When was the last time you heard from God?  When was the last time you were listening for God’s voice?  As a tech person, I tend to find myself back in the booth just trying to facilitate what other people have heard from God.  Hearing from God is something that happens to other people.

I have been reading my way through the gospels and right now, John the Baptist has just seen Jesus for the first time and says “This is the Son of God.”  Throughout this encounter with Jesus, John is saying things that we would consider not normal:  doves descending, voices telling someone what to do, God’s son showing up.  Again, these are all things that happen to other people, whether that’s in biblical times or just other people I hear about.

I got to thinking, that I don’t expect anything remotely like this to ever happen to me.  I live my life, I make choices, I pray, I journal, I go to church…but I don’t typically expect to have God speak directly to me.

The sad part, is that I would say that I have had at least 5 encounters with God that I can’t explain, and yet I still assume that God speaks to other people and I just facilitate that.  My life would be very different if I hadn’t responded to those promptings.

What would my life look like if I really expected God to speak?  Or what if I slowed my life down enough to actually have space to listen for His voice?

Now I’m thinking, it is one thing to hear God’s voice, but John the Baptist actually did something about it.  He got down to business baptizing people, wearing burlap and eating locust.

Taking this a step further, what about the promptings I get that I don’t act on?  What would happen if I followed these promptings and trusted God for the outcome?

I feel like this applies beyond big life decisions to every day life.  I had a season in my life a few years ago where I felt very unsettled and wanted God to give me the answer to what to do with my life.  Instead, every time I asked the question:  “God, what do you want me to do with my life?”, I would put my pen down and wait for an answer, and it was always something like, apologize to this person for what you said yesterday.  I would get so frustrated.  I’m not doing that!  Where’s the big answer?

Eventually I realized that if I am unwilling to follow a prompting to apologize to someone or to give a gift anonymously to a person or write a blog post about hearing from God; why would I think that God would entrust me with some bigger life altering word.

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After the last 2 posts, “Don’t screw up” and “Don’t, Don’t screw up”, it seemed like there was another dimension to the idea of creating a culture of people doing their best out of fear of failure or because they are freed up to bring their best to the table.

As a leader, much of that culture is created in the heat of the moment.  During a live production, when things are going great or going down the tubes, how are your dealing with these situations?  Not only how you are treating your people, staff or volunteers, but how are you personally handling the all the moments that make up a live event, good and bad.

One huge way to create a culture where people aren’t scared into doing their best, is when things are going really well during a service.  It is important to celebrate the wins.

When people are doing a great job, following the worship leader to a song that wasn’t planned, a lighting look that exactly matched the moment, or the perfect mix (not really possible, but you get the idea); do you let the members on your team know that they are killing it?

Sometimes I like to respond in the moment with a “Great job”, but not at the expense of distracting that person from the task at hand.  Over the last few years, we have been doing what we call “Time of Affirmation” at the end of our Saturday night service debrief.  I noticed that we were spending lots of time talking about wasn’t working and we never talked about all the great things that had happened because people were doing great work.

There are a couple things I love about the Time of Affirmation.  Knowing that we will be publically talking about things that went well helps me and others on the team be more aware in the moment, looking for great work.  It helps us see the good during the event instead of just the mistakes.  The other thing I love about it is that people are being publically affirmed.

I don’t do my job so that people say “way to go!”, but it is great to hear, and motivates me to keep doing my best.  The people on your team need to know that someone noticed their attention to detail, or their hustle at a particular moment, or passing on word from the band that the monitor mix was like bathing their ears in champagne.

As a group of people that are always trying eliminate distraction, we tend to only focus on the distractions.  While it is part of who God made us to be, we can’t survive long on only pointing out all the things that were done wrong.

Do you take time to celebrate the great things happening on your production team?

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My friend Dennis Choy is not only a pretty awesome person, but he has a saying that I have been hearing in my head lately.  Dennis points out that the baseline for what we do as technical artists in the local church is perfection; that we are expected to not make any mistakes while executing a service.

Writing it out, it sound ridiculous and impossible, but unfortunately I think it is true.  The reality is that it isn’t attainable.  Humans are involved, and we aren’t perfect.  Things outside of our control can cause bad things to happen.

The challenge to me is that to have no mistakes as a good goal, and yet we can never achieve it perfectly.  The other challenge is to think about tenaciously going after a no flaws service while letting go when the mistakes do happen.

I love the fact that I get to do something I love, but when who I am designed to be gets wrapped up in my work performance, or lack of work performance, there’s a problem.

I recently had one of the worst work days of my life.  Big time mistakes on my part.  And since then, I’ve been pretty good about beating myself up about it.  On one hand, I need to figure out where I went wrong and fix it.  I can’t just give up on becoming better through my mistakes.

On the other hand, I have not been myself either.  My wife said to me this morning, “You aren’t defined by your job.”  When she said it, I agreed with her and said “of course” and “you’re so smart” and “blah, blah, blah”.  But since she said it, I realized that perhaps I am acting like how well I do at my job is what defines me.

When creating life changing moments through the fusion of the technical and creative arts is something I live and breath every day, and when one of the foundational values I hold to is making a distraction free environment, it can become very easy to define my self-worth by how well I succeed in these areas.

Here’s the reality, God loved me before I existed, even though he knew I would fall short every day.  This means that he loves me regardless of how severely I fail each day.  I am loved whether a distraction free environment is perfectly distraction free or just the best I could do on a particular day.  As a leader, on some days I am really awesome at leading my team.  On other days, I’m pretty awful at it.  God loves me on both kinds of days, and the truth about me doesn’t change.

God proved that he loved me in spite of all I fall short in, by sending His son to die for me.

This is how God showed his love among us: He sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him. – 1 John 4:9

See what great love the Father has lavished on us, that we should be called children of God! – 1 John 3:1

The truth of this applies every day and in every situation.  It is apart of my successes and failures.

Where do you derive your worth from?  Do you rely on a flawless service to make you feel valuable?

I really enjoyed listening to Daniel Pink’s newest book “To Sell is Human”, about the idea that most of us spend significant amounts of time doing non-sales selling.  Or in other words, we are all in the business of pitching our ideas to those around us, trying to convince them of the merits.

One of his examples came from computer maker Dell’s consulting business.  They had two main principles for how they work with clients:

have a bias for action

be easy to work with

As technical artists in the local church, we tend to have a reputation for saying “no” a lot.  Being designed to solve problems, it can be really easy to solve those problems by picking apart someone’s idea to the point of not doing anything.  This isn’t problem solving, I would tend to call this problem-pointing-outing.  Solving isn’t a part of this equation, you’re just telling people what won’t work.

This is basically feels like the opposite of having a bias for action.

However, having a bias for action doesn’t mean that you say yes to everything.  Not everything is doable or affordable.  Engaging with an idea, diving into the details, asking questions, all with the intent to figure out a way, is a bias for action.

To work on a solution together, given the boundaries and constraints, is part of what it means to collaborate.  If you are always saying yes to every idea or no to every idea isn’t collaboration.

A few bosses ago, I had a goal to never say no to any idea he had.  I would figure out a way for him to say no.  I realize that it sounds sneaky, but it turned me from always being the one saying no, with a bias for inaction, to the person who was engaging with the ideas and helping to come up with a doable solution…a bias for action.

Are you characterized by action or inaction? 

Are you just pointing out problems or are you a problem solver?

We’ll tackle this second principle, “easy to work with”, in the next post.

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The death of Roger Ebert struck me harder than I thought.  I am not a huge movie going person, so I didn’t really pay attention to his reviews.  At most, he was a just always in the background, and if I wondered if a movie was good or not, I would see what he thought.  Living in Chicago, it is also kind of difficult to ignore his presence; his name seems to be everywhere.

I was struck by his passing, when I was listening to a rebroadcast of one of his last interviews on the radio show Sound Opinions from 2006 (If you love rock history, this episode is a good listen).  While setting up the replaying of the interview, the hosts commented that he had been struggling with cancer for over 10 years.  Over 10 years!

Here’s a guy that kept moving forward, in spite of his situation.  Roger Ebert pushes on to continue meaningful work, even though he hasn’t been able to speak for the last 6 years.  I was humbled by the idea, especially considering the fact that I can so easily get tripped up by the smallest bump in the road.

I also thought about all the times I’ve felt like a victim in a particular situation.  When stacked up next to the courage that Roger Ebert showed, I’m embarrassed.  Roger had a vision for his life and was willing to keep fighting for that idea.  He knew what he wanted to be about, and went after it, regardless of obstacles.

I guarantee that this was not easy for him.  And from the outside looking in, I could totally understand if Roger decided to recede from life and possibly even become bitter for the situation handed to him.  Instead he fought for every ounce of life that was left to him.

There are 2 things here for me, and hopefully you:

Do I have a vision for my life that I am willing to fight for, regardless of the obstacles?

Am I fighting for it?

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Not just two words that end in vity.

The work that we do as technical artists in the local church, tends to fall in the category of intense.

Not only is there a level of intensity around doing live events, but there is something about doing something different every week, that makes a lot of the process more last minute than any of us would like.  Not surprisingly, this doesn’t make things less intense.  Flying by the seat of your pants is how most of us end up working.

So not only are live events intense, and not only are different live events each week intense, but doing them in the church, where it is easy to get wrapped up in eternal issues, is where the gravity comes into play.

When you talk about creating a distraction free environment, it is because we don’t want anything to get in the way of people hearing the message of Christ.  If someone isn’t able to hear because production is getting in the way, this weighs heavily on the technical artist in the local church.

I take my role very seriously, as we all should.

OK, so we’ve established that being a technical artist in the local church can be intense and be accompanied by loads of gravity.  So if things are going to be intense regardless, I’d like to enjoy the process along the way.  Levity.

I’m not saying that every meeting or each moment in the booth should be about cracking jokes, but I would say that there isn’t any reason to not have fun as we are serving the church together.

(Side note: I’m not talking about having fun at the expense of other people, which can be easy to do in the cynical world of the production booth.)

I have a theory that most people start serving in production because they like production-y things.  They keep serving because they love the people on their team.

Creating a levity on your team could look many different ways.  It could be a light atmosphere while serving together.  It could be picnics or field trips outside the normal serving time.

For those of you who know me, you know that I love to laugh.  I like to enjoy myself while working on a big project.  This in no way diminishes my commitment to our team’s missions statement:  “to create life changing moments through the fusion of the technical and performing arts.”  I am very serious about this lofty idea.

However, it does mean that I want to have fun while working really hard.  The goal isn’t to have fun.  The goal is to accomplish the mission, and having fun along the way is part of the journey.

Deal with the gravity of what we do by introducing levity into how your team functions.  If I don’t enjoy the process, I will eventually be crushed by the gravity.

What are some ways that you can stop taking yourself so seriously? 

Where can you introduce levity to your team’s experience? 

How can you balance out the gravity of what you do with the opportunity to enjoy yourself along the way?

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Remember that one time your monitor mix wasn’t perfect, but you just gave up trying to ask for changes.  “I can deal with this.”?

Or that other time when you got graphics late on Saturday night, even though you keep asking for them on Friday afternoon and you just decided that since you always get them this late that you should just adjust your schedule?

Or that one time…

I’m pretty sure we all have stories  when we have decided that things would be better if I just got used to this.  I’m tired of bringing this up all the time, so I’m just going to stop asking for what I need and adjust.

This is a truce of sorts, but it is unbalanced.  You have decided to give in, without the other person having the option of doing their part.  In my opinion, an unbalanced truce leads to bitterness and resentment.  It is what turns most tech people into passive aggressive, negative people that are difficult to work with.

Here’s the thing.  Deciding to give in and just deal helps in the short term.  I would even say that in the moment, getting the job done is the most important thing.  For those of us in the technical arts, when it is “show time”, there isn’t time to argue about process or how you hurt my feelings or whatever.  It’s time to get it done, and deal with it later.

Unfortunately what happened to me over the years is that I would forget to follow up, or the intensity of my feelings had diminished and it didn’t seem like a big deal any more.  Then it would happen again, and since I hadn’t dealt with it, the resentment built up.  But it’s “show time” again, so let’s just get it done.

Being flexible in the moment is super important, but for me it had become less about being flexible and more about not dealing with the uncomfortable conversations required to make sure we didn’t find ourselves in the same situations each week.

Having an effective working relationship with people requires lots of hard work and trust.  When we settle for an unbalanced truce, our trust levels start to decrease and we can become bitter with our situation.

I need to commit to myself to go after the actual truce; to fight for real trust and an actual effective working relationship with those around me.  And not during “show time”.  I need to invest when the pressure is off.

Where have you given in and settled for something, instead of pushing for what’s best?

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Over part 1 & part 2 of “what is the perfect volume?”, we have talked about knowing what you are trying to achieve in your services and how volume plays into that, and we have talked about the appropriate volume for each part of your service.  In this post we’ll be talking about being responsible with the volume.

How many of you have found that guy who has brought their own dB meter to church? You know, to check the volume?  With multiple venues going on at the same time, we’ve had a gentleman who would travel from room to room with his Radio Shack dB meter checking up on the levels all around the building.

I had several conversations with this person, as well as receiving many emails from people accusing us of doing permanent damage to people’s hearing.

I know that it can be really easy to dismiss someone that is so insistent and frankly obnoxious about how wrong you are and how right he is.  And while our knee jerk reaction can be to ignore these people, or at the least wish they would go away, we need to be able to address their concerns.

Given that my last posts have been about knowing what you and your team believe about volume and being volume appropriate in each part of the service, these answers aren’t sufficient for someone who is adamant that you are doing actual damage to the ears of the people in the congregation.

This is where the subjectivity of volume goes away and where science kicks in.   Measuring the volume in real time, and keeping track of the volume over a period of time become critical to objectively understanding the volume in your space.

Real Time Measurement

Measuring the decibels in real time helps in the moment, letting you know if it is getting too loud.  We have several places that this number shows up, and as the one who answers for the volume levels at my church, I have a good sense that many times 97dB is a little too loud for the first song (back to the idea of the appropriate volume for the appropriate time).  Being able to see this number, helps me to react in the moment to what the empirical data is telling me about the volume at the moment.

This also helps when a producer or pastor has a question in a particular moment about how loud is it and it is important to know in that exact moment where things are.  It’s not about my opinion at that point, but something exact and measurable.  Again, something might be too loud from a what’s-appropriate-to-the-moment standpoint, but having a number to measure this opinion against is a huge benefit.

Maybe more important than knowing in an instant, is keeping track over time.

The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), has set some standards for safety in the workplace, which includes volume levels that have proven over time to be safe for workers.

While OSHA standards don’t apply to the people in your congregation, at the very least they apply to church staff, who are exposed to the same volume over time. As a result, the OSHA standards are a great metric for how loud it can be for how long before permanent damage is done to people’s ears.

As an example, OSHA PNE (Permissible Noise Exposure) specifies a legal limit of 95 dBA (slow) continuously for 4 hours to avoid hearing loss.  Similarly, 80 dB for 32 hours and 100dB for 2 hours.

Now, as I see it, there are 2 challenges with trying to keep track of every service’s volume levels.  The first is how to actually record dB levels over time and the other is the administrative part of having to keep track of it.

To overcome these 2 issues, we have started using TREND, a combination of hardware and software that allows us to set up recording times and then it automatically documents each service on a spreadsheet.  The data is collected in an easy to understand format as well.

Since we really only care about how loud the worship part of the service is, it will take the average of all things that are over the OSHA threshold of 80 dB.  This gives us a more accurate idea of how loud the loud stuff is over time.

I’m going to brag a little bit right here…Chris Gille, the CTO at Eastside Christian Church in Anaheim, CA has done some amazing work at making this program perfect for what churches need.  Using TREND has really helped us to keep track of how loud our services around the campus are running, without having to do all the administrative work necessary.

Having a record of each service is a great resource to point people to.  For those that think your services are too loud and doing damage to people’s ears, this not only helps them see that you take volume seriously, but it also shows that your services have been well within the limits of potential hearing damage for weeks and months.

On a more serious note, having a record of every service is an excellent way to protect your church legally.  There have been some instances where churches were taken to court over noise concerns, and chances are it won’t happen to your church, but wouldn’t you rather have a record of each service to be safe?

Having a way to measure how loud it is, matters.  While much of the volume conversation can be subjective, there is a good bit of it that is objective.  Let’s do the work necessary to take care of the objective part by measuring and keeping track of how loud it really is.

Special note: Thanks to Chris Gille for correcting much of the technical aspects of this blog post.

Another special note: Chris had nothing to do with me plugging TREND. It is just that good!

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I am amazed at what a change of venue can do to my outlook.  No, not the Avid Venue, and no, not my calendar, but my actual outlook.

I am sitting at a some Starbucks that I have never been to before, and will probably never come again.  I am having new thoughts and brainstorming new ways of doing ministry that I would never be able to do from my office.

When I think about the times I’ve been able to go to other churches and see how they do things a little differently, I wish I did it more often.  Or when I am able to see a show, or go back stage, there is always a new perspective on my every day life.

At the end of this day, I am glad I put it on the calendar months ago.  I am also I got barred from boarding the train this morning (a story for another time), because it led me to this spot instead.

When was the last time you changed your venue?

Mark your calendar for a day to see backstage somewhere, or sit in a coffee shop, or be inspired in some way.

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This week has been pretty interesting.  Much of it comes from recovering from Easter.  We are a little outside of our normal routine, especially with a hefty load out, and we are working hard to make sure members of the team can have some recovery time.  Vacation or an extra day off, whatever.

As a result, we hit this weekend with lots of little things undone, making it unpleasant for several volunteers.  We started analyzing what went wrong and how we could have prevented them from happening.  This is a useful exercise, but I think there is a better way to look at this.  Instead of beating ourselves up for what we should have done differently, we should be looking forward to how to prevent something similar from happening again.

A process problem

Some of what we experienced this week, was a result of process:  an inconsistent process, a less than thorough process, a letting slip of parts of the process that matter.

It is really easy to complain about how the process doesn’t work; in fact I think it is a favorite of most technical artists.  The trick is what to do about fixing it for next time.  Whether it is in your job description or not, if the current process affects you and your team negatively, how can you contribute to making it what you and your volunteers need?

A knowledge problem

Sometimes things happen that we didn’t plan on, and they aren’t a result of a bad process, but just simply a lack of knowledge.  When I first got involved doing production stuff in the local church full time, there was a stretch of time (maybe 6 months) that something went wrong each week, making us start rehearsal late.  At a certain point, the music director at my church was like:  “what the heck!”  The interesting thing about this particular run of problems, was that each one was different.  I would learn some new thing, fix it, then the next week something completely different would break.

I learned 2 things here.  One is to over-communicate when things are not going well.  If something is broken, tell your worship pastor what’s going on.  Having them be in the dark is never a good thing.  In my example, from the music director’s perspective, the same problem was happening every week:  rehearsal was starting late.  From my perspective, a completely new problem would happen each week.  I just needed to let him know that we had fixed a particular problem, and that a new, unforeseen problem was cropping up the this week.

A knowledge problem leads to a process solution

The other thing I learned was that with each new knowledge problem I tackled, I needed a new process to make sure it didn’t happen again.

In another example with the same music director, I had taken a vacation and had lined up my best volunteers to make the weekends happen.  We were meeting in a high school and had 3 semi trailers full of gear to haul over to the school and unload each week.  One of our cases would come off the trailer each week to be loaded up with things from our offices and then on Saturday would be put on the trailer to go to the school.  On one of these weeks that I was gone, a case that never came off the trailer was taken out and left in the offices.  As a result, some key equipment wasn’t available for set up, making rehearsal start late, my music director’s favorite thing.

When I got back from vacation, he lit into me about how could I let something like that happen, and who was to blame and I can never take another vacation over a weekend again.

It dawned on me:  how can I plan for something that has never happened before?  The answer I came up with is that you can’t plan for something that has never happened.  There was no point in wondering how I could have prevented it from happening the first time, since I didn’t even know it could happen.  The trick was figuring out how it wouldn’t happen again.

When something happens that you didn’t plan on, it is either a process problem or a knowledge problem that needs to lead to a process change.

The next time something you didn’t plan for happens, don’t dwell on what you should have done different, use your energy to figure out what to do differently next time.