Our new experiment: Regional Double
Presenters
If you live near Ocala, FL,
Dallas, TX, or Memphis, TN you might consider calling a regional
Double Presenter to train your teachers to double.
I am a big
believer in the idea that you learn by doing. You learn by trying.
You learn by experimenting. You can learn a little by reading, and I
read a lot. You can learn some by listening, and I listen a lot,
but, ultimately, you learn by doing. You will never learn to golf by
reading about golf. You have to golf. And, you will never learn to
do whatever it is that God has called you to do by reading about
it--though I encourage you to read--you have to dive in and do it.
Who would you
rather listen to, a self-taught guitarist who never had a single
lesson or read a single book on guitar or music theory but has spent
thousands of hours with his hands wrapped around a fret board,
strumming and crooning, or a guy who has read every book on guitar
available, but has never had his hands on a guitar?
Who would you
rather have rescue you, if you were drowning--someone who has read
every book on swimming and life-saving techniques, or a guy who grew
up pulling people out of the water on the beaches of Hawaii?
You learn by
doing.
I read of an
experiment conducted where they compared the results to two
approaches in two High School pottery classes.
In class #1
they graded on quality. Students could make as many or few pots as
they wanted. At the end of the semester, they were required to turn
in that one glorious pot for their final grade. The grade was based
solely on the quality of that one pot.
Class #2 was
graded on quantity. In this class, quality didn't matter. They were
not graded on the quality of the pots, but rather on the number of
pots created. At the end of the semester, they counted the number of
pots thrown, and, based on that number, students were graded. Those
who made a lot of pots got a high grade; students that created only
a few pots got a low grade.
Question:
which class do you think created the best pots? Which class created
the most high quality pots?
As it turns
out, the class that created the best pots was not the class graded
on quality, but the class graded on quantity. How can that be? You
learn by doing. In the process of making lots and lots of pots, the
class learned to make better and better pots.
This is why,
as I wrote in another article, we do well to
grow into ministry,
not go into ministry.
My experiment
I have an
experiment of my own I would like to invite you to consider working
with me on.
I did 120
conferences last year. That is as many as I want to do. If I want to
get the Doubling Message out to more people, I can't do it by doing
any more conferences.
This year, I
adapted my plan to encourage churches to involve the association and
state convention in promoting events. See
www.joshhunt.com/conference.htm for details. This has shown a
marked increase (along the lines of doubling) in the attendance of
my conferences. I will continue to experiment with ways to get my
message to larger crowds, I would also like to experiment with
working with Regional Double Presenters.
A Regional
Double Presenter is a presenter who presents Double Your Class content
to churches in their area. I would like to invite you to consider
working with a Regional Double Your Class Presenter. The three that
I have recruited so far are:
-
Tim
Turner, Ocala, Florida (just north of Orlando)
-
David
Smith, Memphis, TN area
-
Bryan
Faus, Dallas, TX area
If you happen
to live within a couple hundred miles of any of these locations,
consider using a Regional Presenter to train your teachers. If you
would like to have one of these men speak at your church, contact me
at josh@joshhunt.com with
three possible dates.
Benefits of Regional Presenters
There are two
main benefits of working with a Regional Double Your Class
Presenter: availability and cost.
Availability. My calendar stays full. If
you would like me to come train your teachers this fall, we may
could work out a date, but the calendar is filling up. There are
only so many meetings I can do.
By working
with Regional Double Your Class Presenters, my goal (if it works) is
to raise up dozens, then hundreds of double your class presenters,
making thousands of dates available for training.
Cost. I am writing this article in the
Roanoke, VA airport. I set my alarm at 4.30 yesterday morning to fly
here yesterday. Today, I will have the travel day from the dark
side. I fly south to Charlotte, north to Detroit, where I change
carriers from US Airways to America West. From Detroit I fly west to
Phoenix, then back east to El Paso. From there, I have an hour drive
home.
Churches
compensate me for such travel. (Usually it is not near that bad.) I
charge the same thing to everyone (with rare exceptions) because I
don't like negotiating and making deals. Speaking and product sales
is my sole source of income. With these financial realities, the
cost for hosting a conference is in the range of $1000 - $1500,
sometimes more, depending on travel costs and other details.
Regional
presenters will live with an entirely different set of financial
realties. The presenters will all be practitioners with day
jobs--mostly Ministers of Education and Pastors. Rather than
traveling half-way across the country, they will be working within a
two hundred mile radius of their home. With these financial
realities, the cost for a regional presenter will only be $500 plus
expenses. If you would like to have one of these men speak at your
church, contact me at
josh@joshhunt.com with three possible dates. Expenses will
normally be just mileage and perhaps one meal. My dream is that this
will make it possible to get the double message to a whole new tier
of churches that cannot afford the current cost structure.
What about quality?
The best
Double Your Class Conferences have not yet been presented and likely
won't be presented by me. My goal is to recruit presenters who are
more talented than I am who will do a better job than I do in
presenting the Double Your Class Vision.
I am confident
that the people I have recruited so far will do an excellent job of
presenting the why and how of doubling groups. They are all men I
have worked with several times and have a bit of a history with
them. The truth is, I am with quite a few hosts that I believe could
do a fine job of presenting the Double Your Class Content.
I believe they
will do a fine job, but I don't actually plan to trust my instinct
and hope for the best. The plan is to develop a simple evaluation
form that each participant will fill out and give to the host. The
host will mail those to me. In this way, we will be able to deal
with any presenters who are not presenting in an excellent way.
I anticipate
that in time there will be others who will come to me and want to be
a Double Your Class Presenter. This evaluation system will make it
rather simple to determine their qualifications. I will require that
they conduct a seminar on their own, then send me the evaluations.
The Plan
My plan for unfolding this
approach involves a series of experiments. My first experiment is to
see if I can get speaking opportunities for the three guys I have
recruited so far. If you would like to have one of these men speak
at your church, contact me at
josh@joshhunt.com with three possible dates. I am able to
keep my own schedule filled; I am not sure if I will be able to fill
their schedules.
Assuming I can open some
doors for these to minister, I plan to spend the summer recruiting
other presenters. If you are interested in being a presenter, the
first step is to host a conference yourself. I am going to feel most
comfortable working with people I know at first. Another thing you
can do is to seek to find your own opportunities to present. The
more practice you have at presenting, the better your presentations,
and evaluations will be.
Step three will be to role
out a marketing campaign to get more and more opportunities for the
presenters to cast a vision for doubling groups.
But then, none of this may
work. You learn by doing. So do I. I believe you have good
ideas by having LOTS of ideas. I am particularly excited about this
one because it has the potential to get the Double Your Class vision
to hundreds of thousands of teachers.
I believe in training. Steve
Parr and the Georgia Baptist Convention Sunday School office has
done extensive research validating the effectiveness of training.
See
www.joshhunt.com/mail109.htm If you would like your teachers
trained to double, and you live near Orlando, Memphis, or Dallas, I
would invite you to consider calling a Regional Double Your Class
Presenter. The cost is just $500 plus expenses. To do so, email me
at josh@joshhunt.com with
three possible dates. Let's see what happens.
By the way, if you want to
be a Double Your Class presenter and want to work outside this
system, I encourage you to do so. I have written two articles about
that:
http://www.joshhunt.com/mail112.htm
http://www.joshhunt.com/mail99.htm
This plan will include a
heavy dose of advertising that I will be paying for, thus will be
taking a "cut of the action" to pay for those costs. If you can get
yourself an opportunity to speak, go for it! It is all about getting
the message out there.
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