Guest Post: Matt Knisely

You can follow Matt at www.twitter.com/mattknisely

There are two times a year where we at Lawton First take it to a whole nutha level, to steal a phrase from Ed Young, Easter is one of those times.  Over the last few years, I have been asked about how we plan and how our creative process happens.  Its hard to quantify our creative planning and structure it into a blog post, but for all our series planning everything hinges on two key areas consisting of  “the creative planning/process” and “the experience.”

For us creative planning process consists of four stages we call, “the 4D’s”: Dream, Design, Develop, and Do.   For this instance Easter starts for us in early December with weekly one-hour dream sessions, where the creative team brainstorms ideas off key points from our teaching pastors.  This year after 13 series titles and roughly 12 hours of meetings we settled on the series name “OVERCOME.”  The series keys off of hurts and pains our people are experiencing and how they’ve overcame them through Christ.  By the end of January, we started the design phase where we outline key service elements from music to media and go as far as what an individual will experience as soon as they enter out building.  This stage also includes set design, many different graphical layouts and illustrations.  Just for Easter alone we have two highly detailed click tracks choreographed to dramatic video elements which took a month to create in addition to support media for our architectural projection which we have been working on for the last month and a half.  The fun for us begins in our development stage which we just finished and where we try to poke holes into our designs, artwork, set layout, programing and music.  The development stage is not for the faint of heart and usually a step most creative teams skip.

In the experience area of our planning we make sure that all elements from design, media, music, illustration, to message meet four key criteria: Diversity, Energy, Flow, and Connection.  These are unique to our house and because we are not only cross denominational and ethnic we need to be diverse on all fronts.  We know that energy of our worship and message need to be in unison or our people will disengage.  Which really makes the flow of our services really count.  We work really hard to make sure there is no dead space, because nothing kills an experience more than start stops.

No matter if you are a musician, technical operator, or production we strive to rehearse at-least one-hour for each minute of service; that may seem like a lot but we believe in excellence.  Finally our core value is being a relational body and connecting with one another and to god, so we work really hard to bring a laid back and welcoming feel to everything we do.

Once we have done all of that all we need to do is execute and do what we set out to do.