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Archive for the Big Day Category

BIG DAY – Don’t Be a Cheapskate (Use Your Conference To GIVE To Others)

One of the many benefits of attending the Spiritual Leadership Conference in Lancaster, CA, is receiving the gifts that are given to each delegate. I always wonder how their budget balances at the end of each conference, and I am sure that the church gives much of the gifts that are not covered by the registration fees. I am always impressed by the culture of giving. I want the same for the Preaching Rally, and it is not as hard as one might think. For our case, the Preaching Rally budget is basically self-sustaining. We charge $5 per person (including

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BIG DAY – Make ’em Laugh – Choosing and Performing Hilarious Skits [Including FULL Scripts!]

Being funny is serious business! Part of what drives home our theme each year is our custom-written skits. My brother-in-law, Jared Burkholder, is our resident funny man, and therefore our skit chief. Each year when the Guidance Document is finished, three people receive it: the guest preacher, the decorations chief, and the skit chief. Bro. Jared sits on the theme a couple weeks and creates a funny scenario that could fit all three skits. For our “Pure Love” theme, he created the character Willomena (played by my bearded brother in a blonde wig)–the woo-less woo-ee–who sought in vain for “Mr.

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BIG DAY – What Type of Music Is Meaningful: Silly Or Serious?

I am a C-hicken I am a C-hicken. I am a C-hicken H-icken. I am a C-hicken H-icken R-icken – I – S-icken T-icken – I – A – N-icken. Weird. I know. Blame the Indiana churches where my wife grew up. They sing weird, non-spiritual songs like, “I Am a C” with a twist. And we have transported the crazy songs to the west coast. One tradition we have at our Preaching Rally is to test our guests’ ability to sing “I Am a C” by singing the vowels normally, but adding “icken” to the end of each consonant.

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BIG DAY – Treat Guests Like Guests. Be Kind. Be Friendly. Be Welcoming. Be Nice. Be Helpful. Be Glad the Guests Are Here.

You walk into a room, and in the corner is a crowd of teens stealing looks at you and talking in hushed tones. Three of four of them look your way and break out laughing, trying to hold back, but not trying very hard. Awkward. The banner of Christianity is to love God and love others, yet our tendency is to love ourselves and not care about others. It is not that we hate other people, we just have a hard time actively loving them. In a church setting, or when you are hosting an event like the Preaching Rally,

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BIG DAY – A Hungry Teen Is An Angry Teen

When I worked in Stillwater, planning the Men’s Advance meals was like planning for a World War II battle. We had charts and graphs, purchase lists and runner routes, restockers and servers galore. It seemed like every man in our church was enlisted on the food team. And it worked. It worked well. It worked efficiently. The guests ate hot, good food. And it was fast. Really fast. Have you ever tried to herd 1,700 men? Even if there’s food at the other end, it still takes a lot of time to move that many people anywhere! One of the

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BIG DAY – What First Impressions Are You Making?

Temecula, California is a beautiful place to live, but all that beauty comes at a cost: city ordinances. Any new construction requires all sorts of red tape. Our five acre strip of land was a possible habitat for the kangaroo rat. An environmental study and a few thousand dollars later, we were approved to build on our land. Ordinances. California is known for its earthquakes, so sheer panels are required almost everywhere. Around doorways, the nails are supposed to be one to two inches apart. By the time the nails are in, there’s no more wood left! Ordinances. Other ordinances

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BIG DAY – Transport Your Church To New Locations

Oh man. The church is a dump, literally. And it is the morning of the Preaching Rally. In just a couple hours, hundreds of guests would be here. There’s trash scattered everywhere outside. Apparently, someone had come the night before and destroyed the place, dumping trash bags, flinging papers, flooding the front yard with the church’s hose and spraying graffiti everywhere. It was a mess. When my mom arrived at church, she seemed unconcerned. As the family freak-outer, she was uncharacteristically calm. She got right to work. She grabbed a black trash bag, picking it up with both hands. She

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BIG DAY – Even With Today’s Tech, This Old Fashioned Method Still Works Best (for us, at least)

While the website is helpful, it is not our primary communication tool. Our mailings are our biggest outreach tool. Our guests refer to the mailings more than the emails or Preaching Rally website. I am no social media guru. In fact, I have a barely-running Twitter account that I still do not know how to use well, and I am active on exactly zero other social media sites. But I am smart enough to realize that my way is not the best way to promote an event. People live on social media, and I know I should go to where

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BIG DAY – Registration: Projecting Numbers and Collecting Data

Things I Hate I should not hate things, but I do. I am weird–I keep an Evernote list. I hate lots of random things: over-baked chocolate chip cookies, showers running out of hot water, wet towels, and filling out forms over and over again. I go to doctor’s offices, dentists, and sometimes different divisions within the same company and have to fill out the same information over and over. I think, “Come on… Don’t you have this information already? Why do I have to fill this dumb form out again?!” I am a terrible person, I know. I should be

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BIG DAY – Get Your Info Online. Some Tips About What We Put On Our Event Website (And How To Set One Up)

WHY We Have a Website You do not HAVE to have a website for your event, but it IS a nice feature. Here are a few reasons why we chose to create a website for our Preaching Rally: It’s not much work. Really, it’s not a whole lot of work to set up. It takes a lot less effort than one might think. You can quickly build it yourself (below, I show you how to do it in about 20 minutes), or you can hire out the work. There are paid and free options for website hosting, but to get

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