A recent post on 37signals’ “Signal vs. Noise” blog cites an interview in which Quincy Jones talks about Michael Jackson’s classic Thriller album. When making the record, they created “polaroids” or rough recordings of 600-700 potential songs. They kept what worked and trashed what didn’t. As Tom puts it, “That way, failure is cheap.”
Our youth ministry team has spent a lot of time creating teaching series lately (I know, hypocritical, right?) and I think that this is a really interesting model for curriculum creation. We tend to get an idea for a series, spend a ton of time building it and then execute it our services. Sometimes the series are great, and sometimes…not so much. I think that this approach would be a great way to weed out the bad stuff before we make a heavy investment of time and resources.
Plus, I just kind of dig the idea of equating our youth ministry curriculum with Thriller. But maybe that’s just me.
I’d love to hear of other areas of ministry where this approach would be useful. If you’ve got ideas, share them in the comments!
