Ada Trip Report

We had a wonderful trip to Ada Bible Church on Sunday. Bill, Marci, Casey, Gwen, Justin, Kathy, Dave & the Drury children made the trip to the other side of Grand Rapids to check out that church's 3 video venues on Sunday morning.

Key learnings we debriefed at a coffee shop afterwards:

• The environment is key -- chairs, tables, couches create the ambience
• The venue coordinator/pastor role is absolutely crucial (according to Ada)
• We think we should do some pre-weekly gatherings social events with our launch team and potential key attendees (Kathy has agreed to be our "social coordinator" and is planning such events for the winter).
• The set design seems important to the atmosphere too
• It's important to "level the playing field" between the venues
• The language we use is important -- watch calling the other services "the main" services or "the main" sanctuary (so we're not second class worshipppers)
• Keeping it simple seems to work for Ada - we shouldn't over-complicate the launch
• Ada appears to have 900+ people attending their additional video venues - it's really working for them. They also have 300+ people attending their Sunday night venue.
• The video thing is a non-issue in many ways for thier church. They don't find themselves defending it at all.
• Bob King wanted to stay in touch with us. His e-mail is bking@adabible.org

Other notes...
-Pastor Dennis shot a video for the team to view while on the trip. Thanks, Bishop Jackson: how thoughtful!
-We had a long discussion on the name of the new venue... more on that later.
-We thought we should continue to debrief the Ada Trip online here in the comments of this blog. So click the comment button to get in on the discussion.

PS: thanks for those of you that prayed for this trip -- the picture on this blog IS NOT from our trip... and we owe it to your prayers for a safe and successful trip (desipte the horrible weather we had).