As a lighting designer, one of my favorite websites to visit from time to time is www.churchstagedesignideas.com.  It’s kind of an idea pool of stage design ideas that can be used as a spring board to get your creative juices flowing.  I was recently able to post some of our own work on the site from my home church and in response to this a colleague mentioned that he wished more churches would be inspired to do stuff like this.  It got me to thinking, what’s stopping them?  Is it time? is it money? Is it inspiration? Is it community?  Community…why would that make a difference.

The reality is that God has made us in his image and He himself is a creative being!  Our American culture is intensely visual so why wouldn’t the church naturally create and reach out in this way to the world around us.  I find that it’s difficult even for me, even as a professional, to put something out there that’s creative in nature.  Is it distracting? Is it too bright or too dim?  Does it support the message?  Will people get it?

A group of us got together as a “creative team” for this project and it turned out to be one of the most rewarding processes I’ve been through.  Our pastor had laid out a vision for a church wide focus on moving deeper into relationship with the body of Christ. We came up with the idea to contrast the focus of the series with the recent popularity of social networking. We put together giant i-Phone looking set pieces as a backdrop and used some of the catch phrases such as Profile, Groups, Status, etc to present the theme for each week.  As a small group we were more empowered to brainstorm ideas and hammer things out to a result that really had some impact.

It doesn’t need to take a lot of money or time.  You don’t have to be super creative (you can steal the ideas right off the website if you want) but in a “creative team” you can draw on the strengths of one another and use the small portion of the body of Christ you have assembled as a think tank to bounce ideas off of one another and come to something awesome that one individual could never have done on his or her own.

Most people don’t know that Google offers a FREE directory listing service called Google Local Business Center.  I was recently updating our FREE listing and realized that churches could benefit from this service as well.

Google Local Business Center is an online director of local organizations in any given city.  If you do a simple Google search for a service and add the city/state to your search you’ll get a list of local “business” results that matches your search.

It’s really easy to add your church to the Google service an it’s absolutely free.  Every church should register with this service.

Here are some reasons why your church should create a listing:

• It’s FREE.
• Get better search results placement and search authority for your website.
• People who don’t know about your church that are searching for a church in your city will probably see your Google listing before they see your website.
• Google provides some basic stats about how many people have viewed your listing and how many clicked on it for more info.