media Production Allen Hendrix shared, made-for-TV performances can offer just as much inspiration.
“Adele’s ‘One Night Only’ special on CBS was one of the most beautiful programs ever, and Bruce Springsteen’s ‘Western Stars’ video special on HBO Max was the inspiration for the last off-site video special I produced,” Hendrix says.
Central Florida’s Bayside Church was impacted by a Jennifer Lopez performance on American Idol several years ago where the singer wore a full, flowy white dress that became a canvas for projected images during her song. For a non-Christmas event, the church was able to replicate that expression by creating custom video to project onto the dress and help tell the song’s story.
The current plan [at one Houston-area church] is to carve large blocks of Styrofoam into icebergs that will be a main focus of this year’s stage design. Large fans will also be used to strategically introduce gusts of wind into the room as part of the show and add another sensory element to the experience.
While musical television is an easy starting point for creative ideas, nearly anything on TV can provide a trigger of some sort, whether it’s a documentary, a commercial, or even a popular kids’ cartoon show.
“We always start with the direction that our lead pastor is going in narratively,” says, who helps lead the creative process for Christmas Eve services at Southern California’s One&All Church. “From there, we develop a brand that informs the looks and feel of all things related to our Christmas season. Once we have this approved, we go into planning our Christmas Eve services. This year has been inspired by a couple different things,” Vines continues. “First is the feeling of wonder. We knew that we wanted to convey a sort of awestruck response to Christmas in hopes of inspiring others to find the magic of Christmas again. Our series is all about how kids do this naturally and how they are the key to rediscovering that sense of wonder,” he adds.
So, to best explore this child-like angle, the team there turned to Bluey, the immensely popular kids show available on Disney platforms, and drew from themes and ideas presented on a couple of key episodes.
And that’s not the only Disney property that helps church teams’ creative juices start flowing. Miami’s Christ Fellowship Church modified what they had seen in Disney’s Candlelight Processional at Disney World to adapt it better for their setting. In the show at the theme park, a celebrity narrator tells the Christmas story, interspersed with live musical performances and visual displays. For the church setting, it was similar, mixing songs and scripture that told the story of Jesus’ birth.
As obvious as it is to draw creative inspiration for Christmas from, well, another Christmas experience, what about things that have nothing inherent whatsoever to do with Christmas, like random, inanimate objects? For Birmingham, Alabama-based Church of the Highlands, inspiration one year came from Pinterest boards of retail merchandise. Pictures of stark, three-legged tables and pyramid-shaped jewelry cases led to ideas of how to create unique Christmas tree elements as part of a new stage design.
OBC’s Hendrix also loves scrolling through retailers’ Pinterest pages, noting how outlets like Target, West Elm, and Anthropologie, all present great ideas for décor and displays. Sometimes, even a stroll through a local mall or a Pottery Barn to browse their displays and interior design can spark ideas for lobby décor or other displays on campus.
A Christmas experience for a church doesn’t have to be contained to just a main auditorium, or even just to the indoor lobby space. Creating a full “experience” can extend across the church property through the parking lot or even to other venues to help create an immersive environment. Cathedral of Faith is a large, multi-ethnic ministry based in the Bay Area of the California coast. At their main campus in San Jose, they have an outdoor amphitheater that can host a variety of events during the year. For the upcoming Christmas season, the venue will be used during services to provide arts and crafts and to give away hot chocolate to guests. The space will be uniquely designed and laid out as a European marketplace, full of wooden pallets and booths, drawing on the inspiration provided from two staff pastors who are from Europe. From there, the holiday theme will continue into the main church lobby where traditional décor and special Christmas musical performances welcome and entertain attendees until they’re able to enter the main auditorium.
Not every church has the luxury of a reasonable outdoor climate to play with as it explores ideas during the holiday season, but this is just one example of how the natural climate in a church’s region can open up additional possibilities for services. But the weather itself can also prove to be a source of ideas as well.
Portman Lights makes a retro fixture that has seven lamps that are arranged in a way to look similar to a snowflake. One Oklahoma church plans to use these fixtures as a way to help “bring the weather inside” and add to the wintry feeling of the experience.
A Houston-area church is exploring a similar thought process. In a region known so much for heat and humidity, the team hopes to use the auditorium to help attendees feel like it’s winter, regardless of what’s happening outside. The current plan is to carve large blocks of Styrofoam into icebergs that will be a main focus of this year’s stage design. Large fans will also be used to strategically introduce gusts of wind into the room as part of the show and add another sensory element to the experience.
While this reinforces the idea that creative ideas can come from just about anywhere, sometimes limitations of staff and resources make it harder to devote time and energy into pursuing and implementing new options. At that point, the easiest path is to sometimes just find what other churches have done in the past and pull from that as needed.
242 Community Church’s Austin notes that is what his team has done with the current stage design, which will stay for Christmas and beyond. Following a trend utilized by Los Angeles’ Mosaic Church (and others) of having stark, all-white stage backdrops, Austin’s team assembled a new set of wooden frames covered in muslin fabric and accented by some simple LED tape.
Cathedral of Faith noticed how other churches had taken larger LED wall surfaces and broken them up across the upstage wall so that scenic elements could be added in the gaps. Pastor Rick Robinson, the executive tech director, plans to have his team simply separate their 30-foot by 9-foot LED wall into five sections so Christmas trees can be added between them.
The important part of this approach, though, is to understand that every church is different, and while gleaning inspiration from others can be helpful, it’s critical to be able to appropriately scale those ideas to fit a church’s resources and strengths.
This is an approach that has served Adam Dye, the media director at Nashville, Tennessee’s Brentwood Baptist Church, as well. “It’s easy to get caught up in how out-of-reach it is what some large churches or theaters do for their Christmas productions,” he admits. “We’ve made effective use of scaling what others do to fit our available budget, staff, and production infrastructure.” Instead of just mimicking what others have done, he encourages churches to “play into your church’s strengths and then add whatever percentage of that you have margin to add. In our case, we’ve never had an LED wall or a good place to install set pieces, but we’ve always had an abundance of instrumentalists. So instead of a huge set and dynamic motion backgrounds on an LED wall, we lean on bolstering the size of our orchestra at Christmas and we use them as a centerpiece of the concert.”
The same story also plays out at OBC, but from a different angle. Hendrix has extensive background with LED screens and content, and the church will lean on that this year to offset limited resources in other areas. “We are using the gift sets and talents of the people we have in place,” he explains. “For instance, we don’t have a true LD for creative lighting design. And we don’t have a large inventory of moving lights. We have a couple of teenagers that program and run Sundays. But we do have a very talented video content creation team,” he adds. “So we are putting the budget money into renting LED systems and focusing our time and energy on creating video content that amplifies the message of each song.”
While all of us in ministry are surrounded with an onslaught of potentially great ideas, each organization must have a realistic view of its own strengths and weaknesses to know how concepts must be modified and adapted for that unique atmosphere.
Not every idea fits every environment, but for the ones that do, it can create an incredible experience that might even come with its own amazing origin story.
