Next Thursday I’m heading up to Dallas-Forth Worth for a day to connect with Children’s Pastors and leaders from several large ministries. I’m really excited to partner with Greg Baird and speak, lead some conversations and learn from others on the subject of leadership within the context of leading in large churches.

The brains behind Worlds of Wow have put together a unique event at Gateway Church in Southlake, TX and I’m pretty pumped. It’s not too often when you’re in a room with other leaders who all lead at the same capacity or greater than you. I’m humbled because although I’ll be sharing the stage with Greg, I feel there’s probably much I could learn from those in the room. The thing I’ve found though is that this kind of stuff keeps you sharp. As I’ve been preparing for this event, I’ve been reminded of leadership gems I’ve gotten rusty on or simply stopped doing. Speaking and leading discussions like this sure keeps you honest… and focused.

I’m sure I’ll post more about this next week along with some information I’ve been preparing… hopefully to keep you sharp as well!

A few weeks I wrote about our upcoming Baptism Celebration. That Baptism Celebration is happening this Saturday. That’s one of the reasons you’ve not seen a lot of posts on this blog recently. Wow, I’ve been learning a LOT. Between now and next week, I hope to share a lot of what we learned. I’ve had some moments of failure as well as some moments of true excitement. I’ll share it all. However, I wanted to share a sneak peak. Here’s a video interview of one of the kids being baptized. I’ll show this just before each child is baptized on Sunday. BAM!

I’m so excited!

1. I didn’t baptize a single child
2. We baptized less kids at the all-church baptism since I’ve been at Gateway
3. I talked about 15 kids out of getting baptized yesterday

After reading my list, you might think I was crazy. Nope, it was all very intentional. You may have read me talk about our Gateway Baptisms before. It’s an incredible experience of people coming to faith and God convicting hearts and people getting baptized who were not originally planning to be baptized. This works great for teenagers and adults, but can be tricky for kids. Over the years, many kids come to get baptized. They see the commotion and want to participate. Other kids are prompted by their parents to be baptized. Regardless of how it happens, most of these kids don’t understand why they need to be baptized and my greatest pet peeve is to sit down and try to cram in a baptism counseling session in five minutes. So, we had a plan. So let me explain my list.

I didn’t baptize a single child
Probably my favorite thing about being a pastor is leading people to faith and baptizing them. It’s such a joy. However, about 3-4 years ago I had a wake-up call. I realized that the absolute best person to baptize a child is the child’s parent. My role was to walk with parents, help them lead their child to faith and celebrate as they baptize their child. That’s what happened yesterday. About 8-9 kids were baptized yesterday, almost every one was baptized by a mom or dad. Woo Hoo!

We baptized less kids at the all-church baptism since I’ve been at Gateway
Like I said, only about 8-9 kids were baptized yesterday. Normally we would have 3-4 times that many. Why so few? Well, on May 21, we are hosting our very first Baptism Celebration. It’s a family-driving baptism service just for kids. We’re treating it like Child Dedication, where family and friends gather for worship and celebrating kids being baptized. We’ll interview kids telling their story, explaining why they’ve decided to follow Christ and why they’re getting baptized. It’s going to be AWESOME. So, in our baptism class last week, we encouraged families to bypass yesterday’s baptism and make plans to join us on May 21. Most did. Woo Hoo!

I talked about 15 kids out of getting baptized yesterday
I’ve said it before. I hate last minute counseling sessions. I don’t like to rush baptism. In the past 3 years, I’ve not really had anything to point parents to. I’d encourage them to attend our next baptism class which was a month or two later with another baptism following that. That’s not very motivating. However, we have two more baptism classes scheduled in two weeks. We have the Baptism Celebration scheduled for May 21. As we described the Celebration to parents and kids who came up to be baptized yesterday, every one lit up with excitement. Every one said they’d come to the baptism class in a few weeks. Every one said they wanted to be a part of the Celebration. Woo Hoo!

Yesterday was a great day! We had some incredible baptism stories (one I’ll share tomorrow). But I’m most excited about what is to come. Expect to get an information dump as we plan and pull off this Celebration service.

What about for you? When does your attendance really pick up? Do you do anything different or special during this season that causes the heavy attendance? When attendance is high, is there anything you do differently in response  in order to handle the larger crowds or to manage follow up?

Well, I did want to invite anyone out there to join Gateway for any of our Christmas Eve services. Perhaps your church doesn’t have a Christmas Eve service or your Christmas Eve services are only on the actual Christmas Eve. We are live streaming two services tonight and three services tomorrow.

Thursday:
5:30 & 7:30 CST

Friday:
2:00, 4:00 & 6:00 CST

So, plug the computer into your TV or something like that and enjoy Imagine Christmas. Go to www.gatewaychurch.com/live to view the show!

So, here’s a little bit of what we’ve been doing over the years.

• We require a Prep for Child Dedication class.
• We place parents at tables with a prayer leader (the person who will pray with them the day of the dedication service).
• After the class, parents actually register their kids for the dedication.
• At the dedication, we lead the families in two worship songs, a slideshow, a short message about dedication and the role of parents followed by 3-4 rotations of dedication prayer.
• Families come up to meet their prayer leader who will lead a 5-10 minute prayer time with the family. They share the meaning of their child’s name as well as a scripture passage that ties into their name meaning.
• When parents leave, they pick up a child dedication certificate as well as a book (currently Revolutionary Parenting).
• Families also have their pictures taken as they leave which they can download or order prints.

For more details on any of the above points, just read through my past Child Dedication posts as I talk about each thoroughly.

One thing you should know about me though. I’m currently refining and every class and dedication is slightly different as I try to make improvements. Here is what is in the works.

• A parent workbook for families to work though in preparation of their dedication. My hope is that this will be ready for our next dedication in June, but we’ll see. There are a lot of things in process that might affect the content of this book.
• I’d like to refine the “program” for at home or single family child dedications. I don’t do many of these, but at times they become necessary and I don’t really have a specific process or set program. I’d like to develop this so it’s more or less “in the can.” This way these families can experience a quality and personal service.
• I forgot to add a line on the dedication registration where parents phonetically spell out their children’s names. The past two dedications I’ve had one of my staff personally get the pronunciation as they checked in.
• I personally need to revamp my talk both for the dedication class and service. Currently my team is developing “common language” for our NextGen ministry and I feel it will be very important to incorporate this in our class. In addition, I don’t feel that there is enough humor in either the class or service. When speaking to adults, I tend to be more serious than I need to be and I think things will flow better if things were a little lighter.

So, that’s what we’re doing. Again, feel free to read up on the developmental process we have been on for the past 2 years here. Since this stuff is fresh right now, I’ll be blogging this week on some of the nuts and bolts of what we do.

However, I did want to reflect on what went well and what didn’t.

First of all, let me tell you what we did. We had about 215 people attend Illuminate. About 65 of them were my volunteers and 150 of them from other churches. Craig Jutila delivered two keynote talks and Michael Chanley, Sam Luce and Jonathan Cliff each led two breakouts. I charged other churches $25 per person to attend. Each conference participant got a conference notebook (padfolio) which included conference cards (information about the conference, Gateway Church, the speakers as well as promotional items from our sponsors) and a shiny new illuminateconference.tv pen. Woo hoo! Lunch was provided by Chipotle. We started at 9:00 AM and finished just a little after 3:15 PM. All Gateway volunteers came for fee and if they needed it, we provided childcare  for their kids. The idea behind all of this was to provide a phenomenal conference experience for our volunteers at little to no cost by allowing other churches to participate in this very affordable event.

The cons:

• The food was a little messy and confusing – We didn’t think through this fully. We’ll probably use Chipotle again, but we’ll just think though the chips, sides and plates and napkins a little more thoroughly. I’ll also bring on a volunteer person who totally owns food so it’s not something someone else has to juggle along with everything else.
• Some of the breakouts need to be better clarified – No doubt about it, I had top notch breakout speakers and I got overwhelmingly positive feedback for all of them. However, one or two sessions probably could have been better defined so it was more clear what people were attending. Also, my second breakout was supposed to be a Q & A driven session and I think the experience varied. I’m not sure if it was because some people expected something different than what we delivered or what. We’ll fix this next year in working out the bugs and also having the content, titles and speakers well developed long before the actual conference.
• Registration was a little confusing for some – We used our web registration through Fellowship One to register churches. Once a church registered, they had to fill out a second form where they put the names of the people they paid for as well as their breakout and food choices. I honestly don’t think that it was all that confusing, but because things were on such a short time-frame, people got a little confused.
• The stage programing was not as well rehearsed as I would have liked – This was the result of the rushed nature of Illuminate. At 2:00 AM the day of Illuminate, we were just finishing the ProPresenter slides and at 6:00 AM, my team and I were rehearsing introductions and transitions… all things I wanted to do the week before. As a result, we did what we could in the time we had to plan and all of us were just plain tired.

The pros

• Significant response from the community and beyond – Although we really only began promoting Illuminate three weeks before the conference began, we still managed to register 150 people from outside Gateway. We had multiple churches say that they would have brought dozens if they had only had a little more time. Probably one third to one half of the attendees came from over an hour away. This tells me that there is a true need for an event like this and Illuminate met that need.
• Illuminate was highly organized – I’m really proud of this one. From the notebooks to food and lanyards to quick check-in processes, people told us over and over again that things seemed well organized. We had very few questions like “where am I supposed to go?” or “How do I find this breakout?” because everything was clearly communicated either from the stage, from their breakouts or in printed form in their notebooks.
• Content was amazing – This is easy when you have the likes of Luce, Cliff, Jutila and Chanley on the speaking roster. I had many volunteers say that they totally were not expecting Illuminate to be what it was. I’m so glad we’re changing their expectations. I had one volunteers confess later that she was planning to leave after lunch, but was getting so much out of the event that she didn’t want to miss anything.
• Incredible Partnerships – I was totally blessed to have three amazing conference partners. Orange, Group Publishing and Yancy all saw the vision for what we were trying to do here through Illuminate and invested in those who attended. I’m grateful for the relationships I have with them but even more grateful that they were willing to take a chance with Illuminate. Especially since so much of it was last minute dealings as well. We were specific in who we asked to partner with us and I heard from more than one attendee that they were glad to learn about products and programs offered by the sponsors.

So, Illuminate was a success. I’m so proud of what my team pulled off. The biggest lesson we all learned though is that time is of the essence. We have already booked November 12, 2011 as the next Illuminate Conference in Austin, TX. Jim Wideman is the keynote speaker and I have verbal commitments from several breakout speakers that are going to knock it out of the park. Having all of this planned out months and months in advance will help us tremendously!

Here are some pics of the Conference Notebooks and materials included.

It was a great conference. Over and over and over again, people communicated to me that they were grateful for an opportunity like this. Many times people said that they totally didn’t expect what they got. They were blown away.

I’m satisfied because this is what we set out to do. We wanted to provide a “National Conference” experience that was local and affordable and this is what we did.

I’m thankful because my team did a great job pulling it off. It was a slim team, slimmer than I would have preferred. There was a small group of us that did a huge amount of work, but I’m grateful for everyone that helped. I actually had a few new volunteer that simply knocked it out of the park by totally owning some pretty significant stuff. All I can say is Woo Hoo!

So, I’ll post about Illuminate this week. I’ll  share what went well and what didn’t. I’ll share about what we did as well as future plans for Illuminate. Thanks to all of your who prayed for me and my team this week, it was much appreciated!

So, I’ve been talking about the Illuminate my team and I are hosting at Gateway Church here in Austin, Texas. We’re only 5 days away and today is the very last day to register. I can’t tell you how excited I am. It didn’t help that a lot of things didn’t come together until late for the conference this year, but I’ve felt a wide variety of emotions putting this all together. I’ve been excited about the dream, worried that we didn’t get the word out fast enough, nervous that we were going to lose a lot of money and a little apprehensive that we’re not forgetting something really important. Ha!

Well, right now I’m totally stoked. I’m a goal setter and I get stoked when we hit goals. Three months ago I set a goal for what I’d like to see attend Illuminate (both with my volunteers and visiting churches). When we got held up and didn’t start promoting until a month ago, I readjusted my goals in order to be realistic. As of right now, I’m about 2 registrations over my Gateway volunteer registration goal and about 2 registrations short of my visiting churches registration goals… and I know there are more coming in.

So, if you haven’t registered yet, it’s not too late. Registration is open until midnight CST! So, if you’re in the area, be sure to sign your team up for Illuminate!

Enjoy the video!