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.

Preaching: One of the examples I have referred to in training events is the service with the food: the aromas, the use of the food commercials. I have described that to pastors as a way to appeal to other senses, getting people experientially engaged in whatever is done. Even pieces of something like that can be used in a traditional sermonic setting.

Martoia: That is a good example of one that is easily scalable, not expensive – a few bucks but not expensive. That particular encounter what we were referring to was “Hungry?” Some people might instantly make the spiritual connection, but it is not long after you start smelling food that people shift back to physically thinking “am I hungry?” Three minutes into the experience you are salivating, your stomach is roaring.

We are looking at video clips of these scrolling food commercials and we have a poetic reading that allows people to realize that at eleven o’clock at night when you see a Burger King commercial, you’re thinking, “I could go for a Whopper right now. I know it is eleven but I could eat.” The world does things like that to provoke hunger. What do we do to provoke hunger in each other to spiritual things? That was the secular/back to spiritual tie in.