Jason Medlin
Worship Leader
Experience Easter
Experience Easter is an event that God laid on my heart about four years ago. I wanted to provide an experience that would tell the story of Easter in a way that would be interactive, unique, in-depth for believers, and an introduction to Jesus for non-believers. A walk-through that every person would remember and be challenged to think about an element of Jesus' life and crucifixion. We presented rooms that covered the Garden of Gethsemane, the calling of the Disciples, the beatings of Christ, the trials of Christ, and each walk-through ended going through the tomb of Jesus himself. The event was held on Good Friday and used to enhance the Easter Sunday morning worship time.
I wanted people to understand that the disciples were people just like you and I. 2012 was the height of Facebook so I came up with the idea of creating Facebook pages for each disciple. Hopefully this allowed each of these 12 men to seem a little bit more like regular people.
These "transformation" signs were designed with two sides. The first side was how we see ourselves. You can see in the picture that the words in white represent how we see ourselves with all of our faults. A simple spin of the poster reveals the same image but with all of our faults removed and words that describe how God sees us instead.
The message of Easter changes people. I wanted everyone to learn that. God changes us from the inside out. Each room on the journey had a big poster like this one. On it was more scripture and a brief summary.
This 8 foot tall, 25 foot long time line illustrated the night of Jesus' trials. The entire process took over 12 hours and this Trial wall made it easy to follow.
The elements of Jesus' crucifixion were brutal. I wanted people to be able to see and handle each device. This was a set-up to the real crucifixion room which was completely black and people sat a listened to 40 lashes and nail hits. Very powerful.
At this station, Jesus' prayer from John 17 was taken and personalized. Each time Jesus used the word "they" or "them" we changed it to be gender specific pronouns. Then I had a computer programmer write a software program that would import a specific name into the prayer so that we could print out Jesus' prayer with a person's name in it. The person was given a card that had Jesus praying specifically for them in the Garden.
This was the prayer station for Experience Easter. Every person could write or text a prayer request and that request would be sent to our prayer room where people were actively praying over each request.