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Many of the worship teams I know began planning their Christmas season months ago—mapping out songs, creative participation ideas, sermon titles, and special events. Whether they and their congregations observe the entire season of Advent, or gear up all of their resources for a fantastic Christmas Eve or Christmas Day service (or a combination), all seasoned worship teams recognize that the Christmas season is a special time of year for us as believers and understand the significance of this season to a world looking for redemption.

As I sit in planning meetings, I've discovered that, many times, the media elements used throughout the service are almost an afterthought, considering the substantial amount of care given to planning the right spoken words, light transitions, and song tempos. Worship team media designers are becoming savvier, and the postmodern culture we work inside of has given us countless resources for crafting services that are compellingly extraordinary. Christmastime, the uniquely sacred Advent season, gives us a beautiful canvas to paint images and tell stories that awaken our worshipers to the wonder of this time—but how can we use media elements to fulfill this opportunity?

William Saroyan, the great playwright and author of the Depression era, noted that "Christmas is sights, especially the sights of Christmas reflected in the eyes of a child." Saroyan was most noted for his works representing poverty and the beauty that can happen inside the experiences and imaginations of the most destitute. His imagery is powerfully reminiscent of our human plight, especially in this pre-Christmastime. His statement is perhaps an over-simplification of all that we believe about the Christmas experience as followers of Christ, the long-awaited Messiah, but it is a simple reminder from one artist to countless others about the power of the visuals of the season. How many images are conjured up in the mind at the mention of Christmas? How many of them represent the mystery, paradox, and hope of this season? These mental images, especially as represented in our childhood memories and the child-likeness this season invites us to, can be our greatest allies—or our biggest obstacles—when crafting meaningful Christmas media.

This is a great time for us, individually and corporately, to evaluate our concepts of Christmas and the Advent season. To super-impose benign and placid ideas over this scandalous and sacred event robs us of the kind of transformation that worship invites us to enter into.

As you and your team craft your media elements for the Christmas and Advent season, here are a few thoughts to consider:

1. Create a "muse-board." Basically a sort of visual brainstorming tool, a muse board is a great way for planning teams to come up with visuals based on seasonal concepts. Start with word mapping and be creative, out-of-the-box, and reflective. Write down the expected words: joyful, hopeful, stars, angels, shepherds, glory; and then move to the more unexpected: paradox, terrible, mysterious, sacred, breaking in, dirt and grime, ramshackle stable, and so on. There are so many ideas from this season that can only be communicated visually, so when these words come together on the board, start to attach conceptual images and photos alongside your words. This brainstorming technique is a great way to conceptualize the visuals you want to use in your Christmas or Advent services. This tool is often underused and underappreciated by many visual designers, but it is an invaluable aid to help shape the intention of our holiday season, and to help us expose the underlying tensions to our audiences.
   
   

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