Annual Meeting: Video Reports

No one usually likes annual meetings. They’re required by most church by-laws yet they’re a pain to plan and can be boring to sit through. That was the typical challenge faced by Level Ground Mennonite Church in Abbotsford, British Columbia.

“We had found in the past that evening meetings had low attendance and could often drag on and on with report after report,” says Worship and Creative Arts Pastor Dan Loewen. “We felt this didn't really get people excited about our church and what we had done in the last year so we came up with a way to make it more engaging.”

In order to do that, Level Ground, a church of around 225 people, decided to tell the stories of the past year through video. Sure, there will be a few reports given by someone standing up front, but that would be accompanied by videos featuring various ministries. They wanted to make sure there was a good mix of video, talking, worship, prayer, voting and humor. And to boost attendance, the replaced a Sunday morning service with the meeting to make it a vision weekend. As one of our judges said, “Love the time of the meeting; that’s meeting people where they’re at.”