The sermon series “GO” at Schweitzer United Methodist Church was one of the first series by our brand new paster, Spencer Smith. I was excited to have new leadership at the church (we loved Pastor Bob, but he went and retired on us!), and I wanted to really make something cool to help usher him in.
The sermon broke down the different parts of the Great Commission into four pieces, which were the talking point of each week’s sermon.
Graphics
The graphic I created uses the letters “G” and “O” as an arrow and a globe, respectively. Indicating that we are to GO out into the world, making disciples of all men. With some help from a coworker at the church (thanks Tim!) I put the graphic over the top of a map of the world, just to help hammer in the metaphor.
The Kids Ministry also did a version of this series for their Wednesday night program, so I created a “kid-friendly” version of the graphic as well.
Video
Next, we needed a video that would serve as both promotional material and as a bumper video to each sermon. I decided to use a globe to capture slow-moving macro shots of the Earth turning, and add traveling lines on top of it in After Effects. I quickly realized that it is extremely difficult to manual spin a globe slowly and at a steady rate. So I had to get creative and use a moving light to slowly turn the globe so that I could capture the video.
The audio of the Great Commission being read in the video is courtesy of this video by First-Plymouth Church in Lincoln, Nebraska. I am very happy with how the whole thing turned out and I received plenty of positive feedback.
Stage Design
Lastly, we needed to update our stage design to match the aesthetic of the graphics and video. A couple of antique shops, a stop at Hobby Lobby, and a bit of shopping on Amazon later and we had a bunch of globes of various sizes and a few different wall hangings to decorate the stage with.
