The immersion part was mostly environmental. Sometimes we did this with no chairs in our auditorium, sometimes cushions, sometimes we were sitting in a big desert. I think that is the most well known example, where we brought in a ton-and-a-half of sand and created a dessert with cactus and everything. It might be where we created a huge reflecting pool in our auditorium and floated candles.

All of these environments that we created were really trying to help people connect a biblical theme to something they could experientially do. Usually there was some sort of artifact they could take home from the services – a polished stone, a piece of wood or a fragment from a painting that we had corporately painted, a piece of polished glass that was used to make a corporate mosaic or a square of clay they used to put their thumb print in to represent that they are God’s workmanship and unique, Eph. 2:10. We always tried to have an interactive part which had communitarian dimensions and part which had very much individual dimensions.

I think what was most interesting was that our people were more apt to invite non-churched friends to Encounter than to Sunday morning. Sunday morning was usually very experiential. It had the ambiance, lights, bands, video and all that stuff. But the interactive, minimal talking head approach seemed to be a huge attraction for people who were not going to come to a conventional church service.

Preaching: Looking back on that experiment, was it overall a very positive venture – something that you would do again? And is there a downside?

Martoia: Oh yeah, it was an amazingly positive experience. Would I do it again? Sure. I think there are churches that are experimenting and continuing to do those sorts of things.

What’s the down side? The thing that is cool about Encounter is that, depending on what you are going to do, it is very scaleable. But the larger the church you get into the harder it is to do these things. To create this massive interactivity for a church of 5,000 is very different than doing it for a church of 500, for instance. Maybe the scalability gets increasably difficult as you get larger, whereas it is quite the reverse on the Sunday morning venue when you try to create immensely good video, excellent graphics. Those things require whole teams and sometimes editing platforms and cameras. In a church of 200 you don’t have the budget to pull something like that off, but they could probably pull of an excellent Encounter service that is highly immersive, very interactive, yet do it in a budget that it could easily be done.

But the challenge is how do we, on a weekly or monthly basis, engage an entire team of people that would be part of the creative process to help pull off immersive and interactive environments. It is hugely time intensive to pull off. It is one thing to pull off a well executed service that has good video and graphics. You can have a small team of people and yank it off and it can be amazing. If you want to do highly immersive environments and use multiple interactive elements, you either have to have a huge staff or have a cadre of volunteers that goes very deep numerically to pull of some of these events. Some of these events took several hundred man hours tearing down Sunday morning to get ready for the Sunday night monthly experience; it is immensely time intensive. That is the thing that is very daunting. How do you get creative teams activated? And how do you make sure you don’t burn them out, because it is so time intensive.