The fact is that as a church tech volunteer to run the sound board or work the presentation and worship software or as a church tech staff that is overseeing and filling in with church tech responsibilities, we have a lot to do. We do not need to be taking on other people’s responsibilities too. At the same time, take your game to the next level and be an expert at your specific craft.
Being A Better Church Tech Expert
Here are three things to help your team become experts.
- Be Responsible For Just One Thing.
A great value to have for a church tech team is to focus on one object. If (ok, let’s be honest, when) things come crashing down during a service, you do not want to be in charge of more than one task. You either run the sound board or the web stream, not both. You take on the live tweeting and social media or the sermon presentation. Having more than one task can be a distraction and impossible if something goes wrong. - Be An Expert At That One Thing.
Knowing how to use a piece of technology or software is fine for putting it together. Setting up the audio levels during rehersal, preparing the presentation software, focusing the camera before hand is great preparation. But do you know your one task inside and out when the power flickers off and everything resets or someone comes and plays with your settings between rehearsal and game time? Know your task so if something goes wrong you can quickly identify it and restore it. - Don’t Take Other People’s Tasks.
We talked about this topic a bit already this week. If you are the sound board technician, you are not the worship leader and not in charge of the vocals. This goes doubly if you have a volunteer in that position. Your job is not to write the tweets themselves, but to get the content from the pastor and then craft it into tweet form. Own your area as experts. Church tech leadership, give boundaries to the rest of the church and protect your team. Then serve with the best capacity possible.
This is not a nice and easy issue for church leadership because it requires people to put lots of effort into it. What are your thoughts on this topic? Is this possible for you?
Chip Dizárd says
I find this is harder with smaller churches. For example, one Sunday the audio guy was late and guess who had to fill in, you got it, me. But I feel cross training is important so when something does go wrong, someone can fill in the gap. I agree with your three points, thanks for the video blog.
seventy8Productions says
Chip, I totally understand that this is “the ideal situation.” But even with bigger churches, you begin to add technology which requires more eyeballs and most likely more volunteers that might not have the same commitment as a paid staff. Even more so, you will have people that are not part of the church tech team not owning their part in the process and hurting the church tech team’s productivity. Some processes we can completely change, others we need to recognize that you only control so much. By no means is this an easy task to complete, but something that I think we need to strive towards always.