Yesterday was an awesome day for Total Grace Christian Center. With three separate, all-live (no video) locations throughout metro-Atlanta and four (sometimes five) Sunday morning services, we are getting better and better at creating a great experience for all of our locations and yesterday was a great example of this. We were one of the first churches in Atlanta to go multi-site and have been doing it now for over five years with a great deal of success. We have wrestled with a couple of ways to do our Easter Sunday services over the years and see it done in a lot of ways in the city (rent out a big stadium and have one big service, keep the regular schedule, etc.), but we do it a little different on Easter Sunday.
Normally, we have a 7:30am service, two separate, simultaneous, all-live 10 am services, and our largest gathering at 11:30am. Frequently we also hold special services @ 7pm as well.
Yesterday, we did a church-wide sunrise service @ 7am at our Clayton County location, and did three simultaneous services @ 10am @ all of our locations (HQ, Clayton, and Gwinnett). We had live worship at all of the locations (which was great everywhere). Bishop & Co-Pastor Alvarado then did a great song together @ our HQ Location from their upcoming recording project with the Ministry Couples Institute.
For the Gwinnett Location, this is where we tapped into a live feed and piped the service into Gwinnett with our projector and screen using SlingBox. I was surprised at just how easy it was to make use of the technology. I have a few complaints about its efficiency, but thought that it was good overall. So, while Bishop Alvarado preached live @ HQ, we watch the live feed at our two other locations and it went very, very well. Attendance was up at all of our locations and we probably had around 3,000 people that attended all of our locations and services combined – which is awesome. I know we joke that "everybody comes to church on Easter," but attendance really does go up. I was shocked at the number of first time visitors at all of our locations.
It is now 6:51 am on Monday morning and my youngest son, Ezekiel (we call him EZ) is crying for me to come get him out of bed about a full two hours early….which means I must quit my rambling about the church. Bye. Here is a picture of my crew yesterday outside of Norcross High School – where we have our services….