MainStreet is back tonight!

It seems like a huge layoff for the MainStreet gang. (Since Christmas Eve) But we are back at it tonight with a great event.

During the layoff we’ve gotten an opportunity to do a few things that will help us in the Spring run.

• Rest!
• Reorganize!
• Re-prioritize!
• Renewed enthusiasm!

Rest. We needed it. Pulling MainStreet off every month takes about a month of preparation. The result is that each month our team gets just 3-4 days of not thinking about or acting on MainStreet per month. We need this layoff just to have some time to not think about “Oh my gosh, it’s 2 weeks away!”

Reorganize. If you come to MainStreet you may get the idea that we’ve got a play book. You are wrong, we have created MainStreet from scratch. Things that we thought would work didn’t. And when we divided up jobs we didn’t know what would be big jobs or small jobs… so during the layoff we were able to reorganize a little bit to divide things more reasonably. It’s a big project, but when the team works together its pretty manageable.

Re-prioritize. Sometimes you are so busy working on a project that you can’t think enough about the strategic goal. Stepping back gave us the chance to change some things and focus this more specifically as a foyer environment. (An invitable event) Tonight, you’ll see this play out in a couple of ways as we specifically point new people to the next step… our living room environment of UpTown. Watch for this in the greeting and goodbye especially. Another thing we’re doing better than ever is teaching the virtue. As we point attendees to the next step, UpTown, we want to introduce this month’s virtue… watch for kindness to be taught all over the place… from the greeting, to a special song, to the skits, to Bob’s talk, and other places.

Renewed enthusiasm. Stepping back and evaluating MainStreet helped us recognize just how far we’ve come and just how effective MainStreet has been. This charged us up. This helped our team look at our body of work and say, “It is a ton of work, but it is helping us draw people into the Kingdom… so let’s do it even better!”

We’ve got a long way to go until our next break. (July… maybe!) I’m looking forward to the next 6 months of MainStreet. We’ve got some goals to accomplish along the way and I can’t wait to reveal them as we go. Let’s just say we plan on doing MainStreet bigger and better as we finish season 2.

UPDATE: Man, the snow is so bad… and getting worse… that’s we’ve called off MainStreet for tonight. I am so bummed out! So, the layoff continues until March 5th.