“Alaska is a beautiful place. But the real beauty is the people,” said Creative Missions founder Cleve Persinger at the beginning of the week when the Anchorage region was hit with a late spring snow even for Alaska standards. “That’s why we’re here, to help introduce the people to the creator of all this natural beauty.”

Cleve and a crack team of 29 communications professionals hailing from places like Hagerstown, Md., Hollywood, Fla., and Portsmouth, England, did just that working alongside pastors and church leaders in and around Anchorage for the week.

Pastors like Jay Dagenhart, who moved to Wasilla last fall from Virginia to plant OnMission Church: “As a church planter out here, sometimes I feel like an island,” said Jay. “Spending time with (the creative missionaries), I feel vindicated.”

The team that worked with OnMission developed a new website, shot and edited a promo video, designed an invite card, took photos, and worked with church leaders on worship and service programming.

This astonishing amount of output for a team of five led by Kelvin Co, creative arts pastor at The Oaks Fellowship, was replicated in four other teams who collectively completed:

• 14 branding projects (logos, letterhead, business cards, etc.)
• 5 style guides (helping churches know how to be consistent in their messaging)
• 10 website designs or redesigns
• 13 tech, worship & programming projects
• 3 invitation or rave cards
• 9 signs (including indoor & outdoor)
• 8 social media strategy & execution sessions
• 6 welcome or promo videos
• 5 photo shoots (family sessions or church photo sessions)
• 5 general communication audits
• 3 podcast setups

Adam Legg, creative arts and communications pastor at ChangePoint Church in Anchorage, had a unique perspective on the trip as the only non-cheechako (slang for newcomer to Alaska). ChangePoint Church served as an evening base of operations for the team through the week.

“It’s been surreal,” Legg said of the experience. “It’s helped me realize even though doing ministry in Alaska can be lonely there is this huge family of church creatives that may not be in Alaska but they are just a phone call or email away.”

In addition to hands-on projects, creatives led workshops for ministry leaders, missionaries and nonprofit leaders in Kenai and at ChangePoint Church at the end of the week. The workshops, like all of the work, came at no charge.

“Yesterday’s generation was reached through crusades, Bibles and guitars. Today’s generation will be reached through social media, YouTube and interactive experiences,” said Leigh Sloan, co-pastor of Resonate Church in Anchorage. “Creative Missions equips ministers to turn an ageless message into a present reality.”

Perhaps the coolest thing about this trip, as with previous Creative Missions trips to Albany, N.Y., and Northwest Arkansas, is the soul care that happened. Burdens were lifted. Spirits restored. Sustainable solutions have been created to help churches more effectively share the good news and make a difference in Alaska. The status quo has been challenged.

More:

• Follow along with Creative Missions for the full social media experience.
• While this year’s trip is now over, there are still bills to pay. Make a donation to support Creative Missions.
• Last week we released Dangerous: A Go-to Guide for Church Communication. It’s an ebook written by Creative Missions participants that captures many of the lessons and insights they share during the trip. A portion of the proceeds support Creative Missions. Learn more about the project and  buy a copy.

The Center for Church Communication will be there, so stop by and say hello.

You also have to check out the geekiest conference promo video ever. Also, the best:

Echo 2013 Promo from Echo Hub on Vimeo.

“We should be building great things that don’t exist.”

Isn’t that amazing?

Go ahead and read it again and let it soak in.

Here are two major takeaways the church can take from Page’s keynote:

1. The Church Should Build Great Things That Don’t Exist

We’ve spent so much time trying to be like the world, we’ve lost our identity.

We want to produce music like the world.

We want to build websites like the world.

We want our marketing to be like the world.

Believe me when I say there are valid arguments for doing some things “like the world,” as it has more to do with doing things the right way than anything else, but that’s not the point.

The point is that we’ve ceased to innovate.

Did you know that government welfare systems were simply mimicking and providing a secularized version of services previously offered by the church? Who used to feed the poor and clothe the naked? It was the church.

I realize this is laced with some irony as I am recommending that the church approach innovation like Google (the world), but like I said, there are valid arguments for doing things well.

The point I’m trying to make is simply this: Let’s build something that doesn’t exist.

Perhaps we could start by filling a need in the community that isn’t currently being met in Jesus name.

2. Pass On Your Passion by Your Actions

Larry Page shared some interesting insight into his childhood:

“My dad was really interested in technology. He drove me and my family all across the country to go to a robotics company. Then we got there, he thought it was so important his son would go to the conference.”

Dang.

That’s huge.

Page’s father was a huge influence. He didn’t just talk about technology, he lived technology. His actions had enough weight that they left a deep impression on who?

The CEO of Google.

Our churches can have awesome websites, thousands of friends and followers on social media networks and provide a live video stream of services every Sunday morning, but if we’re not living the gospel of Jesus Christ to an impressionable degree, it’s a complete waste of time.

“Creative Missions helps remind me that the church is bigger than Bellevue, Wash., … I love that for one week a year, I get to learn from pastors outside my region and denomination how they are sharing God’s love.” -Kyna Moore (Q&A With a Creative Missionary)

This week Creative Missions is serving in Alaska. Consider supporting the effort and follow along to see what God is doing.

(Not working? View the story “Creative Missions 2013″ on Storify.)

We’ve been talking about Creative Missions all year. We’ve supported the effort since the beginning and our nonprofit parent handles the finances. This year we even put together an ebook collecting some of the wisdom shared by Creative Missions participants that can help churches anywhere tell that story better.

We love Creative Missions. It’s a practical way for church communicators to help other churches communicate better. Let’s give them our support as they get down to work over the next week.

This Year’s Team
First off, let’s give a big thank you to this year’s participants:

Matt Adams , Laura Bennett, Andy Burns, Catherine Burt, Kelvin Co, Evan Courtney, Nathan Dewberry, Sheri Felipe, Tim Gaskins, Danielle Hartland, Dave Hartland, Brad Huss, Adam Legg, Denisse Leon, Colt Melrose, Lindy Melrose, Deanna Mingo, Kyna Moore, Eric Murrell, Cleve Persinger, Katie Persinger, Micah Petrea, Joe Porter, Jamie Pruitt, Matt Ralph, Stacy Regan, Jon Rogers, Chuck Scoggins, Matthew Walker and Brandon Wanamaker. (Follow them on Twitter)

Give them a shout out on Twitter, say thanks and let them know you’re rooting for them.

How You Can Pray
There’s a lot to accomplish in the next week and they could use help. Here’s how you can pray:

• Pray for the participants, that they would have unity, strength, clarity and creativity in abundance.
• Pray for efficiency and effectiveness as they serve 15-20 churches in a week.
• Pray that the pastors, staff members, volunteers and congregations served in Alaska will be encouraged.
• Pray that the communities in Alaska will be impacted as these churches more effectively reach out to their neighbors.

How You Can Follow Along
One of the cool things about technology today is that we can follow along from hundreds or thousands of miles away:

• Follow the #CreativeMissions hashtag on Twitter or check out our Creative Missions 2013 list.
• Watch for updates on Facebook.
• We’ll be collecting updates on Storify and tweeting at @cmsucks.
• We’ll be posting a recap after the trip or you can check out mediaBLEEP.com.

How You Can Take Part
Creative Missions doesn’t have to be limited to this year’s participants. You can take part. Here are a few ways you can help:

1. Donate: Projects like this require a lot of time, work and, yes, money. We shared last week that Creative Missions had a significant budget shortfall. They’ve made a dent in that need, but they still need your support. Make a donation and support Creative Missions. All donations are handled by our nonprofit parent, the Center for Church Communications and are tax deductible.
2. Buy the Book: Another way you can support Creative Missions is by picking up a copy of that ebook we mentioned, Dangerous: A Go-to Guide for Church Communication. A portion of the profits will go to Creative Missions, so by picking up the book you’re helping the cause. Plus, reading the book is like getting your own Creative Missions experience. Share the book with pastors and churches that need communication help and you’re becoming a creative missionary.
3. Help: Watch the #CreativeMissions hashtag on Twitter and pitch in when you can. The team will often run in to unexpected needs or questions and turn to social media for help. Jump in and do what you can from a distance.

Enough to Be Dangerous
This week churches in Alaska are learning enough to be dangerous. It’s incredible to watch, pray and support it as it happens.

It’s a common refrain from pastors served by Creative Missions. A team of creative professionals served their church for a week, empowering them to communicate the gospel to their community. These churches have now become dangerous.

That’s the idea behind the new book we released earlier this week, Dangerous: A Go-to Guide for Church Communication.

It’s a collection of thoughts for beginners, written by Creative Missions participants, enough ideas and practical wisdom to get a church started on the path to better communication. While it is geared for beginners and covers the basics, there are plenty of deeper ideas as well. You may not need to know how to get started on Facebook, but maybe you’re doing too much housekeeping with your announcements. Something for everybody.

Three Weeks Ago
I want to take a minute to share how this project came to be. While it’s kind of “insider baseball,” I think it can be instructive.

On April 23 at 4:12 p.m., Creative Missions founder Cleve Persinger sent an email to myself and Chuck Scoggins, pitching “an 11th hour idea.” On previous trips they’ve given away books to the churches they served, including Less Clutter. Less Noise. and Outspoken. Practical stuff that would help these churches when they were on their own again. This year Cleve wanted to compile the helpful articles we’ve been running from Creative Missions alumni and create a book to give to the churches. For this year’s Creative Missions trip to Alaska. Which starts May 18.

Cleve wanted to publish a book in three and a half weeks.

It was all I could do not to laugh at him.

But I dutifully shared the idea with our board members at the Center for Church Communication and got the green light. Cleve, Chuck and myself got to work.

Yesterday we released the book. It took only three weeks. Twenty days.

Yes, it’s insane. It gives us a good excuse for any typos that slipped through. It helps that technically it’s more of a booklet—about 15,000 words. It also helps that three-fourths of the content was already written by some amazing contributors. It also helps that we had layout and design help ready to go.

In the end we have a powerful resource to hand over to some churches in Alaska. We also hope it’s a resource that can help your church or other churches you know. Creative Missions only goes to one city a year and can only help so many churches. We hope this booklet can make that Creative Missions experience available for churches all over the world.

So What? Three Lessons
You’re not just going to talk about yourself, are you?

I told you it was insider baseball. But rather than go on and on about ourselves, I want to share three lessons from this experience that can help your church:

1. Do It.
If your church has a big idea, you need to go for it. Don’t think of excuses. Don’t think about how crazy it is. Don’t think about failure. If you want to have a big impact, you need to dream big. Don’t dismiss that crazy ideas as impossible. Too often our churches play it safe when we should be dangerous.

2. Create Content
The reason we could throw this book together in only 20 days was because we’d already created the content. Content is king. That’s what people are looking for. They’re watching content on YouTube and listening to content on podcasts and reading content on websites, books and magazines. Your church needs to start creating content, offering something to the people who are looking. Then, when it’s time to do something big, most of the work is already done.

3. Church Ebooks
Your church could be creating ebooks. This isn’t just some fad for bloggers or novelists. It’s an opportunity for churches to package their content and share their message with people in a new format. You could be creating devotional guides or a history of your church or collections of writings about spiritual topics. The ideas are endless. You don’t need a publisher and this isn’t limited to churches with big name pastors who can get a book deal. Anyone can do it (we’re proof!). Admittedly it’s not for everyone. But there are some churches out there just sitting on the content that could create some really cool ebooks.

Check out Dangerous: A Go-to Guide for Church Communication.

“There is nothing more powerful than a well-told story about someone whose life has been changed by Jesus. Fortunately, God’s story can be told with or without money or expensive equipment.” -Dave Hartland (Dangerous: A Go-to Guide for Church Communication)

It took only a week to make Pastor Jeff dangerous. A team of church communication pros descended on his church to share their knowledge, a venture known as Creative Missions. The status quo is now endangered.

Is your church ready to be dangerous?

This booklet is written by the reinforcements, men and women in the trenches of church communication. They’re Creative Missions alumni and now offer that same insight, wisdom and help to you. This booklet includes 19 essays on church communication, covering basic strategy and practical, real world tips for churches that want to be dangerous.

This is a collaboration between Creative Missions and the Center for Church Communication (CFCC). We’ve been sharing insights from Creative Mission alumni since January, leading up to this year’s trip to Alaska—which gets going at the end of this week. This booklet collects those Creative Missions stories, along with several additional articles, to offer a solid beginner’s guide to church communication, filled with the kind of practical ideas shared during Creative Missions.

It’s enough to make a pastor dangerous.

We hope you’ll check out the booklet and share it with communicators who need some help. It’s available as an ebook with a print version coming very soon and a print version, with profits benefiting CFCC and Creative Missions.

Buy it now: Kindle | Print

What’s in It?
Dangerous: A Go-to Guide for Church Communication covers the basics of church marketing, including design, writing, sound, video, web, social media and several articles on big picture strategy for beginners. It’s designed to be like a visit from a Creative Missions team, quickly offering practical insights and ideas to a church ready to improve their communication. It’s just enough to make your church dangerous.

Dangerous includes contributions from:

Matt Adams, Laura Bennett, Phil Bowdle, Kelvin Co, Evan Courtney, Kim Fukai, Danielle Hartland, Dave Hartland, Kevin D. Hendricks, Colt Melrose, Eric Murrell, Cleve Persinger, Joe Porter and Chuck Scoggins.

Creative Missions
It’s no secret that we’re big fans of Creative Missions. As this year’s trip kicks off later this week, we’ll be talking more about the trip and following along. We urge you to support Creative Missions. It’s a practical way you can help churches share the gospel. Last week we shared a major budget shortfall they have and we hope you’ll consider donating to support this year’s Creative Missions trip.

These folks have shared their ideas and content with us in order to make Dangerous happen, and then they’re off to Alaska to help the churches of Anchorage tell the greatest story ever told. That’s worth celebrating.

A big thanks to all of these church communicators for contributing to this project. Big thanks also to Cleve and Chuck for spearheading this with me, as well as to Laura for designing our cover.

Grab your copy of Dangerous: A Go-to Guide for Church Communication.

Maybe you already have a Facebook fan page for your church and it needs to be dusted off, or maybe it’s a new idea and you don’t know where to start. Either way, we can help your church get started on Facebook.

How to Create a Page
First off, you need to create a page for your church. So log in to your Facebook account. (Don’t have an account? Time to join 1 billion others.)

Visit facebook.com/pages to create your church’s page. Choose to create a page for a Company, Organization or Institution. This is best for most churches. Then select Church/Religious Organization. Now simply follow the next few steps to fill in the details about your church.

Page URL
Make sure you set your Facebook web address. This will make it easier for people to find your church on Facebook. Pick something short and simple, but clear. Facebook won’t let you change this URL, so be sure it’s the best choice. (While the form says you can’t change it, Facebook’s Help Center says they’ll let you change it once. Either way, be sure.)

Already on Facebook but have that ugly string of numbers for your URL? Here’s a fix for that: facbook.com/username. You can set a custom username for any person or organization you administer.

Key Elements
There are a few key things you need to work on with Facebook:

1. Set a good profile image. Use your logo, but make sure it’s readable at different sizes. The profile image is square, so plan accordingly.
2. Keep your cover photo (the big banner up top) up to date. Using current sermon series/event artwork is great. The Facebook cover photo is 851 pixels wide by 315 pixels tall, and your profile photo sits in the lower left, covering a small portion, so be conscious of that. Download this zipped Photoshop PSD file to create your cover photo and see it in context.

How to Connect Your Site to Your New Page
Facebook has a few great tools for you to add “like” buttons and share buttons to your website. These are little bits of code, but it’s pretty much a copy and paste deal, so if you are slightly web savvy, you should be OK. But don’t hesitate to ask a pro to do this for you.

You can check out the full set of social plugins, but the Like Button is one you really want to use. It allows users to like your Facebook page from your website and gives them the option to share with their friends. There’s a form to fill out that will generate your code. Leave the ‘URL to like’ field blank if you’re adding this code to every page on your site. Tinker with the options to see what fits your site best.

What to Post
Post anything that’s important! Upcoming events, sermon podcasts, news items, even daily or weekly Bible verses. This is no different than a Sunday bulletin, weekly email or an encouraging phone call. One good approach is to ask questions. Most likely the “fans” of your new Facebook page go to your church. Shepherd them, but also remember they can re-share your posts with their friends. So speak to them in a way that is uplifting and inviting, not like they are already part of the club.

Have a Strategy
Create a communication plan. Know what is worth posting and when to post it. Some audiences are more active after business hours than others. Also think about your content: If you’re asking people to sign up for an event, that might not be something they’re able to do during the work day.

Get Help
Facebook pages allow for multiple administrators, so get some. This is good for accountability, but also good practice. You can spread out the responsibility and not force one person to do all the work. Plus, if someone on the admin team quits, gets fired or is asked to no longer volunteer, you need to remove them from the admin roles ASAP.

A current admin can add new admins from the Admin Panel, assigning different levels of control and access.

Keep Trying
You can do a lot with Facebook and it’s constantly evolving, so keep experimenting. Hopefully these tips will get your church started. Once you’re up and running, check out ways to get better at Facebook and learn how to get lots of likes.

We’re thrilled to partner with Creative Missions (our nonprofit parent, the Center for Church Communication, handles the Creative Missions finances). Learn more about Creative Missions and this year’s trip to Alaska and consider a financial donation to help church communicators help other churches communicate better.

For more helpful tips like this, check out Dangerous: A Go-to Guide for Church Communication. It’s a booklet of articles by Creative Missions alumni offering a crash course in church marketing basics.