You may know Indiana as the home of the Indianapolis Colts, the Indianapolis 500, and Hoosier basketball, but it’s also the home of Northside Christian Church. Located just 10 miles north of Louisville, KY, Northside desires to “connect people to God and grow together to full devotion to Him,” and so far they’ve been fairly successful. Averaging around 5,700 visitors during its five weekend services, Northside utilizes a variety of creative media, including a dynamic website, creative visuals, and social media to help connect people to God. When we discovered they also recently created and published their own quarterly church magazine, we knew we wanted to talk.
Matt Bayless – Creative Arts Director/Worship Pastor
COLLIDE: What role do creative arts and media play at Northside?
MATT BAYLESS: Creative art and media play a huge role in everything we do at Northside. There are so many ways to express God’s love for people, and we want to express our love for Him simply and creatively through a variety of methods. The services, the environment, and the promotional ministry tools all work together and are congruent. God has given us a huge vision here, and we work hard to communicate it with excellence and in a variety of ways.
COLLIDE: Tell us what a typical worship service looks like at Northside. How do you incorporate media and technology.
BAYLESS: A typical service at Northside involves a variety of thematically programmed elements. We incorporate a lot of music, film, and experiential elements. Most weekends consist of worship songs, film testimonies, and feature songs, while being heavy on graphic design throughout all of those elements.
COLLIDE: With all of the media you produce, what kind of media team does Northside have?
BAYLESS: Our media team produces all promotional needs for the entire church, including ministries. This is a big undertaking, but ensures a constant level of quality and continuity. We have three dedicated graphic designers, one video production associate, and a creative coordinator (Josh Starr) who also happens to be our web designer. They all equally rock!
Josh Starr – Creative Coordinator
COLLIDE: Northside has a strong website with many features. What is the importance of a great church website?
JOSH STARR: A lot of churches are finally starting to understand how much influence a great website can have. When I first started at Northside Christian Church three years ago, we had an archaic website that didn’t communicate our vision or our church body very well. I’m now on my third version of our website, and with each one I try to capture what makes us who we are at Northside Christian Church. That’s what’s most important to me, making the website visually match what you would see and experience here at our weekend service. If our website doesn’t communicate the same vibe you would get during a weekend service then I need to re-examine what I’m trying to accomplish.
When a church has a great website, it benefits everyone who sees it. It gets people the information that they need in order to get connected, it’s a resource for people that need help, and most importantly, it can be a starting point for someone’s life in Christ. What better way to measure a great church website than by how well it gets people started in their journey with Jesus Christ?
COLLIDE: Where did the idea of creating and publishing your church magazine, The Plug, come from? What is your involvement with it?
STARR: The Plug is our 100-page quarterly magazine that is designed to help our church body connect to God and others. The idea came from us needing a way to communicate better to people that show up here on the weekend. Before The Plug, we had a separate brochure for every ministry, sub-ministry, and event. Because that was our system, we became accustomed to creating a brochure for every new thing we did, and before we knew it we had a whole buffet line of brochures. Now we have one magazine that has everything someone would need if they came here on the weekend.
My involvement with The Plug starts really at the beginning of each issue with our creative brainstorming session. From then on I oversee each section of the magazine, making sure each minister gets everything that they need in The Plug, as well as coordinating our contributing writers and working with our designers on all the artwork. After our team finishes the design and all the content is correct, we hand it over to our senior pastor, who then either signs off on it or rolls it up into a bat and beats us with it … just kidding.
COLLIDE: What is MyNorthside.tv? How do you utilize web video for worship services?
STARR: MyNortside.tv is our website for our past and future weekend messages. Being such a big church, there are a lot of people that miss the weekend service, and when they do, they need a place to catch up on what they may have missed. MyNorthside.tv is a simple way for people to watch and comment on the weekend services.
COLLIDE: What tools and technology have you found to be useful for ministry?
STARR: Being a web designer/developer, it’s paramount that the tools I use are widely supported and easy to use, which has lead me to WordPress. WordPress is primarily a blogging platform, but I have been using WordPress for almost all of our ministry sites here at Northside Christian Church. It’s free, simple, and easy to adapt to any ministry need. Also, anything that Apple makes.
COLLIDE: Why does Northside share its creative resources such as sermon series graphics?
STARR: We’ve been blessed here at Northside with some very talented and creative staff. We view these talents as gifts from God and something that we should give back to God’s kingdom. Our creative resource site is a place that we can share the things that we have created for free to other churches/ministries. It’s our way of blessing other churches.
To learn more about Northside, view their magazine, or get free church resources, visit www.mynorthside.com.