Sermon Series and community outreach

For those of you on the "inside" here at Element Insider you're going to get the sneak peak of our upcoming series. We'll be promoting it this Sunday at church. January 6th - 27th we are going to be doing a series called "Deal or No Deal" and talking about finances. In fact the first two sermon series of the new year are going to be topics that are literally drowning our society. Money and sex. Along with our Deal or No Deal series, we are going to be offering a FREE, one day Dave Ramsay financial seminar. Adam just got off the phone with a guy, who along with his Dave Ramsay certified brother, will be doing a full day's seminar on finances. Element Church is going to provide this seminar completely free to those in the community who may need a day like this. The seminar is highlighted on our new mailer going out, as well as our invite cards we got made. We'll also be doing an advertisement in the newspaper leading up to it. We'd like to launch a "Financial Peace University" Life Group following the event if we have enough interest, as well as someone to lead it. Below are the graphics for the invites of the upcoming series. All of our invites are done in a "rave card" size (3.5" x 3.5"). We order them from 48hourprint.com and their custom size options. VERY affordable.

Graphics

Can't tell you how nice it is to have Adam, who is an AWESOME worship leader on staff. But his skills don't stop there. Adam creates all of our graphics for sermons, mailers, web-design, etc. His job description right now goes WAY past worship. Here is the sermon graphic for our Thanks:Giving mini series coming up the next two weeks.

We are taking the two words, Thanks and Giving, for our two week mini series called "Thanks:Giving". Here is the graphic for that series.

We are doing a five week sermon series for Christmas entitled "Believe". John 20:30-31 says "Jesus did many other miraculous signs in the presence of his disciples, which are not recorded in this book. But these are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name." So we are going to take 5 of the miracles of Jesus recorded in John and attempt to answer some questions. "Why did Jesus come?" "What did he do?" "Why should I believe?" The two graphics below are for our invite cards and we are doing a direct mail similar to those cards. I wanted a "non-traditional" approach to our Christmas series, so we aren't really going to talk about the birth, shepherds, angels, wise men or "no room in the inn". We're going to look at the life of Jesus and we'll know why he came by his actions.

We are going to be doing some fun stuff through our Believe series. Some outreach things we are doing are going to be so much fun. Adam is developing some GREAT worship sets for the series. Some creative twists on Christmas songs. And maybe even a theme song we'll do through the whole series. We'll be kicking off our two services with this series. Pretty fun. Have I said I love what we do? I really do.

Following Christ,

Jeff

New Mover Cards

Each month, outreach.com will be sending out invites to Element Church to all the new movers into Cheyenne. The over sized postcard is VERY well done with our info on it. It's also personalized to the actual person being mailed to. On ours, the persons name is on the coffee cup. I posted pictures below of our cards. This month we sent out 200 cards costing a total of $178. We don't do a thing. Outreach does it all. I don't know why more churches aren't doing this. You can cut it off at any number you want. So if you can afford 50 cards to go out, they will only send 50. You can do it by zip code, radius around church, etc. Very cool deal. Anyway, every month those will go out for us.

Timing

God's timing in things sometimes (even though it shouldn't) blows me away. There is a magazine here in Cheyenne called "Around Cheyenne" that is published monthly and gets sent out to all Cheyenne residents. In each magazine is an article "Where to Worship". We've been getting this magazine since we moved here and I always thought how cool it was going to be when the chose us. I had thought in my head "Man, what if they would do ours right before we launched?". I never thought they would. I never contacted the mag or told them anything about us. 2 weeks ago I got a call from the writer of the "Where to Worship" section. She wanted to know if I could be interviewed for that section about Element Church to be released in the September issue, the month before we launch! She heard about our church from one of the ladies who is attending Element and talked about us. She checked out our web-site and the rest is history. So we will be featured in the September issue and will hopefully help us out in launch. God's timing, never early, never late.

Following Christ,

Jeff

Final News Story

This is the final top story that KGWN News Channel 5 showed about our event. This time they didn't mention our church name but the previous two nights they did. By this point I think people knew who we were. We are grateful to the news station for such great coverage and believe God really had a hand in what coverage we got.




Following Christ,

Jeff

Top Story 2

Friday night we were once again the top story on News Channel 5's 10 PM news cast. Bob Geha came to the gas station and did a live interview with me at the top of the show and then we ended the show with a 1 minute recap. Again, Bob and the news station have been great to pick this up as a newsworthy story. Today at 1 PM the news station again will be covering the event and we expect to be on the news tonight as a story again. I was able to share on the news about why we are doing this. That we want to be servants to the community and that it's a practical way to show God's love. Our team prayed last evening at the gas station for God's safety, to help with connnections and for things to run as smoothly as possible. We really hope this makes an impact to the people we come across today. Below is the video of last nights news cast. The first segment they were having some video trouble but the audio worked.

Following Christ,

Jeff

Top Story

HOLY COW...We were the TOP STORY on the only local news station here in Cheyenne tonight. KGWN News 5 picked up our gas buy down story as soon as I shared the info with them. Robert Geha spearheaded the coverage for us and has been great getting us exposure. Today we had a walk through with the GM of Big D Exxon. News 5 sent a videographer out to get some shots of us for the story. I had no clue they were going to interview me on the spot there and air it tonight. Well, we sat down to watch the news that we set to record and what was the top story?...ELEMENT CHURCH. I couldn't stop laughing. I've been nervous all day about not being a total DORK on tv. Gas prices have been THE top story every night this week, so for us to be doing this on Saturday it made a natural top story on the news. I couldn't believe it. Tomorrow morning in the paper we have a simple ad running, tomorrow night we will be doing a live interview on the news then on Saturday I believe they will be covering the actual MAYHEM that ensues. LOL, this is gonna be crazy. Watch the video and I put the ad we are running in the paper as well. Pray for us. We think we have enough volunteers. The gas station has been PHENOMENAL and the news station has been more than gracious. Like I said before, I think God is all over this for us. We (I) feel TOTALLY unprepared for this...I wouldn't have it any other way! We need God to be prepared and I believe he is.



Being Stretched!



Jeff

Gas Buy Down

A few updates on the gas buy down:

--- God is all over this. From the energy and support of the GM at the gas station to the instant pick up on the news station and newspaper, to the volunteer support that has come in.

--- Friday night during the 10 o'clock news I am going to be interviewed live at the gas station about our event. Please pray for me. I'm already nervous. lol I want Element to be portrayed positively as a servant showing God's love in a practical way. This opportunity to be live on the only local news station is HUGE for us. They will also be filming live on Saturday at the event.

--- We are running one standard black and white ad in the Friday morning paper, we'll be on the news Friday night, in the paper sometime this week as a news story and maybe more than that. We've handed out hundreds of invite cards and the gas station is putting on it's reader board info about the event.

--- We have 19 volunteers that have committed to serving on Saturday. 8 - 10 more volunteers that we are hoping to be there. 24 people is what I would consider "good" coverage to make sure things run smoothly. The more we have the more bases we can cover. Right now we will have 8 people pumping gas on 8 pumps. 6 people directing traffic. 4 people washing windshields and if possible Grant, Keenan and I will be connecting with people as much as we can. A few more volunteers would only help. We'll use everyone who shows up. If we have extra we'll give people breaks every once in a while.

--- PRAY PRAY PRAY If this generates the buzz I think it will then we should get some connections out of it. Priority #1: Serve. If we aren't servants to Cheyenne then I want out. Priority #2: Promote Element Church. Priority #3: Because we served and promoted Element Church we will connect some people with Life and hopefully get them involved in our church somehow.

Gas Buy Down

IT IS ON! Saturday, May 26th from 1-3 PM at the Exxon Big D gas station here in Cheyenne. We will be buying down the price of gas by .50 cents per gallon. Wish I could fill up. God has really opened up the doors on this one. Some people will ask about the cost/reward on this one. How many people will come to church from this? Maybe NONE! But this is the type of event that puts us on the scene. It starts to tell people who we are and what we will do. It labels Element Church as a church who is willing to do something TOTALLY out of the ordinary to show God's love in practical ways. We have to get our church name out there somehow and we could pay LITERALLY thousands of dollars on advertisements or marketing to promote our church name. If I'm going to spend money I'd like to serve someone in the process. (Now there will be times when we just do an ad, but this is not one of those times) Since this is our first presence in the community it needs to be one of doing something for someone else. We've made some business cards to hand out (see below) with the intentionality of leaving off the location. This makes the person go to our website if they want to know where to get the cheap gas. We will do this on our press releases as well. I think this is a genius idea that we got from another church planter. People then see your web presence and can see what the church is about if they so choose. I'm fired up about this event. Please pray for good weather, for patient people, for the right amount of volunteers and for GOD APPOINTED CONNECTIONS. Pray that the right media outlets would pick this up to get our name out there. We'll keep you posted on how this goes and have some pictures and video to share as well. (For some reason the website doesn't show up on this image. It is correct on the card itself.)

What element of Easter are you looking for?

The catch line of our newspaper ad that was on the 2nd page of today's Wyoming Tribune Eagle. It's a color Ad so it pops out against the regular black ink of everything else. This is our first visible presence in the community. The Ad invites people to our free inflatable games during the city Easter egg hunt as well as encouraging them to find a good church in their neighborhood this Easter. Our Ad was influenced (we stole the idea) from direct mail piece that Journey Church in Bozeman, MT used for their Easter egg hunt they did 2 years ago. Since we are not an established church we liked the idea of being kind of covert. The opportunity to do this event arose later than we would have liked so using an idea from elsewhere made sense. There are so many good ideas that churches do, no sense in re-inventing the wheel. Maybe someday we can influence another church with an idea that works. I'll post an image of our ad below. Not sure how well it will show up. It looks great in the paper. It's a 3x3 Ad, little small on here but you'll get the idea. You can click on the picture to download it in .pdf format to view the full size if you want.