how big do you want to be?

The question of scale is a big one.

It's also a question that's applicable to both aspects of my career and possibly relevant in your life and work as well.

In fact, as I think about it writing this, it seems to me that the question of scale is one that's relevant to almost everything we do.

How big a house do you want?  How many friends do you want to have?  How much money do you want to have to manage?  How much debt are you willing to carry?  How often will you see your extended family?  How many vacations a year?  How much wine will you consume in a month or a night?  How many dishes do you need?  

How big is too big.

VERY relevant to making movies and building Churches.

A key problem with movies is trying to fit the right movie into the wrong scale.  A prime example is M. Night Shyamalan's 'LADY IN THE WATER'.  If you've read the biography done on him while he was prepping and shooting LITW you know what I'm about to hit on.  If--like most of you I'm sure--you haven't read the book then this might speak to you a bit.

Night said what he really wanted to do was make a ten million dollar 'art film'.  And it seems clear to me that LITW is that, an art film.

Problem is Night spent his typical $60,000,000 on production and WB spent their typical $70,000,000 on marketing it.  That's $130,000,000 spent and the film did nowhere well enough to call that a good investment.  If he'd done the film for $10,000,000 and WB had marketed it for $40,000,000 it probably still would have hit the numbers it hit except, at that level, it would have been a rip-roaring success.

And it seems, from the reading, that Night did the film with all his typical 'perks' including lavish sets and big money for him and his key crew and that he spared no expense with his crew even down to the kind of food they ate.

That's no way to save money.

Chris Doyle, his Director of Photography, was driven from NYC to Philly and back every single friggin' day.  The gas alone on that would have been a frivolous expenditure on an art film.

Again, par for the course if he's making 'SIGNS' but LITW needed to be another animal.

And I'm an M. Night fan (though THE HAPPENING was really quite the stumble if you ask me...) so I'm not trying to criticize him or pretend that I understand his motives.  I'm just saying that I have learned from reading about his process that it's very important to know the size your project wants to be and work within that framework.

Same thing with Churches.

Seems that many guys planting or leading Churches these days are fixated on either the Mega-Church model or the multi-site model.  Both models have their merits and I'm no expert either way.  My thought is simply that you'd better be really sure your Church (and the people in it) *want* to be a Mega-Church or a Multi-Site Church.

'Cause some Churches *want* to be 220 vibrant, loving, living people.

And If you try to shoe-horn that kind of Church into a Mega-Church package or try to force what is essentially a 'country church' into an urban or even suburban model you might find yourself working uphill.

And I'm not looking to criticize you I'm just concerned that you might be putting all this effort into doing something that's not necessarily in-sync with reality.  

Pretty sure you don't want to waste your life or your efforts, right?

So, the key is to take a good and honest look at the things we're working on and try our best to figure out what size they're wanting to be.

I met with a guy today and we were talking about Church sizes and I said, "Look, the thing with a 1,000 person Church is that it's a thousand people loving Jesus and that's great.  But there's no reason you couldn't have 5 two hundred person Churches in the same area doing the same effective work."

Same deal with your movies or your TV shows or the other things you're doing with your life. A film is no more poignant or impacting for screening on 10,000 screens as opposed to at home with one man and his wife.  As a filmmaker you're looking to connect to as many people as possible but to truly connect with each one. How you do that needs to suit your picture and your picture needs to suit how you do that.

With preaching in a Church you're looking to impact people one life at a time and through them the lives around them.

One heart will receive the truth no differently sitting among three thousand than it will sitting with 299 others or with 30 friends.

But it's a problem if your imagined or dreamed-of size doesn't match your gifting or the resources you happen to have on-hand.

You can't make 'TRANSFORMERS' with less than $200,000,000.

You can't start with 10,000 people at your Church.

So, decide what you *have* to do and the best way you can start doing it today and start doing it.  Don't impose a size structure on yourself before it's necessary and keep your eyes open to see what kind of natural 'pocket' your thing wants to sit down into.

'Cause you might make much more impact with a couple of art house screenings or preaching to a room of 30 around a table or you might be made for the multi-plex or the Mega-Church but the key is in the knowing.

Size (big and small) matters.

T