Weekend Experiences at

the Grunau Hotel

Our specials offers
You are visiting Bayreuth at the weekend and are looking for a special event at a good price? Just make a reservation for a Weekend Experience at the Grunau Hotel

Check in and enjoy!
Sports, culture, wellness - whatever is on your mind, here you will find the short vacation of your choice.

Choose between the following packages

Happy Weekend: Relax at the Lohengrin thermal spa

Bicycle Fun: discover nature and landscape around Bayreuth

Beer and Baroque: Visit the world's largest beer museum
and experience a fascinating light and sound show in the
baroque Margravian Opera House of Bayreuth

Prices, booking conditions and special benefits of each
 Weekend Experience are given on the pages above

Whatever change in life brought you here,
expect to take an even bigger change from here.

It’s called a college degree. And once you have it – once you’re part of that prestigious group called college graduates – you can expect unlimited changes:

• New job opportunities
• Exciting career paths
• Higher earnings
• More professional respect
• Greater personal satisfaction
  
  So what brought you here? Undoubtedly the same life circumstances that have brought almost eight million other current adult students in the U.S. back to college: job dissatisfaction, plans for a new career, the need for more income, a recent divorce, family relocation, layoff of a spouse… or maybe just a deep-down desire to complete what you once started.

We know adult learners are different in almost every way from traditional college students. You’re here not because your parents want you to be or society expects you to be, or it’s the logical transition from high school. You’re here because:

• You are ready at this time in your life to start or finish your degree
• You’re self-directed, highly motivated and goal-oriented
• You’ve gained a wealth of life experiences – raising a family, handling jobs, managing financial obligations – and you bring that richness to the learning experience
• You learn differently and you want to apply what you learn immediately
  
  Planning Weekend Experiences
  

Video Advice by Anthony D. Coppedge Contributing Writer September 25, 2006

Does your Pastor use a Creative Team to help craft the weekend experience at your church? Does your team plan out sermon series, music, videos and events well in advance?

Chances are, your Pastor is overloaded with studying for the weekend, managing the staff, meeting with members and handling the day-to-day of today's church. I doubt that your Pastor has had the time to even consider how to implement a strategy that would help relieve some of the stress by inviting a group to help plan the weekend experience.

Of course, how far in advance you plan depends on what you're trying to do, the manpower you have to do it, the facility issues (owned vs. temporary) and the budget. All of that comes under "Implementation".

The actual "Planning" of concepts and ideas, in my opinion, needs to be 3 months out. This gives those who use a lot of interactivity (video, audio, lighting, drama, props, graphics) in the service the time to keep new ideas fresh, apply concepts to practical solutions and implement without the pressure cooker of week-to- week deadlines.

When you get right down to it, the ability to manage the process is key. I've used a lot of ways to accomplish this, but none has worked as well for me as a simple Gantt chart. These are used in construction all the time. They show the various trades and timelines for a project so that the Architect can stay on top of the overall process to make sure it comes in on-time and on-budget.

I prefer the software Microsoft Project 2003, as it's easy to set up your teams, their areas of responsibility and the timelines/deadlines to ensure all of the coordination comes together.

For smaller churches, a simple Excel spreadsheet can handle this, as the needs are typically less involved. But for churches really pushing the envelope creatively, project management is a highly valuable skill/asset.

Finally, you can only schedule to a point: the Holy Spirit can move and change at a moment's notice. But in reading the Bible, He consistenly choses order over chaos. In my experience, I've seen that He's capable of moving 3 months in advance just as well as 3 minutes in advance.

In my opinion, It's much easier to ditch a plan if God moves than it is to create one if He doesn't.

The most striking example of this was September 11th, 2001. The need to make changes for the upcoming weekend was obvious, and everyone did the last minute heroics to pull it off. But again, the plan and team structure was already in place to allow for that change and helped avoid people burn out and emotional train wrecks. Share this idea with your Pastor and begin 2004 by planning out your weekend experiences to be more engaging, interactive and exciting!

Anthony Coppedge provides consulting to Churches for developing a media ministry and choosing the right equipment, Manufacturers for developing new products and marketing strategies to reach the church market and Dealers for sales training and systems integration development for working with churches. He lives in Bedford, Texas with his wife and two daughters and can be reached at anthony@anthonycoppedge.com