Len Wilson is Creative Director at Peachtree in Atlanta, GA.
When I started as Creative and Communication Director at Peachtree, the church was producing super lengthy bulletins for weekly worship, up to 24 pages long. They were the size of a university syllabus, or maybe a small town phonebook.
Peachtree was in desperate need of innovation in general, and with the bulletin in particular.
I had come to create “a storytelling culture,” which is a cool way of saying that I was hired to bring creativity and innovation to worship and communications, using more narrative and less information-based approaches. One of the most obvious needs was the 24-page bulletin and the church’s absurd dependency on print.
Why Peachtree was so dependent on print isn’t hard to understand. Peachtree is a stately church, part of a “high cotton” tradition with a great reputation as one of Atlanta’s finest institutions. Innovation in communication systems tend to work their way up the socio-economic ladder, with the laggards at the highest rungs, because they have the most invested in the old systems. There’s a high correlation between socio-economic status and resistance to innovation. Peachtree is no exception.