Church leaders often feel pressure to develop creative programming that makes a great impression for their new audiences during the Christmas season. We’ve developed a framework for leading your team through creative planning as well as ideas you can use or adapt that help connect the Christmas story to culture today!
Have you ever been part of a creative planning meeting where you show up and either the leader lays down a formulated plan for the team to execute (not a lot of collaboration there!) or the team shows up and nobody really knows what you’re trying to accomplish?
It’s not easy to lead teams through collaborative, creative planning. Because there is rarely complete unanimity, we often want our ideas to be the ones that are chosen and, ultimately, there is a leader that has to make a call for anything to happen.
All of these dynamics make it a challenging process, but it is important to prioritize true collaboration in your creative planning because using the talents of the entire team will always generate the best ideas, garner the greatest buy-in and ensure the best outcomes - it’s worth the hard work!
So where should you start? Here are some suggestions:
This list is certainly not exhaustive, but I would suggest that these six components must be in place to get the best outcomes.
Shared mission, vision and values
Your mission, vision and values are the filter through which you make decisions. They should be the why behind everything you do.
At Fishhook, one thing we love to do is remind ourselves often about our mission, vision and values. If you were to ask any person on the team what those are, we could tell you what we’re doing, where we’re going and what we care about - maybe not verbatim, but we’ll get to the same ideas. We talk about it often, so have these things internalized.
For your team, are you talking about these regularly? How do you let these direct why you would or wouldn’t do something?
Make sure these are top-of-mind and on the tip of your tongue in any planning and creating you’re doing as a team. They are the true north of your church and should be shared and understood by your team!
Shared Context
Whenever you begin a creative collaboration of any sort, there should be shared context. If you’re doing something brand new (never been done before), then maybe the context is simply a shared understanding of the problem you’re trying to solve. For churches, Christmas planning has been going on for a long time, so that context should be around what has/hasn’t worked and why, what you’ve done in previous years, what things are non-negotiables, etc.
It would be worth spending a block of time at the beginning of your first creative meeting reviewing debriefs from the previous year or two to see where you’ve been, what has connected and what you may want to do differently. If you haven’t been debriefing, you should start doing that with everything! Here are some helpful debrief tips if you want somewhere to start.
Getting your team on the same page from the beginning of the process helps remove barriers from the jump!
Shared objectives and prompts (the agenda)
There is nothing more frustrating than being asked to be part of a creative planning meeting but not knowing what you’re trying to accomplish. Additionally, it’s really frustrating to come to a meeting with no agenda or direction to set you up for success.
Most people prefer some time to think and process individually before being asked to jump into a brainstorming session with a team, so if you’re the leader, plan ahead, set an agenda, provide clear prompts and give your team plenty of time to process individually before meeting.
Make it fun
Creative planning happens best in a fun, loose environment. If you can do this, you will always generate the best ideas. Get out of the board room with no windows and go somewhere with good lighting and comfortable seating, bring in some snacks or a meal, play some music and develop some creative activities to help your team think out of the box.
Here are some ideas to try:
Chat GPT is far from perfect, and most of the time, you have to ask follow-up questions to provide context and personalize responses, but it’s a really helpful tool to provide quick ideas and even some hard data to help you plan!
No bad ideas!
We’ve learned this since we were children, but make sure to foster space where this is experienced. Every idea has something to contribute. It comes from a person who thinks it would connect, so odds are, it will connect with somebody. Try to harvest every little piece of wisdom and creativity from every idea to help develop the ideas that end up being used.
If you’re able to develop an environment where every idea is heard and celebrated whether it’s ultimately used or not, you’ll develop more and better ideas regularly as a team!
Next steps – who is responsible for what and when is it due?
Many times, when you get into creative mode, it’s hard to know how to land the plane and take some steps. One thing we find is really helpful is we have a person assigned to taking notes in meetings who notes action items, tracks potential follow up questions and provides timelines for when things are due. Assign a person who is very organized and process driven to play this role on your team to help you stay organized and on track.
A pro-tip here is to have some things already defined before going into the meeting like when the next meeting is and have a timeline for what needs to be done and by when.
Many churches spin their wheels every year trying to come up with clever new ideas for the Christmas series. For many churches, this is simply for internal planning while others use this for their external messaging. Whatever approach you use, it is a good exercise to help you organize messaging, sermon planning, song selections, visual elements, hospitality experiences and many other things.
No matter your approach, it’s really important to keep in mind where the world and culture are to be able to present the solution of the Gospel to the lived experience of our day. What are the dynamics at play in the Christmas narrative that speak to what people are experiencing right now?
Here are some categories where you could start:
If you take anything from this, I hope you involve your team in the creative process, have fun together and be true to who you are as a church in whatever you plan. Your hard work matters and is making a difference in your community, and we’re praying for you and cheering you on!
If you want to talk more about planning well for the Christmas season, we’d love to connect!