A while back I wrote about forming my Tech Arts Leadership Team. I can not stress enough how crucial this team is to my ministry. I work extremely hard and am very strategic about making sure nothing relies on me alone. If I miss a Sunday, my team doesn’t miss a beat – everything will still go on like normal. Obviously, I love being there most weeks and love encouraging my team and seeing them in action, but I try to lead in such a way that all the volunteers take ownership.
Yesterday was an exception, as I had to run lights due to my previous post on “firing a volunteer”. I ran lights because that person was scheduled to run lights. The rest of the month is covered on lighting, so I’ll go back to being a cheerleader for my team. Every now and then I’ll video direct, but that is the exception rather than the rule.
In this crazy last couple of months leading up to the move into the new worship center, I relied heavily on my Tech Arts Leadership Team. I met with them about a month ago and shared the weight of pressure and responsibility with them. They dove in and rallied around me better than I could have ever dreamed. Each person is over a specific area of ministry. They each headed up their area and led out in organizing and overseeing training for their teams. Besides being the first team to serve on our first Sunday (last week), they each committed to stay on the remainder of the month to sit beside each person in their area as they serve for the first time on the new equipment.
Besides learning new equipment in a new room, we’ve had to grow overnight and assimilate new people onto our team. We went from 2 video cameras to 3, 1 stage manager to 3 and added the video engineer/shader position since our first Sunday in the new building – that’s 4 extra people needed each week to make Sunday happen. Thankfully, people are coming up to me and asking how to get plugged in last week and yesterday. Picture that! Yesterday everyone who served last week was sitting beside those that served this week. It was a beautiful sight and I was grateful to God.
Obviously, there is a lot of excitement and momentum with a new building and new equipment, but I also think it helps to have more of the team visible to the congregation. In our old worship center only Front of House audio was visible to the people. The lighting, graphics, and video team were hidden upstairs in the “tech booth”. Now there is a large Front of House booth in the middle of the worship center where lighting, our Service Director, Producer and Front of House audio team (A1 and A2) are. We also have 3 camera men up on platforms (a left, middle and right camera) that are seen in the house. FYI – Our graphics operator, video director and video shader are in a video control room, which is in a building behind the worship center. They have an “eye in the sky” camera that they look at on a big plasma monitor, so they can see what’s going on on the stage (note the control room picture in my next to last post).
Another thing I did was to order new tech team polo shirts. We did a whole new branding campaign when we moved into the new worship center, which changed our church’s logo. I waited until the first Sunday in the new building to utilize our new, black tech team polos, which feature our church’s new logo. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: You wouldn’t believe what people will do for a free shirt. 🙂 Our team looks sharp and people have taken notice. Below is what the logo looks like on the shirt:
Some have asked, so I’ll list these two groups out for you:
- The Technical Arts Leadership Team consists of: Myself, a person over audio, a person over lighting, 2 people over video (one over live video and one over video production), a systems person, a person over graphics and social events, a person over volunteers/assimilation and Service Directors and a person over stage managers. NOTE: Each team member plays a role in assimilation, as I match them up with newcomers to shadow and learn from. them
- What it takes to make Sunday happen: 4 audio engineers (A1 and A2 at FOH, a monitor engineer and a broadcast/recording engineer), 3 camera operators, a camera shader, Video Director, graphics operator, lighting operator, a Service Director (who executes and calls cues) and a Producer (who takes in the overall experience and offers artistic suggestions for creativity and different looks/feels each week). I simply float around and spend sometime in the video control room, some time at the FOH booth and sometime in the audience just taking it all in.
What does it take to make Sunday happen at your church?