Preaching the Big Idea: An Interview with Dave Ferguson...Continued from page 2

There are a couple of kinds of teaching teams out there. A lot of churches have teaching teams like baseball; ours is more like basketball. The teaching teams that are more like a baseball team have a teaching rotation; this guy is up this week, this guy’s up the next week, lefty is up on the third week, and you have your four-man rotation and you start all over again. Each of them goes up and they do their own thing and they are on their own.

On a basketball team, everybody plays every game; maybe only one guy takes the shot, but everybody gets to touch the ball. Our teaching team is a collaborative that works much more like a basketball team. Every week we work together -- actually we work about nine weeks in advance starting, then three weeks in advance on the actual manuscript. We all work together to actually create that manuscript.

We call it the 105 fastest minutes of your week. Basically the format is we all come together; there are about five of us usually in the room. We also have a whole network that we helped start called the New Thing Network with churches across the country. We bring them in through video conference and teleconference and they also collaborate with us.

If I was going to break down the 105 minutes, the first five minutes is what we call Focus. The person leading that meeting will bring into focus here is the big idea that we are working on, that we are going to have to do a sermon on in three weeks. Then we have what we call the Desired Outcomes. We go around, and everyone is responsible for bringing something that will relay what are the desired outcomes that we want to have. We think very simply in terms of head, hearts and hands. How are we going to get people to think differently, how do we want them to feel, what do we want them to actually do differently?

Then we start Brainstorming. What are the possibilities? Anything goes. We use big white sheets and spill everything up on the board. This usually lasts about 45 minutes. We have enough stuff, in any one message, probably for a whole series. One of the things you discover in a collaborative process, there is never a time when you don’t have enough content. Sometimes when you are out on your own, you might say, “Oh man I am struggling to find some good stuff.” We always have more than enough good stuff; it is a matter of what we are not going to say. Then the next thirty minutes is Structure. OK, what are we not going to say, what are we going to say, how do we put it into some kind of structure? We use a variety of different structures, depending on what the topic is and how we can most effectively communicate that.

About ten minutes we spend in Consensus: “Is everyone really sold on this? Will we all really buy into this?” This is a thing we all created together. Once everyone is on board with that, then the last five minutes we Divvy it up, we divide up the message. Let’s say the message has an introduction, four mods, and a conclusion. That means at least six different people. So around the room each of us may takes a section, and another guy across the country by teleconference he would also take a part of the message, and they all agree to write that part of the message. They’ll have a week to write their part of the message, then they email it in. Tim, who is the point person on the team, he edits the whole thing into a manuscript -- we actually do everything by manuscript. That is what we call our 1.0. So we actually have our 1.0 done at least two weeks in advance before we have to deliver it. That gives everybody a chance to go out and let it marinate, to live with it for awhile. Then we can make it more our own throughout that creative process.