I love to read.  Unfortunately I have discovered that as I get older, I have trouble staying awake while reading.  I’m not really that old, and in reality, I have had this problem for at least 15 years…ok since college.  As a result, I have been reading the same book for 8 months.(it is 1200 pages, just for the record)

To combat my mild case of narcolepsy, I have gradually switched over to listening to audiobooks.  Not only do I have about a 30 minute commute to work and 30 minutes home when I can listen, but with iTunes, you can listen at 2x speed, making it possible for me to get around 2 hours of reading done a day.

One of the difficulties with listening to a book instead of reading one, is that you can’t underline anything.  I was driving to work the other morning and I had to keep rewinding the book, then deciding I should pull over to send myself an email with what I wanted to “underline”.

It was a quote by George Bernard Shaw, a guy who had just about ever profession during his lifetime, but is perhaps best known as a playwright.  Here’s the quote:

“Reasonable people adapt themselves to the world. Unreasonable people attempt to adapt the world to themselves. All progress, therefore, depends on unreasonable people.”

This hit me like a ton of bricks for a couple reasons.

I wish people were more reasonable.  As someone who has to figure out how to make someone’s ideas a reality, I can easily fall into the trap of wishing they would come up with ideas that were more doable; or ideas that were easier to figure out; or ideas that wouldn’t require me to stay late to work.

If this quote is true, how can I embrace the unreasonable person’s ideas?  What if I want to be the one who helps change the world with my ideas?  How can I be more unreasonable? 

Most of the really amazing things I have been a part of, have been unreasonable.  If I think back on it, much of the reason why I love to work in production can be traced back to some crazy unreasonable task:  an all-nighter, a stupid deadline, being completely outside of my comfort zone.  I wouldn’t trade many of those memories for anything, regardless of how unreasonable they seemed at the time.  In hindsight, they are the times that I felt like I learned the most and grew more than any other time in my life.

As technical artists, part of our job is to make the ideas of “unreasonable” people a reality; to adapt to the world around us.  The other part of it for me personally is to begin adapting to myself the parts of my world that I have been uniquely created to adapt.

For our churches to move forward; for us as individuals to move forward; we need to adapt to our world, and make the unreasonable happen, but how can we embrace the unreasonable so that our organization can move forward?

I’m sure this isn’t an actual disease, but I have found the reality of it to be true in my own life.  Leading up to a big event, I spend every spare moment thinking, planning, then executing the event.  In the most recent case, Easter.  After it is all over, the adrenaline is gone, the focus is missing, all that work is in a dumpster.

Hopefully lives have been changed.  Hopefully all the work was worth the effort.  But now what?  It is time to get back to the every day.  How do I bounce back from expending most of myself on the event that just happened?

Build recovery into what is required to pull of the large event.  So often, we are focused on just getting to the finish line of the service being over.  Maybe you move the finish line one step further to cover the load out.  I would say that the end of the race needs to extend even further, taking into account the fact you have been working some pretty crazy hours to make the event happen.

I need to be better about how to recover from a big event.  While I have been at rehearsals, my family has been continuing to live life, and I need to catch up.  Unfortunately for them and for me, I am not good about thinking about this in advance.  For recovery to happen, it needs to be a part of the original plan; thought out and intentional.

One of the difficult parts about taking time to recover is that I have been ignoring large chunks of my job in order to make the big event happen.  Emails have piled up.  Deadlines have passed on other projects.  Other deadlines are looming.

For me to be at my best, and for me to be able to give my all, I need to take time to recover.  I don’t necessarily have to make up all extra time I put in over Easter, but I need to at least feel like a human being again.  I am not doing anyone any favors by just pushing past this because there is work to be done.

If you lead people, help them by building recovery into their schedule.  Unfortunately, I learned this lesson recently, by not doing a good job of this.  It is important for individuals to figure out how to make life work for them, but as a leader, it speaks volumes about how much you value a person by making recovery a normal part of how things get done.  Not only making it normal, but by creating a plan that says, “During this run, take these days off, and when it is all over, you will take these days off.”

There will always be more work to get done than there is time for, so do everyone a favor and recover.

 photo credit: Mr. T in DC

How many of you are working crazy long hours to pull off a Good Friday or an Easter service or both?  How is to going?  Are you having the time of your life?  Or are you frustrated?

I have a theory that holiday services are an exaggerated form of our weekly experience.  The things that are good about our weekly process, play to our advantage when we are in the middle of rehearsals.  And the things that we try to work around or gloss over in our day to day interactions bubble to the surface and can wreak havoc on everyone involved.

Having the good exaggerated is wonderful, however the exaggerated bad can usually take over.

Whether it is a relationship that you have needed to invest time in outside of pulling off services; or it is a broken process that you have figured out how to deal with each weekend; or having a plan just in your head and not on paper is catching up with you; what are you doing every week that is effecting your bigger productions?

In my opinion, the key to having a great Easter production experience is to start the day after Easter, and begin working on relationships and processes and plans for your week-in and week-out services.

Hoping that Easter will be better next time just because you want it to, seems pretty foolish.

You are probably saying “Thanks a lot for the advice, now that it is too late to make this Easter better.”  However, after the services are done and the load out is complete, commit yourself to fixing the every day issues, and continue to build into the areas that are working great.

What can you work on to make the process better or that relationship stronger?  Not just for the next big production, but for next weekend.

Making every day better is key to making your next Easter experience the best it can be.

 photo credit: prettywar-stl

I gave an interview for a local magazine the other day.  Being interviewed always makes me a little uncomfortable, but I agreed to it, so I gave it.  It was a local magazine highlighting local businesses, and they were interested in knowing more about the Global Leadership Summit, hosted every year at Willow Creek Church.  They wanted to talk to me about the technology involved to pull off a live broadcast event for North America, and then how we rebroadcast it to people around the world.

Sitting in front of the blank page of this blog, already worn out from the stress of the Easter production coming up, a question from this interview popped into my head.  I’m not sure if they asked the question or if I just started talking about it, but the idea of “Why do you do this?” came up.    Hopefully the answer I gave will help remind you and me why being worn out from Easter matters.

I could do production almost anywhere, for any reason.  Many of the people I work with do some free lance side work, and it is generally corporate meetings or product launches.  At the end of the day, these meetings are all about making more money for shareholders.  The side work is helpful for a couple reasons.  One is that it helps to earn some extra money for individuals from time to time.  The other reason is that it is a great reminder of the privilege it is to work for a purpose greater than shareholder value.

As you live out the run up to Easter, remember that we get to do this!  You can work your butt off and be just as tired as you feel now, all so a company can make more money, or you can do it all so that people can hear the gospel message.

Whether you are on staff at your church or a volunteer, you are investing your time for the sake of people.

[Pause.  Think about that.]

Lives will be changed forever by your efforts this week and next.

[Pause.  Picture someone you know.]

All those long hours you are putting in or will put in, are for the sake of those who are far from God and will hear of his love for possibly the first time. 

[Pause.  Let this thought help you to the finish line.]

In case you don’t hear it from anyone else, “Well done.  Way to go.”

[Pause.  Believe it.]

 photo credit: University of Delaware Alumni Relations

I hate this idea.  I hate using it as a title for this post.  It goes against everything in me as a technical artist.  I don’t consider myself to be a perfectionist, far from it.  You can ask anyone who has helped me with a home improvement project.  I want things to be done the best they can, but perfection takes too long…and is impossible.

Talking about production in the local church, when things can be done well, they should.  If something is within my power to accomplish, I should do it.  This is a lot easier said than done.  Enter the picture:  picking up kids from school, a less experienced volunteer behind the console, just coming off a week of working 5 nights in a row, bad footage, blown bulbs in the perfect light…and the list could go on.  There are tons of obstacles that get in the way of doing an excellent job; some inside and some outside of our control.  These cause us to make decisions on lowering the bar.

Lowering the bar isn’t exclusively a technical question.  Many times we lower the bar by staying late to get an edit just right and not going to our son’s basketball game.  We can lower the bar by neglecting our personal development by working non-stop on the urgent all the time.  We tend to lower the bar by not talking honestly with our worship leader and stuffing our frustrations too long.

For many of us production types, we have a singular focus, and that is technical excellence.  We don’t want to hold up rehearsal.  We don’t want to be the bottleneck.  We want to be able to accomplish the impossible without help.  For us, lowering the bar equates to not doing our best all the time on the task before us.

Maybe we have defined success the wrong way…or at least not completely enough.  Success means the technical arts in the local church need to include developing new volunteers more fully; it needs to include how engaged we are with our children; it needs to also include us as individuals becoming more like Christ.  Does this mean we exclude always increasing our capacity as technical artists?  No.  Does this mean we stop trying to raise the bar, because excellence honors God, reflects his character and inspires people?  No.  Do we lower the bar because it’s too much work to keep it raised high?  No.

Becoming a mature technical artist in the local church requires us to define each day what success looks like; where we are going to choose to raise the bar and where we need to choose to lower the bar.  These are not easy choices, but choices that need to be made none the less.

The other day, my team and I participated in a thought exercise that Steven Sample, author of the book “The Contrarian’s Guide to Leadership”, talks about.  When he was faced with a particularly difficult challenge, he would try to imagine how a lady bug would solve the problem, or even how a dishwasher might think about solutions.

The idea was to try and think differently about how things get done.  Not to just think differently, but think in radical terms, to free your brain from constraints and preconceived ideas about how things are done or should be done.  I decided that I would consider how ninjas might do production at my church.  It was a fun exercise, and most of the ideas, if not all of the ideas we had were ridiculous and impossible or both.

It got me thinking about how we go about doing production for our church and the ministries that we support.  So much of what we do and how we do it is a function of either how we have always done it or because we are processing things based on production values alone.  During the exercise, nothing really popped out as wrong thinking or that there needed to be crazy changes.  What did jump out to me was wondering what matters to our church, especially when it pertains to production.

I do a lot of defining expectations for my team, mostly based on my production perspective.  I can’t remember the last time I asked the church leadership what they expected from my team.  Is audio consistency the highest value or is volunteer involvement the most important thing?  Is a short rehearsal critical, or should we allow for more time to work through the kinks?  Is having cameras pointed at the wrong thing a problem, or do we need to increase our level of camera work?

I am feeling pretty sarcastic even asking these questions!  As a production person, I am guessing we would all answer these questions in a similar manner.  However, if you have chosen to invest your production skills in the local church, at the baseline you know that the point of all this production is to help to facilitate life change.  If all you cared about was production values, you could go on tour or work for a production company or any number of places, where there is more money to do things at the highest levels.

I’m not saying that excellence doesn’t matter or that production doesn’t have a place in the church.  On the contrary, I am very passionate about the role that technical artists play in the life of the local church.  However, my passion and values have to be balanced against the passion and values of my church.  What is my church about?  How does production fit into how ministry happens?  How do we have an appropriate level of production without just spending money on the newest gear, that may be exactly what we think our church needs?

How many assumptions do you make about what your church leadership thinks about production?  When was the last time you asked the question:  “What are the expectations?”  Take a look at what you and your team are about and try to imagine how ninjas would get that done.

 photo credit: dcosand

Ever notice how production people don’t completely fit in anywhere?  In a creative brainstorming meeting, we are the ones trying to figure out how to make something happen.  In a operations meeting, we are thinking creatively about how to get something done.

On our team, we have been talking quite a bit about the operation side and the ministry side of our church.  Typically there is a line drawn down the middle, showing the two sides of what makes our church run.  For many people, it seems easy to classify the accounting department as being on the operations side, and the youth pastor on the ministry side; the person cleaning the facility after an event on the operations side, and the worship pastor on the ministry side.

When it comes to production, we have a foot in both camps.  We are intimately tied to the ministry that is happening all over our church, but we are also figuring out more practical operational type things also.  In a single meeting we are brainstorming new ways of making an element in the service better through the technical arts, while we are also trying to figure out how to fit all our inputs into the channels we have.

In a creative meeting, there is a whole side of me that is thinking about how to plug in 4 giant inflatable moon walks for a middle school event and which circuits I am going to plug them into so that I don’t blow a fuse, all the while someone is asking me if a worship set list will work or not.

This can lend itself to me feeling like I should just be sawn in half, so that the part of me that needs to deal with the operational side can focus on it, and the creative side  of me can just sit in the moment.

The reality is that God created me to live with a foot in two worlds; to understand two different perspectives in any given situation; to think differently from anyone else at the table.  Instead of wishing that more people thought like me, I should relish the thought that I am the only one with my perspective and that the way I think is vital to my church functioning properly.

If you are a technical artist in the local church, you know what I am talking about.

How can you fully embrace what feels like a split personality?  What can you do to function more fully as who God made you to be? 

 photo credit: whlteXbread

I wrote a post on the Willow Creek Association for their blog to church leaders.  Even though it is targeted to church leaders, I thought there would be something useful for the tech artists among us.

If you had to define the church tech people you work with, would it be:

a.)  Creative.  Energetic.  Helpful.  Indispensable.

b.)  Drained.  Critical.  Grumpy.  Anti-social.  Resistant.

Technical artists worshiping :)

I don’t need to know your exact situation to know that we all want to work with a church technical artist defined by “option a”.  However, I have been to many churches, in many different environments, and I see “option b” all the time.  Full time, part time, volunteer, it doesn’t matter.  “Option b” is everywhere.  What is happening at your church?  Chances are, if you dig around a little, you’ll find an unhealthy tech, buried under too much work.

As a leader at your church, not only would you like to thank me for pointing out the obvious, but you are wondering what to do about it.  How can I get an “option a” type tech person at my church?  Is there a school where they crank these types out?  Can I trade in the “option b” I have for a new “a”?  Can I poach one from Willow Creek when no one is looking?

I’m a tech person myself, and I can tell you that it is way easier to be an “option b” tech person, than an “option a” one.  Unfortunately for your church, “option a” technical artists don’t just happen by themselves.  Tech people are unusual and are generally misunderstood at most every church and most of what they do is a mystery to you.  Your tech person is pouring themselves out for your church, and nobody fully understands what they do, how they do it, or what they need to keep doing it.  It is no wonder that “option b” is so wide spread.

The production team at Willow Creek Community Church understands what is like to be a tech person in the local church, which is why we are hosting our 2^nd annual Gurus of Tech conference (FREE) to help equip, train and inspire the “option b” types at your church toward becoming an “option a” technical artist.

There will be skill specific training (FREE), and while that is useful and what most tech people hunger for, we will be focusing most of our attention on the heart condition of tech people everywhere: knowing the difference between excellence and perfection, making your relationship with God more than just your serving time, understanding how production fits into the mission of the whole church. (ALL FREE)  Basically moving “option b” towards “option a”.

I would encourage you to send every tech person you have. Check out the website for further information: www.gurusoftech.com (FREE)

What: Gurus of Tech

When: May 22-23

Where: Willow Creek Community Church – Crystal Lake Campus

Cost: FREE