We had a GREAT trip to Sherwood Elementary to visit New Hope Church. Bruce Cadle, the Lead Pastor, acted as our host for the day and was very gracious, as were all the people at New Hope. They were VERY hospitable to us future attendees of Bay West Church in Palm Bay, or the Bay West Campus of First Baptist Church of Melbourne.
We arrived at 8am and got to help unload the trailers. Everyone was cheerful and upbeat and I was EXTREMELY proud of our group and their willingness to jump in and help.
One takeaway was across the board...PCI is worth the money. New Hope has a pretty involved setup and we were able to setup in a little over an hour. Everyone was impressed with the ease of which the room set up.
Another takeaway was the importance of depth of the setup team. For example, in the Baby-K area, people are asked for a 2 week a month commitment. One week, a person would participate in the area's set up and they are done. Their second week commitment, they would come in and work the morning (after another team had set up that morning), and then they would take the area down afterwards. So actually, one person only misses 1 worship service a month.
A good rule to remember anywhere (especially here) "Many hands make light work." The thing about this proverb is that it's not that EVERYONE shows up at the same time and mass assembles. They had a period at the beginning where they had TOO many people...people in the way, inability to set up in a proper sequence... What they found was that the "light work" was better served in 3 teams of 10, rather than 1 team of 30.
We also found out about layered setup. Some areas don't need as much setup as others, so some areas had later meet times.
Another takeaway was how different each area (especially the children's area) looked before/after. The PCI setup was able to achieve a VERY inviting atmosphere. Bob Osterholm remarked to me how impressed he was, because he was expecting for it to look like you were having "church in a school", but it was not like that at all...the transformation was WONDERFUL.
We also realized that we have several advantages over New Hope.
1) Chair setup. Because they meet in a cafeteria, they have to take down the tables and setup their chairs, then take them down again. In the auditorium that we'll be using, we will have neither.
2) Acoustics. New Hope's music and sound was GREAT, but there are always challenged in a cafeterium...an auditorium is acoustically treated to handle performance styled music, which (regardless of what you like or don't like about the word "performance") is pretty much the style of music that ANY worship service has...regardless of the configuration of instruments, vocalists, etc...bad sound hinders everyone, and the room can really hurt or help you...
3) Stage setup. Because of the small size of the stage in the cafeteria, they had to set up a pretty sizable temporary stage for a pretty complicated setup. Even though PCI's system sets up likety-split, it is a challenge that we won't be locked into taking on.
We heard some great stories of kids and salvations and reaching people in the community and were really encouraged about their enthusiasm for our task of reaching people in Palm Bay. They offered open access to relationships with the setup team leaders there to offer any wisdom to us as we go through the process. It was a great time for everyone.
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