Yesterday we had an all day Big Idea meeting that was the culmination of a process that resulted in getting all our Big Ideas planned for the next year! Actually we have them planned even farther than that; we are planned through August, 2008. Awesome!
Thank you to the following people for all working together to make this happen: Eric Bramlett and our arts team; Tim Sutherland and Jon Ferguson on our teaching team; Shawn Williams with Stuco; Tammy Melchien from Kids City and many of our NewThing affiliates! It was a tremendously collaborative experience!
If you want to do this yourself (and everyone really should!) read chapter 6 in The Big Idea on Creating Your Own 1 Year Big Idea Plan. That and chapter 7 will give you all the details. If you want to check out the book before you buy it, click HERE and you can download a free chapter from The Big Idea.
For those of you that are interested here are some key things we did along the way this year:
- Several brainstorming meetings led by Tim Sutherland where we invited everyone from the Community Christian Church staff. (We also had a brainstorm on this blog that was very helpful! And for those of you who participated we will be sending you the list of suggested big ideas on this blog via e-mail in the next week or so)
- We had brainstorming meetings with some of our NewThing Network Affiliate churches.
- We found out what Big Ideas and dates were really important to Kids City at CCC.
- We found out what Big Ideas and dates were really important to Student Community at CCC.
- We found out what Big Ideas and dates were really important to our NewThing Affiliates.
Once we had all the brainstorming possibilities, the essential Big Ideas and key dates for the coming year we were ready to meet. Here is what we did at the meeting today:
- We began our meeting with a prayer (that God answered!).
- We reviewed the key dates we needed to keep in mind from each group represented.
- We broke up into groups of four and listed Big Ideas and topics that we like best.
- Each group presented (lobbied!) the Big Ideas that they liked best to the large group. They displayed these on giant post-it notes.
- We gave each participant 9 stickers and told them they could express their preference by putting a sticker next to the Big Ideas they liked best. It wasn't a vote because we didn't go with all the Big Ideas that got the most votes. It gave us an idea of which Big Ideas had the most potential.
- For the remainder of the time we worked through putting Big Idea series and topics onto a year long calendar.
It is a pretty intense meeting...but soooo worth it! I love the Big Idea process.
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