Brad Christian grew up as a Baptist pastor’s kid in North Carolina, and from an early age was intimately involved with his father in exploring how to best use technology to reach their local communities.
Since the days of fiddling with transparencies and overhead projectors, it’s been his desire to use any available technology as a means of reaching the unchurched, and Christian’s experiences and personal philosophies mesh well with those of the leadership of Freedom House Church, a rapidly expanding ministry with three (soon-to-be four) locations in the Charlotte area, plus an online audience.
“The pastors always have had a passion for creativity,” Christian says of Pastors Troy and Penny Maxwell, who planted the church in 2002. “If you watch back over 20 years, Freedom House has done all sorts of things over the years in terms of creating really engaging experiences that really have had an impact here in Charlotte.”
“Time is the gift, and that's why we're starting the conversations in February rather than July.”
That foundation of creative expression has been consistently evident through how Freedom House has designed and executed its Christmas services over the years. Knowing it is a prime opportunity to reach unchurched members of the community, the church has not held back when it comes to trying new and different ways to create excitement and engagement.
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As part of Freedom House's Christmas program the Grinch arrived onstage to interact with the children as the narrator shared the Grinch’s well-known struggle with his perspective on Christmas, the show transitioned to the Trans-Siberian Orchestra’s “A Mad Russian’s Christmas” to exemplify how the craziness of life can keep anyone from experiencing the joy of Christ amidst the chaos they may experience.
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“Freedom House has hosted an event called ‘Merry Queen City Christmas’, where it's basically a family Christmas experience,” explains Christian, the church’s Production Director. “For many years now, they've intentionally made the Christmas Eve service super kid-friendly and putting some sort of what we call a kids element into the service on top of the normal worship and everything.”
“They had a Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer mashup when Hamilton hit Disney-Plus two years ago, which was very different element, but everybody loves Hamilton, everybody loves Rudolph, what happens if they come together?” he continues. “So different things like that, which we loved and had a great time creating. But this year we wanted to tell a consistent narrative story throughout.
Starting in the summer of 2022, the Freedom House team began planning the Christmas services for that year.
In a multi-site ministry, the question of scale often presents a large conundrum…. Does each location have access to similar budgets and staff to pull off the service at the expected level?
“We had this vision as a creative team of creating an experience that was focused around the story of Christmas as our narrative that we wanted to tell. And so we started scraping together and putting together different musical pieces that we all thought could talk about why Christmas is so powerful,” he explains.
“We wanted to talk about how the story of Christmas has such an impact. So at the start of the service, we have a narrator that ties the entire service together, and the narrator spoke about how every year in the Christmas season on different street corners, no matter where you turn, you'll hear the story of Christmas.”
The thread that connected different elements of the service together was the story that two kids that have kind of discovered a special book. “They open it up and there's a light that emits out of the book, and it's kind of like the different stories are coming to life,” Christian says.
Beginning with the Christmas classic “It’s The Most Wonderful Time of the Year”, the show uses a small orchestral ensemble on stage to drive the musical elements, which varied greatly in style and pace over the course of the show. The variety of instruments available allowed the musical teams to display great flexibility in how they performed different numbers, each designed to create different emotional responses.
After the classic opener, the Grinch arrived onstage to interact with the children. As the narrator shared the Grinch’s well-known struggle with his perspective on Christmas, the show transitioned to the Trans-Siberian Orchestra’s “A Mad Russian’s Christmas” to exemplify how the craziness of life can keep anyone from experiencing the joy of Christ amidst the chaos they may experience.
A choir and orchestral performance of Phil Wickham’s rendition of “Joy to the World” began to shift the narrative back to the spiritual foundation that a relationship with Christ brings, and Israel Houghton’s “Jesus at the Center” served as not only the musical finale, but the lead-in to the main pastoral message of the service.
While the church has always utilized varying creative expressions to make their Christmas experience feel fun and vibrant, this was their first time tying all of their different service elements together with an overarching narrative.
It was also their first time utilizing such an extensive array of production and special effects elements, which presented a bit of a challenge across three different physical campuses.
The conversation about consistency tends to revolve around how to make the satellite campus events bigger. At Freedom House, the broadcast campus is going to be the campus that will need to scale back.
In a multi-site ministry, the question of scale often presents a large conundrum for services and events. Does each location have access to similar budgets and the scale of staff, volunteers, or contractors necessary to pull off the service at the expected level? Are the facilities and stage sizes similar? Does a particular element resonate with one community as well as it would with another?
How many decisions will be made centrally so that campuses have a uniform look and feel, versus how many will be made locally to allow each location to preserve its own “flavor”? And if the idea is consistency, how will service elements be designed ahead of time to allow each location appropriate amounts of time to rehearse before opening night?
At many churches, there can be a perception that a “broadcast” campus might inherently have access to additional resources or capabilities that a “satellite” campus would not, thus setting different expectations right out of the gate.
However, Freedom House typically utilizes local teaching at each campus on a weekend, meaning that each location is inherently accustomed to a certain level of quality for locally generated content. Unfortunately, logistics prevented each campus from getting an identical experience in 2022, and as the team began debriefing those Christmas services in early 2023 and started to set plans in motion for this year’s services, that became a central part of the discussion.
“This year we realized that our non-broadcast campuses each present unique challenges,” says Christian. “From our South End campus that has giant windows to our Lake Norman Campus having a smaller platform, a ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach doesn’t apply in our context. We decided to not look at the limitations as a constraining factor, but more a creative box that we get to program inside of. This year we are creating elements that work in both of those contexts while still taking advantage of the more theatrical opportunities we have at our main campus.”
As an example, in the 2022 show, Froggy’s Fog snow machines, lasers, and Shoven Sparkular spinning cold spark machines were designed to be heavily utilized as special effects vehicles that added a fourth dimension of experience to the services at multiple locations. The church had previously made the decision to purchase the snow machines, knowing the return on investment that will be realized over time as the machines get reused each year.
But for the special effects machines that were rented. . .
“That was where especially the scale hit us is because it wasn't just four laser units that we needed with this local laser vendor we were working with, it was eight,” Christian explains. “And that literally doubles cost on things. Some of the stuff was scaled to different rooms, but that's still a lot of snow machines to deal with, a lot of lighting, programming, a lot of things. And to the point this year with our South End campus, we knew that we could not pull off lasers and cold spark machines and stuff like that at that campus because that campus has windows to the outside and you can't go full theatrical when you have daylight.”
With facilities being different and the challenge of scaling budgets and logistics, the Freedom House team started having planning conversations much earlier this year so they had more margin to draft up a specific plan for each campus that would provide a high-quality, but scalable, experience.
“That's why we're kind of evaluating what we do,” Christian says. “Do we centralize that to where all campuses can come together to create a Christmas experience? And then trying to figure out, do we want to shift Christmas even to being more like a family worship Christmas candlelight type thing for Christmas that's at each campus and separate. Can we do a Christmas production at this level at four different campuses?”
In most cases where multi-site churches weigh the discussion of localized special events versus consistent but scaled ones, the idea of consistency tends to revolve around how to make the campus events bigger to try and match the larger scale of a primary or broadcast location.
However, what if the decision needs to be made differently? What if the goal shouldn’t be to make everything big and stretch the limits of resources available at smaller locations? What if the goal should be to lock in on vision and then come up with a more streamlined approach that will be easily attainable by every location? That also eliminates the idea that a broadcast campus has a “better” experience than any other location.
“Can we do a Christmas production at this level at four different campuses?”
“The majority of churches still want the heart and culture of the church to be expressed globally to all campuses,” Christian notes. “We zoom out and focus on the big vision of our event and build around that. Since we know our creative ‘box’ to work within that allows all campuses to have the flavor and vibe. [Ultimately it means that] the broadcast campus is going to be the campus that will need to scale back.”
When it comes to multi-site Christmas services, there really is no uniform standard that all churches need to adhere to. Instead, there should be intentionality on the front end to define vision and goals for the experience and then work outward from there to clarify how those things will be expressed.
“Time is the gift, and that's why we're starting the conversations in February rather than July,” he says. That's the big shift we're making this year is because we can do it all just with time. It's kind of time, cost, and quality in that triangle we're working in, and we don't have unlimited budgets. So if we push everything to as much time possible,” there’s more margin to plan something that appropriately scales and translates to each venue.
It's all part of planning ahead for the biggest season of the year.
