ICC 2006 Session 4: Mark Waltz & Butch Whitmire

Mark Waltz and Butch Whitmire talked about how we design a weekend service–and experience or environment–at Granger to help people feel safe enough to take steps toward Christ. Mark explained that our arts experience is very intentional to help people focus on one main theme in every service.

Butch then walked through the service planning process. It begins with the senior management team selecting a theme and message topics. Then that team develops the "big idea" of each message. After that’s decided, the speaking pastor develops the big idea through the message and the creative arts team develops the big idea through the arts programming. The arts teams develops live music, live drama, video, transitions and ambiance to supplement the spoken message. This is the palette our team uses. We don’t add anything to the palette we can’t do well. (Butch highlighted several forms/charts he uses in the arts planning process. They’re available on WiredChurches.com.)

With that intro, Mark and Butch showed a number of examples of arts elements that we’ve done at Granger over the last 12 months. Many of those elements are available on the brand new "media player" at GCCwired.com. (I’ll tell you more about that later.)