I think it’s important for churches to “mix it up” sometimes. It’s so easy for church to become routine. You just go through the motions sort of like brushing your teeth. My job as a pastor is to keep church from becoming routine.

Ultimately, if Spirit of God is moving in your church, it’ll be anything but routine. But there are things we can do as well. Sometimes you just need to move the piano. You need to change the environment or change the order or change the entrance. There are a thousand ways to do that. One way is to rent a donkey. That’s what we did this weekend at our Capitol Hill location. We couldn’t do it at our movie theaters because of liability reasons. But I had the donkey get up on stage at Ebenezers. It was supposedly a professional donkey that has performed at the Kennedy center but it must have gotten a little bit of stage fright. It jumped on and then jumped off. Scared me a little. The webcast might be worth watching this week just for that.

For what it’s worth, I think church ought to be the most creative place on the planet. That means you sometimes need to do something different. One cool side-effect of getting the donkey and utilizing him a guest greeter was how many non-NCCers stopped to ask why we had a donkey. Some of them will end up at NCC because of a donkey.