Super Bowl Sunday: a day that has become an unofficial holiday in the United States. Over 123 million people gather around the world to watch two football teams battle it out for the championship of the year.
At VOUS, we celebrate Super Bowl Sunday not with football, but with our annual VOUS Soul Bowl. It’s an opportunity to celebrate how God is moving in our church. We open the pulpit to key leaders in our community and invite them to preach a 7-minute message around a specific prompt. Soul Bowl allows us to identify leaders and communicators in our church and create avenues of growth for them to develop their skill.
This year, our church has been in a sermon collection centered around maturity. We’ve been challenged to ask ourselves, “what would the mature me do?” For Soul Bowl Sunday, all 45 of our speakers shared their thoughts around the prompt, “the one thing the mature me will do this year.” This brings additional voices, insights, and perspectives into the sermon collection, and we hope it inspires our community to carry out the lessons learned in their own lives.
Not only does Soul Bowl bring encouragement, it brings an evangelical opportunity. With so many different speakers preaching across all of our locations and services, many people who would not normally attend church came to hear their loved one preach.
The Good News is not reserved for pastors and teachers – it’s not exclusive to only a few. Every believer has a testimony and is charged with the Great Commission, to share the good news of Jesus with those in our communities. In Mark 16:15, Jesus says to his disciples, “Go into all the world and preach the Good News to everyone.” We carry the message of a lifetime and the responsibility to share it. Soul Bowl allows us to do this on a public scale.
Just like any Sunday, there are many moving parts when it comes to preparing and executing Soul Bowl Sunday.
OPERATIONALLY
In order to set our speakers up for a win, we’ve adopted a few practices that help:
Soul Bowl Dinner
The Soul Bowl Dinner is designed to build community over a shared experience. It also allows us to review key operational elements, the sermon topic, and speaking best practices.
Soul Bowl Rehearsal
A few days before Soul Bowl Sunday, we hosted a rehearsal night. Speakers gathered and went through their full sermons on stage as if it were a live experience. This helped to work out the logistical flow, allowed each speaker to practice on stage with a microphone, and preach their message in front of an audience.
This is the five-week timeline we follow:
Five Weeks Out
- Confirm speakers’ availability
- Send the invite to the Soul Bowl dinner
Four Weeks Out
- Host the Soul Bowl dinner
- Speakers submit the first draft of their message
- Feedback is sent back to the speakers
Three Weeks Out
- Speakers submit the second draft of their message
- Feedback is sent back to the speakers
Two Weeks Out
- Final notes are due
One Week Out
- Final notes are printed for speakers
- Soul Bowl rehearsals
CREATIVELY
From a creative standpoint, Soul Bowl is an opportunity to celebrate and showcase the diverse voices of our community. Our normal Sunday content capture pivoted in order to prioritize showing as many of our speakers as possible. You can check out our recap here.
We leveraged our Mature Me sermon collection design for the Soul Bowl. We used our normal sermon LEDs with the agreement that only scriptures would be displayed on screen for each speaker, alongside a 7-minute clock.
As a thank you, we gave our speakers access to the photo stream so they could celebrate as well.
