Every year January marks the beginning of questions. Often these questions center around one’s reflection of how their life is developing. And for most, January marks a psychological “Fresh Start” towards personal growth.
Knowing that, we decided to begin the year with a stand-alone weekend entitled, “Ask Anything”. I can certainly tell you that people took full advantage of the opportunity! From questions about Captain Crunch’s lack of promotion to Admiral, to questioning God in the midst of the loss of a young child, people came with hearts wide open to catch a glimpse of our Father.
But answering the questions was the easy part (Haha, don’t tell our pastors that 
, so I will tell you how we did it technologically through text messaging. If you can afford it, the easiest way to gather audience text for live presentation is to use a service like JarbyCo. It is a on-line program that allows an audience to vote, ask questions, and post comments live using text messaging. After a text is sent to a specific number, the program allows a moderator, who is on a computer, to approve and decline incoming texts. The approved texts are then moved into a live rotation seen by the audience. It is easy to use but it also costs money and since our services are spread over two days, that meant double the cost. So it was time for plan “B”.
During our welcome time, we provided a cell phone number of a staff member as a lower 3rd graphic over our IMag. After a setup song that followed the welcome time, we again placed the phone number on the screens and left it up the entire time of the Q&A period. Our two pastors proceeded to speak about how the presentation would work for about three minutes and by the time they were done with their setup, we had already received dozens of texts.
These texts went to the staff members cell phone and we had designated a volunteer with the task of typing the questions on to an on-line write board that could be refreshed and read nearly instantaneously by other users that were logged in. Think of it as an on-line word document that can be seen by others on different computers. The next role was done by our Communications Director who would select 3 questions to be displayed for the congregation and pastors. The communications Director would post these three questions on another write board, correct the grammar, leaving me the task of quickly building the slides for presentation (we use the program Mediashout).
Our pastors had no idea what was coming and truly answered the queries as they came. They would quickly poll the audience, either by applause or a show of hands, and answer the favored question from the congregation. We had pre-programmed a 3 minute countdown that was started at the beginning of each answer and the countdown was viewable to the room, setting a rough limit as to how long the pastors would have to speak on the particular topic. This didn’t allow for too much depth but did create an opportunity to truly get to as many questions possible from the audience. It was very similar to the television ESPN show, “Pardon the Interruption”.
Things went really well and we certainly learned some things for the next time we do this presentation. First, 3 minutes is a great time limit (Just don’t end it with a Family Fued type buzzer like we did the first service before changing to a simple bell). Another is that out of three services, each audience had different types of questions. Our first had many personal situational questions while our second was primarily apologetics. The third service was fairly heavy on doctrine but also had some personal situation questions as well.
Also, personal questions never get the majority vote when combined with other theological questions. Questions like understanding the loss of a love one, breaking an addiction, or redemption from immorality, isn’t going to be voted for due to the fact the people who ask are fearful of being judged and discovered by supporting their questions. We got around this by placing these type of questions together and notifying our pastors through the confidence monitor that the next set of questions were personal ones that did not need to be voted on by the audience.
Overall, the services were an incredible success and everyone seemed to be brimming with energy. As the final service concluded, we got one last text, “I don’t have a question, but i just wanted to say that this is my first time at Preston Trail and I will be back every weekend”. That text seemed to truly be an answer to our prayers.
