Making the Peasant Princess: Insights into a Mars Hill Sermon Series Part 1

AJ Hamilton

At Mars Hill, I get the distinct privilege of overseeing the staff of the Preaching & Theology Branch.

This branch is made up of an incredibly talented group of:

web designers
graphic designers
administrators
video directors and producers
animators
editors
content managers
manuscript copy-editors
support staff for Pastor Mark Driscoll

The staff receive frequent emails requesting insight into the systems and applications we employ to produce the stage set design, website, vodcast, and video intros. For those of you interested in our work, I hope this blog and any others that may follow will be helpful to explain the process the P&T staff go through to create the works you can find at www.marshillchurch.org and the many connected one-off sites.

Series: The Peasant Princess

There have been so many projects to highlight recently, I decided to cover the most timely, our current sermon series: The Peasant Princess: A Love Story from the Song of Songs.

As a branch, we knew that Pastor Mark would be preaching through the Song of Songs well in advance of the September launch date, but the direction he would take and the best way to support the sermon visually and conceptually were not as clear as we would have liked. Going into the time of greatest growth potential for a church (the fall), we wanted to make sure we took full advantage of college kids starting school and summer vacations ending.

Knowing that SOS would be a “drawing” sermon we first began working on a sermon series branding that centered on the concept of “Free Sex”. We went with this title and began working on visual concepts for about 3 weeks before we found out the name was changed to “Free Love” to try and tone down the in-your-face title we previously had. 72 hours later and 2 weeks till print deadlines and sermon series launch, we had a 3rd and final title!