Jesus Hates Papyrus » sermon branding

Sermon branding tip: Literal is boring.

Michael Buckingham — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 14:46:15 +0000

The mind wants to be surprised, it attaches itself to things that create interest.

For example, if you’re working on a sermon about Abraham and Isaac’s journey up the mountain…don’t use imagery of a mountain. That’s expected. And expected = boring.

Practicing what we preach : using pop culture

Michael Buckingham — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 18:11:38 +0000

Looks like it’s superhero day.
If you’ve followed this blog or chatted with me at all, you know I’m not a fan of simply ripping off the latest TV show and calling that creative church. You also should know that I’m all about being inspired by pop culture and the creative inputs we run into all the time. Since I don’t believe it’s effective (or clever) to simply grab (24, iPod, Desperate Housewives) and turn it into a sermon brand I typically steer away from diving head first into pop culture as a sermon idea.

But when one of the churches we work with was coming up with a series on Samson and wanted to really show his amazing strength (1000 men with a jawbone) we ended up with a great brand inspired by “The Hulk”.

When we first went down this path, I was cautious. But through working with our designer to continually focus on what we were trying to communicate and understanding our inspiration…the results is a great example of taking inspiration and not stealing an idea.

When bringing pop culture into your marketing, please do it carefully and with originality. It is not the easiest path, but doing so will give you something great.

Sermon series highlight: Grow Up Great

Michael Buckingham — Mon, 28 Jan 2008 15:52:14 +0000

This sermon series, for Sam Rijfkogel at Grand Rapids First, is all about pressing towards greatness. The series was also attached to their Vision Sunday, Martin Luther King day and Sanctity of Life day – A tall order.

We quickly threw out the idea of anything to do with plant growth…sometimes it works, but it tends to be overused and we wanted something that said more. The series is about more than just growth, it’s about having a big vision, pressing towards being bigger than we are. One of our initial concepts include a measuring stick, you know the kind that you use as a kid to measure growth? This was good, but we just needed to push it further. Some of the other concepts included another growth chart, we even tried something off the wall with penguins…we then worked with the concept of climbing a ladder.

That led us to the idea of a kid trying to reach for something by climbing up on something and we developed the concept shown at the top of the post. This shows growth, told the story of wanting to be bigger than ourselves and could also tie in nicely with Sanctity of Life and Martin Luther King. Victory!

Sometimes the idea comes right away, other times, like this, take more time and require digging into the message and getting to the core of it. The most obvious solution is rarely the best solution, it takes a bunch of ideas to collide to produce a strong brand that can carry the message.