Every now and then I get caught up in what I am doing, in what my job title is or the amazing productions I am a part of pulling off.  Sometimes these are going well and I am flying high.  When things are going less well, I am faced with the question of where I derive my worth from.

If a production goes well, I’m a good person and worth something?  If a production doesn’t go well, am I a bad person and worth less?

I have been spending some time reading the book of Romans and yesterday it was time for Romans 12.

¹Therefore, I urge you,brothers and sisters, in view of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies as a living sacrifice,holy and pleasing to God—this is your true and proper worship.

This hit me at just the right time.  What I do matters.  How I do it matters.  However, the outcome is not a representation of who I am as a person.  What I do and how I do it are acts of worship.  I do them not to define who I am, but I bring all of who I am as a spiritual discipline.

It can be easy to get caught up in doing cool things because they are cool.  So you go all out and bring your best because it is fun to be a part of something amazing.  It is also easy.  What about the mundane parts of my job?  Why do I do those things?

I was having a conversation with a friend about classical music the other day, and how there are two extremes versions of conductors:  those that select music for an amazing musical environment for the musicians, and those that give the audience the type of music that most people like to listen to.  The challenge with playing music the largest audience would like, is that the orchestra members end up playing the same Beethoven symphonies over and over again.  The audience gets what they want, but the orchestra slowly dies.

At the end of the day, each member of the orchestra needs to figure out why they are playing in the first place.  If they are playing music they love but nobody is coming to hear them, they don’t have a job.  If they only play the stuff people want to hear, how can they motivate themselves to pour their passion into Mozart’s 40th symphony one more time?

We all have less sexy parts of our jobs.  Right now, my answer for handling the mundane or the less than wonderful parts of my job, is that I am not doing it define my own value, I am doing it as my act of worship to a God who created me this way, and I want to show my thanks at every opportunity.  As we say around Willow Creek, I will give my best because God gave his best for me.

I would encourage you to read the rest of Romans 12.

You are not defined by what you do, but we are called to be all we were created for.

Let your actions be motivated in worship, not by trying to determine whether you are good enough or not.

Looking back through some old blog posts, I came across the one entitled “to lead or be led”, which was a reflection on the leadership style of Dwight D. Eisenhower while he was the PotUS.  In the process, I got distracted by the possibilities of the internet and started looking up quotes by my man Dwight.  The title of this blog is one that I found.

This feels like something that I believe strongly.  To plan like crazy, so you can be ready to throw the plan away.  This quote from my buddy Dwight was from his army days, talking about the fact that good offensive tactics in the army relied on planning like crazy, then letting the plan go if necessary.  This allowed individual commanders to make adjustments as the situation changed.

This is similar to a quote by Bill Hybels from the Gurus of Tech 2012 event that just happened.  “Build flexibility into your capability.”

When getting ready for an event, I try like crazy to know everything possible.  From there I try to imagine all the possible things that could happen and try to come up with Plan B’s and Plan C’s.  I have learned that things will change.

I approach every service like I can know only a part of what is going to happen.  I try to know that part like the back of my hand, so that I can be prepared for what I can’t know.  In a weekend service scenario, we are doing something completely different each week, which means we haven’t seen it, and really don’t have a clue if it is going to work.

Every other year, Willow does a conference in Germany.  It is tons of work, but an amazing time.  We take a crew from Willow Creek and meet up with a crew of German volunteers to walk into an arena and build everything up from scratch.  One year, for a particular session, we had something like 6 microphones fail in the span of 10 minutes.  Since one of our values is trying to minimize distraction, this was not a good thing.  Especially in front of 8000 people.

If I could boil it all down, we had abandoned a plan B.  In the US, we always have a wired handheld in the front row in case something happens to whatever mic is being used.  In Germany, we had one mic ready for that purpose in this particular session, but we didn’t take into account the translator.  We had used the second mic channel for another speaker earlier in that session.  The problem is that any time an American gets up on stage, we have someone translating it into German and at the last minute, an American decided to jump up on stage, requiring us to have 2 handheld mics.

What followed would have to be the worst production moment of my life this far.  I wanted to crawl into a hole.

Going back to the two quotes from above, I had locked myself into my plan.  I had plenty of capability, but I had thrown flexibility out the window.  The cue sheet had become my rule.

Part of knowing when to throw a plan away, or when to be flexible, requires experience, and learning from those experiences.  It also comes from having a plan in the first place, to know when it is time to change it.

Are you planning like crazy?  Are you learning from your experiences?  Are you ready to improvise when the time comes?

Many of us are very protective of our equipment.  We can also be very protective of how that equipment gets used.  This becomes evident when someone from the outside wants to use “our” equipment, or “our” room.  This could be a guest artist, or it could be the children’s ministry.  They have a certain way of doing things.  So do we.  They have been burned multiple times.  So have we.  They want it to be successful.  So do we.  But instead of focusing on the fact that we all want it to go well, we focus on all the ways we don’t agree, or aren’t seeing eye to eye.  As a result, we are seen as over-protective, territorial, and basically difficult to work with.

Much of this comes from the fact that we don’t know each other that well, and have not worked together very often.  There are a ton of unknowns at play, and most of the time, things can get worked out once we understand each other.

Here are a few ideas on how to seem less territorial, and more of a team player.

Decide what matters the most.  You can’t die on every hill that comes along.  After initial conversations, figure out which things are essential and which things you could let go of.  So often with guest artists, we would try to squeeze them into our way of doing things, making it impossible for them to even be themselves.  Instead now, we figure out what is non-negotiable in our particular situation, and then release the rest of it to the other person.

Explain the reason why.  Many times, when we start putting restrictions on people, they don’t understand why.  My wife and I took at parenting class when our kids were little, and one of the concepts was that kids will respond better if they understand the why behind something.  “Don’t run out into the street.” isn’t as effective as “Don’t run out into the street, because there are cars that might hit and kill you.”  The same idea applies when working with people outside of production.  They don’t understand what you do, so they don’t understand the no…or the yes.  Help people understand where you are coming from.

Broaden your perspective.  It is very easy for production people to be seen as hyper focused on the technical stuff, and not really aware of the bigger picture.  When trying to negotiate what needs to happen, help the other person see that you aren’t territorial, by asking questions about what is trying to be done, or what the purpose of the event is.  This helps people see that you care about the impact of the event, not just the stuff that matters to you.

We all have people or groups that push us into being territorial.  How can you use these ideas to overcome your territorial-ness?

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.