Tag: MainStreet

  • Crud be gone

    crudFor the last 48 hours I’ve had some sort of crud latching onto my life. I don’t know if it was the flu, a killer migrane, or food poisoning… but it has now past.

    It started on Tuesday at work. I got a headache, like a nasty one. So I took a couple Tylenol and started drinking some water. Within 30 minutes I started shivering uncontrollably, and got dizzy. So I went and laid on the floor in one of the classrooms at church so I could kind of regain my composure. Things got worse quickly.

    I ended up coming home by about 11:00 on Tuesday morning and basically laid around for the next 24 hours. Now, a couple of days later, I’m about back to 100%. (Though the headache isn’t completely gone.)

    The worst part was that I had all the pressure of MainStreet on my mind. Would I be able to do it? What would happen if I had to drop out at the last minute? What would happen if I tossed my cookies during a scene?

    Of course, MainStreet came off without a hitch. I wasn’t 100% myself but the rest of the crew did a fantastic job. More on that later.

  • 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.

  • K Games Promo

  • Yowsers…

    That’s pretty much how I felt about last night’s MainStreet. In one night we had some of our best stuff and some things we’ll put under our cap as lessons learned.

    The kids who came were way more fired up than I’d ever seen. (Obviously this is good from a kid perspective and scary from an adult one.) I think the cold weather had something to do with this as they were running around the auditorium like bees outside the hive. The room was filled with energy before we even began.
    Then we got them really excited. I said in the pre-event meeting that my goal was to get everyone engaged and excited in the first five minutes.  So imagine the bee hive… and then stirring them up with dancing, loud music, and silliness.

    Then we got them too excited.  About half way through the night we did a skit that was insane with a twist. During the scene I dumped a lot of packing peanuts on the stage (55 gallons) and then at the end of the scene I grabbed a leaf blower and blew about half of those into the audience. It was crazy hilarious, unexpected, and the kids loved it. Unfortunately… this got them a little too excited right at the half way point. The ADD kicked in and it was absolutely nuts from there! (Can you believe we ended the night with a crazy game and cookies?)

    The rest of the night was pretty good, just not our best. After every event we do I instantly think of things we did right, things we did wrong, and ways to improve. My mind races for hours through all the details of it. And last nights MainStreet is like that… there were things that were great and things that need to be better.

    As this post reveals, my mind is still racing about it and it ended almost 12 hours ago. Yowsers…