In 2016, be excellent and show your flaws.

Churches have been getting really good at producing awe-inspiring services over the last several years. I love production. Like, I love it a lot. I love the way the stage lights can command the emotional attention of a room — When screens, sonics and scenic come together to create the perfect moment. I have a ton of respect for (and would even hope to be numbered among) the dedicated creatives, technicians and worship leaders who have raised the bar in the rapidly developing world of church music and production. These tools and skills for Kingdom expansion are absolutely worth all the energy we can give to their mastery.

Here’s what we should keep doing (even more!) in 2016.

Let’s keep pushing. When you pump the haze / call the shots / push the bass / queue the track, whatever…remember that it’s all for this purpose: To keep giving our communities reminders of the gospel packaged in creative pieces that they will never forget. Let’s stay unrelenting until we’ve removed the distractions completely. And let’s not just remove the negatives…let’s amplify the message, by creating heart-rending experiences that tell the story with unmistakeable clarity. Point them to Jesus.

And as much so, let’s act on our understanding that it’s not just the outcome, but the process that glorifies God and shows the world that we mean it.

This is excellence, and it absolutely belongs in church.

But here’s what we should leave in 2015:

The pursuit of the perfectly polished service doesn’t fit the core premise of the Church. We’re all human, broken, imperfect people who have received God’s grace. If all our communities see are flawless services consisting of young, attractive people on stage saying things only spiritually and emotionally invincible people could say, it’s natural that someone in the rows would assume this isn’t a God they’ll ever be able to please. That’s the opposite of the gospel, and doesn’t reflect God or ourselves accurately at all. We do our best, but sometimes we’re not amazing, and that’s ok.

Let’s show them reality, rather than perpetuating the illusion that “real” worshipers are always carefree and smiling. The creative high-points are great, but don’t go as far as constructing a norm for worship that can never be exported back to the real world of office cubes, minivans, family conflicts, and all the rest of life.

So, for the next 365…

It’s easy to strive for a polished weekend service, because all you have to do is “get it right” for a few hours each weekend. But let’s think about how to serve our communities at a higher level than that. For those in weekend ministry, the pursuit of excellence is an all-encompassing deal. We can’t just chose to be excellent for a few hours on the weekends, while omitting that same care from the way we relate personally to another staff member in a meeting the next day. Excellence can’t be present on the stage, but absent from the way we show our volunteers respect through organized scheduling. The examples could go on, but the point is that in order for it to be called excellence at all, it has has to permeate the whole system and bear real fruit in the lives of those we shepherd.

So let’s double-down on excellence this year. But the perfectly polished service? — put it out to the curb, right next to that Christmas tree.