We started the new church in February and we have been going verse-by-verse through the Sermon on the Mount since then. A major part of what we do in worship is a kind of verse-by-verse teaching. We're then going to go through highlights of the book of Acts.

What you'd experience when you walk in. We start off thinking about what would create an environment for worship — that would really focus on the risen Jesus being the predominant reason we're there. We pay attention to aesthetics, not for an emotional trick. Every church, whether they are Southern Baptist or Lutheran, pays attention to aesthetics, so we're just looking at it through a different lens. And we create a space — we have a team called the sacred space team — and we try to say this is a sacred, set-apart space for worship. Last week we were teaching on the wide gate and the narrow gate in the sermon on the mount. So you walk in and we actually set up the entry way as a narrow gate, so as people walked in they recognized the entry way was even communicating what we were teaching about. At the end of the entry we had the Scriptures from Matthew 7 there up on the screens, you can't miss it. You walk in and there's Scripture — that's what we're talking about tonight.

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Then the room is set up. We said: how can we have the cross the predominant thing in this room? So we built a different cross and put it dead center in the front of the room. right now we're using the facilities of Santa Cruz Bible Church, and we put a cross, right where the pastor or preacher would stand there — we put the cross right in that center spot. So that is a dominant visual when you walk in.

Whatever we're teaching about, the series, we have artists who paint paintings that are all about the passages of Scripture. What we generally do is give the passages out a month or five weeks in advance, and the artists will then paint various sections of the Scripture. And so around the room you'll see people painting their expressions of what the teaching's about. One week we did a sermon on heaven and we had someone do a huge canvas — a really kind of glorious light, a scene of light. And the next week we talked on hell; they took a roller and actually rolled all the bright to total black on this painting that's up on the stage.

The room is set up to have everyone looking up at the screens and not at the music band; the music leaders are off to the side, so that they aren't coming across like a rock concert. They're not the focal point, though we still do music.

We are always thinking, "How are we communicating the Scriptures through speaking, through visuals, through people's lives." When we were talking about heaven, we brought up a man who was just given six months to live — he's 79 years old and he has cancer. And basically he is so weak, but he has been coming and hangs out in the back and prays for me when I speak. And so we brought him up — even though it's predominantly a crowd in their twenties who are there — and he talked about what it's like facing the reality of heaven and the perspective he has. He also challenged everyone there, saying most of you are in your twenties, heaven isn't just when you die you're going to go there, you need to be living out the Kingdom of God and the Kingdom of Heaven — we have a mission here. He was trying to break the stereotype of "you said the prayer and now live however you want, cause you got your ticket."