By Tommy Kyllonen

Many pastors haven’t yet planned next weekend’s sermons, much less those for next month. Many say they do this because they want to be led by the Spirit from week to week. In my early years of ministry, I operated like this myself. Often it’s not really being led by the Spirit, it’s more like being led by lack of organization and planning. Although God still uses us when we do this, he can take our messages to a whole new level if we strive to plan more relevant messages.

We’ve begun doing this at Crossover Church lately, and we’ve been developing much stronger sermon series. Last year, we had a creative planning meeting with some of our key staff members and lay leaders. We got together, prayed, and asked God to guide us as we planned message series for the rest of the year. Our team looked at some of the biggest issues our congregation and community were dealing with. Most of those issues were pretty similar.

Our church focuses on reaching the hip-hop community of Tampa, Fla. We don’t just want to preach at people. We want to truly teach them how to live Christian lives and apply the Bible to their everyday situations. Our team also looked at current cultural trends that were happening around us – what people were talking about.  We looked at how we could tie those trends in with a biblically based series that got people’s attention.

Just because they are interested in a subject doesn’t mean your church’s attendees will stay interested while they sit in your church service. The Gospel isn’t boring, but many times the way we present it can be. The Church doesn’t understand that people learn differently now than they did in the past. People have shorter attention spans, and they learn more visually today.

This is why we must be creative when we plan a message in order to maximize its impact. Although I’m a creative person who can come up with good illustrations, skit ideas, movie clips, I have a whole team of creative people around me who also have that ability. When you have five people planning instead of one, incredible messages can be developed.

Planning months in advance is a key when you want to add creative elements like an original short film, a drama, or a special song. I can’t ask people on Friday night to be a part of one of these elements. It’s too late! But when we plan ahead, we can organize these elements and get others involved. We also can be looking for real life illustrations throughout our typical routines. There have been several times when I’ve had an experience or read something tied into a message series I was preparing several months later. That meant I was doing research all along.

Where can you start? First of all, take a look at your audience and your local community (the ones you want in your audience). Find out what they are struggling with and what will grab their attention. Last year, when our creative planning team prayed and practically looked at what was going on in the lives of people around us, we found a couple of critical and popular issues that the Bible spoke volumes about.

For example, our post-modern culture has developed a very universalistic spirituality.  It’s become widely accepted that whatever belief system works for you is truth. That’s why we started out last year with a foundational series discussing the proof that the Bible is historically accurate and that Christ’s life was real and documented. This series opened up a lot of eyes, even for people who had been Christians their whole lives. In March, we launched our second Sunday morning service and started our series on The Passion of Christ at the same time. Everyone was talking about it, so it was an incredible outreach tool to invite people to church. It climaxed on Easter Sunday, where we saw many people build new relationships with Christ. 

  
Early this year we constantly heard people tell us they were tired and stressed out. They never seemed to have enough time. Our next series – From Burned Out to Balanced – addressed this epidemic. This series helped a lot of people to focus their lives and realize what really matters.

As spirituality in hip-hop has grown in the past few years, we also decided to put together a series addressing this and confronting the facts. God had just the right timing when we launched, The Spirituality in Hip-Hop series in July. Several spiritual songs were being played heavily by mainstream radio stations. More than 60 people made brand new commitments to Christ that month. It helped further clarify our vision at Crossover to continue to impact this culture that is blinded in so many ways.

Also, many Americans continually live paycheck to paycheck. We’ve seen so many marriages and lives destroyed by the mismanagement of finances. Last August, to deal with that important issue we put together a series entitled Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? No, it really didn’t focus on how to get rich. But we did use the popular game show in our service. Actually, we had our own Crossover version every Sunday morning. We called people out of the audience and asked them financial questions. We even had the real game show music mixed in with a hip-hop beat and a DJ scratching. We had a great time as we empowered our people and taught them biblical principles on how to be good stewards of what they do have. We could see people being blessed from what the Bible says about finances. Many people created a budget for the first time, learned about home ownership, credit, investments, and much more.
  
The results have been incredible since we’ve taken an aggressive approach to teaching people how to apply the Scripture to their daily lives. As we advertise what is ahead, people are excited as they anticipate upcoming messages. Crossover always makes full color glossy flyers to promote the series, and our members use them as a tool to invite their unchurched friends. We purposely use wording that is understandable and intriguing to people who don’t attend church. The flyers always include each week’s topic, what to expect, our phone number, our Web site, a map, and some nice graphics.

Message series can build momentum if you set up each week’s message to flow into the next and reach a final climax. Several of our message series have had an original short film or a drama that continues each week.

Our services and series are fun, but they always end with a serious challenge. Some will say, “Well, we are here to minister, not to entertain.” The actual definition of entertain is “to hold one’s attention for an extended period of time.” When I’m sharing about the life changing message of Christ, I definitely want to hold people’s attention for an extended period of time. If that means I have to mix in a movie clip, a drama, a music video, a song, a testimony, or even a game show, that’s fine with me. 
  
Most churches say they want to reach the lost, but they don’t really want to make any real changes to become more relevant. It’s too inconvenient for them. The bottom line is that the way we present the never-changing message of Christ must be ever-changing in our emerging culture. We can’t keep preparing messages the same way we did before. We must continue to make them more effective. We call that growth. At Crossover, we are continually pushing ourselves to be more creative, more organized, and more innovative in everything we do. God deserves our best. I encourage you to pray and plan ahead. Be real and speak about issues people are dealing with. The church needs to address the hot topics of our culture from a biblical standpoint.

Tommy Kyllonen (aka Urban D) is the lead pastor of Crossover, a Purpose Driven church reaching out to the Hip-Hop culture in Tampa, Florida.  Crossover annually holds a Hip-Hop/Urban Ministries Conference called Fla.vor Fest.  Urban D. has recorded 5 solo albums, contributes to Feed Magazine, and is the chairman and a writer for The American Bible Society's "Elementz of Life" Hip-Hop devotional series.