Preaching the Big Idea: An Interview with Dave Ferguson...Continued from page 6

I know this guy, I got to baptize two weeks ago, I know his story -- he just came out of rehab, and he had overcome a cocaine addiction. He had a wife, a family, a great job, but he was on the verge of just screwing up the whole thing, just trashing the whole thing. What happened in the life of CCC and the Big Idea through the Holy Spirit helped made that possible for him to be like, “OK, now he has a chance again.” He has become a Christ follower. Those stories are what make it fun for me.

Challenges – I don’t like being by myself. I am more of an extrovert; I don’t like having to go off all by myself to study for long periods of time. When I am with other people I find it much more engaging. So, it will be interesting for other people to account for this process – is it more about the personality of our church or is there something to this kind of worship for everybody?

I would challenge preachers to trust and risk. Number one, in regards to your celebration service, you need to risk more with your arts people. I think that will so complement what you are trying to accomplish. In order to really have artists engaged and involve artists in what you are trying to do, real artists have to be allowed to take risks. Art by its nature is risk. I think as the preaching pastor, senior pastor, you need to empower your artists to let them take more risks.

The other challenge is trust. Trust a team of people to come up with what you are trying to do by yourself. If you will trust them, my experience has been you will actually get a better message for people and accomplish things more missionally.

Preaching: How involved are your arts people in the planning of the message itself, or are they purely involved in the other parts of the service?

Ferguson: We plan our Big Ideas a year in advance. That meeting is primarily driven by the teaching team, but we have our arts people in there and also adults, student and kids leaders in that meeting, so they have input from the very beginning. After we finish the Big Ideas, before we actually go to work on the manuscript, we develop what we call graphs -- about a half-page paragraph of where the Big Idea is going -- and those are given to the arts team. The arts team takes those and actually form everything else that is going to happen in the service before we ever write our message. So they know where we are headed based on that half page graph, but they have tremendous input that way.

They will also make suggestions like: have you thought about this clip, this as a prop, do you think about these kinds of things that will also complement what we are doing? There is a give and take about that. They are involved a great deal.

Preaching: Do the members of your church know that this process goes on?

Ferguson: I think so. I think for some it is a selling point for they will tell their friends, “You should see what we do. Not only do we get the same things, but our kids get the same thing in their classroom,” and they really enjoy this. I am not sure that is so much an added benefit, because we are really trying to reach the unchurched, non-Christian people. I don’t know if that is an added benefit for reaching that population. For invitations -- when people are inviting friends, for people who are looking for a new church home or relocating -- that becomes an added benefit for them.

I do think as far as spiritual formation it is a great benefit for people that don’t have any church background. If it an intact family, mom and dad show up and hear the teaching and go home and junior has already heard about this. They feel empowered that they have a heard a half hour and had a whole experience in this, and now they can engage in conversation with their child about it.