I love Christmas time.  You know, when you are working crazy hours and your body starts shouting back at you to slow down, but because the show must go on, you push through until you collapse at the finish line, with nothing but a heap underneath the Christmas tree for your family to work around?  (I really don’t feel this way anymore, but it is fun to reminisce about days gone by.)

For us church technical artists, another thing that happens at Christmas time, or during any other large production, is that all the great things we do all year long are magnified.  Unfortunately, all our bad habits and not so great process issues are also magnified.  The things we put up with on a weekly basis but should probably change, are blown up to ugly proportions for us that we have to deal with.  All year long we live with a low grade fever, not quite bad enough to go to the doctor over, but when the pressure builds to Christmas proportions, it can send us to the emergency room…so to speak.

I am pretty good at saying:  “we’ll wait and figure that out when we are in rehearsal”.  Many times this is fine, but when we hit the big services this tend to bite us. We have too many details floating around to leave any for the last minute.  There will be enough details that pop up at the last minute that we should be planning everything else we possibly can so that we are ready for the unexpected.  A loose process week in and week out can wreak havoc when the big event rolls around.

In what ways could your process improve each week to make next Christmas be the best experience?  During our rehearsals and services, let’s be observant of the things that we can improve  for next year by doing small fixes throughout the year.

 photo credit: nickpix2011

I have a friend who was a TD of a local church and when he started, he noticed that the volunteer team would talk over the intercom negatively about the people on stage and the content coming from said stage.  As a result the whole production team had a negative view of the creative arts team, and the wall that naturally exists between the booth and the stage was built taller and more robust each week.  When he realized this, my friend went to the worship leader and told him that from that day forward, the production team would not say one negative thing over the intercom or in conversation.  Instead of the standard operating procedure being criticizing someone’s performance or content, the MO would be to speak with positive words, or not say anything.

I was telling this story in a small group setting and there were a few people from the same church that looked at each other and groaned.  They all knew that the first part of the story described their team’s experience and that it was time to stop.  While they were having this revelation, I was having thoughts like “It is OK for my team to talk negatively, because my situation is unique.”  and “My friend’s church has a totally different set of issues that don’t apply to my environment.”  or “I am tired of staying on top of my team to stop the negative comments.” and on and on.  Right about then, I was convicted myself.

Letting our conversation slip into destructive negative comments is no better than letting technical excellence slip.  Would you let a camera operator continually give you bad headroom?  I hope not.  Would you let a FOH engineer keep forgetting to turn people’s mics on at the right time?  No way.  What may seem like harmless fun, slowly erodes respect and trust.

For me, the biggest challenge I have faced as a technical artist in the local church is breaking down the wall that can so easily be built between the technical and creative arts teams.  We talk a lot about wanting to feel like one team, but that can’t happen if we let negative chatter happen on our intercom, or in the back hallway or anywhere.

I’m not saying that you have to love everything happening on your stage, or that you have to be best buds with the worship leader.  I am saying that speaking in a destructive way, about the people whose art we are facilitating, is destroying any chance we have of creating something amazing together.  There should be room for constructive criticism, with emphasis on constructive.  There should be room to speak the truth, but in love.  We shouldn’t live with blinders on, but we shouldn’t live with n0-holds-barred either.

If you are a leader, please hold your tongue.  Your people are watching and listening to how you speak about the people on your stage.  If you are leader, hold your people to the highest standard.  Push your team to the high road.  Breaking down the wall between the creative arts and the technical arts requires constant attention.  Without diligence, it will naturally get built slowly, brick upon brick, which is the exact opposite of what we need and what we really want.

 photo credit: Pikesville

I spent an entire day with technical artists from around the world yesterday during the Technical Director’s Retreat Day hosted by the WFX conference in Dallas.  It was inspiring and reassuring; sobering and sad, all at the same time.  It is great to see so many churches working hard to make a difference in the world through the use of production technology.  It was amazing to be surrounded by fellow technical artists trying to get better at their craft, while trying to help each other through issues we all face.  On the sobering and sad side were the people who are at the end of their rope, who feel misunderstood by their leadership and who are ready to throw in the towel.

There was one universal theme that stuck out to me that all of us, as technical artists can work on:  Defining Expectations.

At one table I sat with, pretty much everyone had issues with expectations.  Whether it was what a senior pastor really wanted, or if it was being realistic about how long something would take to accomplish or how much something would cost; expectations were lacking at many churches.  The thing about expectations and the technical arts, is that for most non-technical people, things just magically happen, and there is no understanding of what it actually takes.  If we need someone to define expectations for us, we have to push them, we have to help them define them, we need to have data that supports our perspective.  

Leaders need information and to say you don’t have enough time or money is an answer that doesn’t work for most senior leaders I know.  They need to understand what you need to do the job, not just that you need more than you have now.  The next time you work on a video project, document how much time each phase of production took.  Now you have defined, with this much time and this much money, that this is the product you can expect.  Documenting how you spend your time is an amazing tool to communicate reality so that expectations can be set.

There is a apt quote in Charles Dickens’ book “Great Expectations”:

“Take nothing on its looks; take everything on evidence. There’s no better rule.”

Work with your leaders now to define what can be expected and change the outcome of your next project.

 photo credit: Andy Martini

In my last post, I mentioned that we are getting ready to replace the sound system in one of our venues at Willow.  We have been looking forward to this for so long and we have been placing so many of our hopes and dreams on getting something new and shining that will solve all our problems.  It is time, and the old one is horrible, but I predict that the new system will lose its luster, it won’t be perfect and we’ll move onto the next thing that is wrong, and put our expectations on the next thing that is just around the corner.

As technical artists, our forward looking selves are generally wanting our equipment and personnel issues to be solved or to pull off the next amazing production. We look forward to the day “if I only had HD cameras”, or “once the newest version of ProPresenter comes out” or “this Christmas is going to be amazing”.   Not that any of these things are bad, it is just that they don’t really solve all the problems, they don’t make life perfect, they will let us down.

Waiting for everything to be perfect is a fantasy.  Putting our hope in “things” cannot fully satisfy, and it is at odds with the very message of the gospel.  The new equipment that you are longing for will let you down.  Solving one problem will inevitably raise other, newer problems to the surface.  The next big idea will provide you with a great adrenaline rush, but then comes the crash.

In Psalm 42, the writer talks about how our souls long for God, yet he asks the question: “Why, my soul, are you so downcast?  Why so disturbed within me?”  The only solution to this feeling of being let down is to “Put your hope in God.”

Our jobs as technical artists in the local church is to push and strive for technical excellence; to look for new equipment, to recommend new ways of doing things, to push our current normal onto something special and extraordinary.  It is how we fulfill our role in the body of Christ.  We must also not put our hope in any of this.  Reach.  Strive.  Work your butt off.  But don’t place your identity in something new and shiny or flashing and amazing.  Put your hope in God.  Allow him to be your motivation.  Let him fill you up because the adrenaline will wear off.

 photo credit: marc falardeau

I am on a flight back from an event where I facilitated a table of TDs from local churches.  It was amazing time to connect with people who are in similar situations and have similar challenges.  We spent a lot of time talking about what is working well, what isn’t, and there was a particular subject that kept coming up.  Either these TDs were at a church where you were required to work at least 6 days a week, or a TD was at a church where they had 2 days off, but they rarely took them because there was too much work to get done.

This seems pretty normal in church production and it is one of the contributing factors to such widespread burnout and bitterness among TDs.  What can we do to change this trend.

Be realistic about what can be accomplished in week.

Someone at my table said that his senior pastor jokes with him that what he does is so mysterious that the TD doesn’t even really know what he does.  The role of TD is like being an auto mechanic.  We all need one, we don’t understand what they need to do to fix our car, but we just write the check.  We need to be ruthless to quantify what we do for our bosses, so that we aren’t just complaining that we work too much.  Take a month and keep track of every hour that you spend editing videos, updating Planning Center, cleaning your storage closet, whatever.  This exercise will help you get a handle on where all your time goes, as well as providing documentation for the people who lead you, to help them understand what is involved.

What can only you do?

Once you have all this data, sit down and figure out what you uniquely contribute and should be doing, and what things could you delegate to someone else.  This is a good place to start trying to figure out what needs to be done and what you should stop doing.

What is mission critical?

If you schedule is overfull, you will need to eliminate some things.  Sit down with your boss and go through the list of things that you spend your time on.  Get help to determine what you can stop doing and what is critical for church to continue to happen.  This can be a difficult exercise since everything seems mission critical or else you wouldn’t be killing yourself to get it all done.  The other challenge will be that your boss might have a different set of priorities on what is critical and what isn’t.

It is important to come to an agreement on what will and what won’t get done.  Mike Sessler, from Coast Hills Church was at my table and he recommended Andy Stanley’s book “Choosing to Cheat“, as a great resource for figuring out how to step back from working too many hours.

Letting go

For each of us to be in this for the long haul, we have to be ruthless with our time.  The list will never go away.  there will always be more to do than time to do it.  The abundant life that Christ offers us requires us to let go of control of certain things.  Are you willing to let go of some good things and hang onto only the most critical for you and your church?

There are times when long hours are necessary, but living with no margin to refresh, recharge and recenter yourself will ultimately only hurt you, your ministry and your church.

 photo credit: add1sun

I was on a flight recently where I watched the movie “Midnight in Paris”.  The basic idea is that the main character is unhappy with his current sitution and dreams about a time in the past that seems more like a golden age.  People were more interesting, amazing things were happening, it was basically more perfect.  Through some mysterious method, he ends up in the 1930’s, in the very magical time he had been wishing for, and he is hanging out with all the amazing people he was only dreaming about earlier that day.

When he gets to this better time, he meets someone who is dissatisfied with her current situation, and dreams of a different golden age, of an earlier time.  Spoiler alert:  the main character realizes that he needs to start looking at the present as a golden age and live a different way.

As the people on my team are all too familiar with, I can tend to look back to my years at Kensington Community Church as my own Golden Years.  Even on our team at Willow, it is really easy to look back to the past and think about all the amazing productions we have been a part of and think back to a more magical time.

Looking back is interesting to me, because I am pretty sure things are never as amazing as I remember.  And if I fast forward into the future I would guess that people will talk about the era that I live as the best and most perfect time to be involved in production in the local church.

Seeing this movie and thinking about how much golden era thinking I do, and those around me do, amazingly, just like the main character in the movie, I started to realize that now is the Golden Era.  Now is the chance to create something that will effect people now and in the future.  Now is the opportunity to stop wishing for something from another era, and to create a whole new era, now.

Regardless of what era you are living in, it never seems quite like we are living in amazing times.  But what if we started to act like our era was the most incredible time?  What if we lived life, right now, like we believed the current era was special?  Golden years are great to look back on, but looking back doesn’t do any good unless we let them inform what our present can look like and what the possibilities of the future could be.

 photo credit: moleitau

The other night, I woke up at 1:30 and couldn’t sleep, which is not normal for me.  When this happens, the thing that usually puts me back to sleep is reading.  It doesn’t matter what the book is.  It could be amazing or boring.  Both kinds will put me to sleep.  So I picked up my e-reading device and started reading.

Now,  no offense to Gary Molander, but I figured his book “Pursuing Christ, Creating Art” would do the trick.  Instead of falling back to sleep in 5 minutes, against all my expectations, I couldn’t put the book down.  One of the many sections I read was called “Missing the Mark”, where Gary talks about how easy it is for artists to be critical of the people in leadership over us, and it hit a little too close to home.

I was most awake during the section called “I Can Struggle to See the Big Picture”.  Gary says:

“I think my stories are the biggest, and the most important stories being told.  The lead visionary of the organization sees the clearest portrait of the organization’s story.  I do not.  The key leader gets ticked when the organization isn’t reaching its full potential.  I get ticked when my software takes too long to render.”

I am one of the first people to admit that production isn’t the most important thing all the time, but these words put this into an even brighter light.  When I think of the reason my pastor gets me graphics late, or that he wears a shirt that a mic has a difficult time clipping to; knowing that he is worrying about a mountain load of things that never even enter my mind, puts all the “short comings” into perspective.

We all have a lot to think about and plan for.  Our job as technical artists in the church is to care deeply for the things we were created for and then to execute to our best ability.  Our pastors need us to do that each week, otherwise the church wouldn’t function properly.

We must also cut our pastors some slack.  They have more going on than you or I could imagine.  I want him to care as much about my area as I do, and so does everyone else that works for my pastor.  Our pastors are carrying a mammoth load that I cannot comprehend.

Next time you wish your pastor cared more about your stuff, pray for them.  Pray that God would help them shoulder the burden of leadership to lead your church where God wants it to go.

photo credit:  Some rights reserved by igb