Church Video Ideas

FYI - There has been some great discussion and comments on the frequency post, as well as the team leadership post. Go back and check them out. As far as the “Firing a Volunteer” post, I’ve been thinking about the whole refining of a team (this applies to any team at your church, not just the tech team).

I’ll probably turn this into a future article, but for now, here’s what I’m dealing with in my ministry. There are a couple of very talented and skilled people that say or imply things like “I want to do _____” or I don’t think I’m going to serve. Or “I’m going to do ______ or I quit.” - that type of thing. These aren’t people that I’m ready to “fire”. They definitely have some heart/attitude issues that need to be addressed, but the firing of the individual I mentioned last week was well beyond that.

As I’ve said before and will say again: ministry is people and people come in all shapes, sizes and personalities. Every church has them - the team members that you have to spend more time with than others, the ones that you have to have plenty of communication with, meetings with to discuss something they’ve said or done, extra coffees, breakfasts or lunches to get to know them better and allow them to get to know your heart better.

Thank God these people don’t make up the majority of your team (at least they don’t for me), but they do exist on each team. Though they can be frustrating and challenging, I do take a step back every now and then and see how God is using me and our technical ministry to shape and mold them into a person more like Christ. These difficult people are prime opportunities for growth and with the proper leadership will one day turn into model team members. I’ve seen it time and time again.

My number one request of myself, my staff, and my volunteers is that we are teachable. You don’t have to get it right every time, you don’t have to know it all - just be teachable. That’s all I’m looking for. I have a TON of grace for someone that’s teachable.

SIDEBAR:
Don’t be afraid to say “I don’t know.” A while back I was going to make that comment its own blog post. I can’t tell you how many times one of you has emailed me to ask a question and my response has been something like, “I honestly don’t know, but here’s someone who might…”. If you’ve ever heard that from me before, you know I’m telling the truth. If you don’t know something, just admit it and either give the task, question or project to someone that does or commit to learn it and let God stretch you.
SIDEBAR END

THE LESSON:
So - back to refining the team. Some things are constant, friends.

• You will always (and I mean always) need to be constantly recruiting and training new team members. Team members leave or step down all the time for various reasons. You must work hard and constantly to see that your team has depth - I can’t stress this enough.
• You will always need to keep attitudes in check. My boss calls it “keeping a short account”. If someone has an attitude on Sunday, we are meeting on Monday - it’s that simple. Don’t allow things to fester and go on without accountability.
• You will always need to be in communication with your team. Whether it be in person, phone calls, or emails - you should be touching base with your team regularly. Send them random thoughts, praises, dreams, goals, devotionals, stories of what God is doing at your church (often they don’t get to hear the stories that you do).
• You will always need to be growing personally, spiritually and professionally. You are their leader. They look to you for wisdom, discernment, guidance, vision and shepherding. You’ve got to stay on your knees (I’m talking to myself, too). You’ve got to stay in the Word (I’m really preaching to myself now). You’ve got to ask the Holy Spirit for wisdom and discernment, which God’s Word tells us He will give to those that ask (Proverbs 2:1-11 and James 1:5). You also should be reading. I encourage you to always be reading some type of book on leadership. If you can’t buy it, go to the Library and check one out.

Here’s what I’d love for you to comment on: What is one or some of your favorite books on leadership?

EXTRA:
If you haven’t heard, yet: Granger Community Church is going multi-campus. Check out Pastor Mark Beeson’s announcement HERE.

EXTRA, EXTRA:
For an update on my blog post “Blu-Ray It Is”, you can read the latest HERE.

BONUS:
To mi amigo, Mark, who requested more links to free stuff. I do still link to free media downloads as I come across them. I try to list the ones that people wouldn’t come across on their own. If you’re just looking for any free stuff, click on my “Blog Sponsors” tab above and go to each of the sponsors websites. Most of them have a monthly free download. HERE’S a FREE download you may not know of.

A while back I wrote about forming my Tech Arts Leadership Team. I can not stress enough how crucial this team is to my ministry. I work extremely hard and am very strategic about making sure nothing relies on me alone. If I miss a Sunday, my team doesn’t miss a beat - everything will still go on like normal. Obviously, I love being there most weeks and love encouraging my team and seeing them in action, but I try to lead in such a way that all the volunteers take ownership.

Yesterday was an exception, as I had to run lights due to my previous post on “firing a volunteer”. I ran lights because that person was scheduled to run lights. The rest of the month is covered on lighting, so I’ll go back to being a cheerleader for my team. Every now and then I’ll video direct, but that is the exception rather than the rule.

In this crazy last couple of months leading up to the move into the new worship center, I relied heavily on my Tech Arts Leadership Team. I met with them about a month ago and shared the weight of pressure and responsibility with them. They dove in and rallied around me better than I could have ever dreamed. Each person is over a specific area of ministry. They each headed up their area and led out in organizing and overseeing training for their teams. Besides being the first team to serve on our first Sunday (last week), they each committed to stay on the remainder of the month to sit beside each person in their area as they serve for the first time on the new equipment.

Besides learning new equipment in a new room, we’ve had to grow overnight and assimilate new people onto our team. We went from 2 video cameras to 3, 1 stage manager to 3 and added the video engineer/shader position since our first Sunday in the new building - that’s 4 extra people needed each week to make Sunday happen. Thankfully, people are coming up to me and asking how to get plugged in last week and yesterday. Picture that! Yesterday everyone who served last week was sitting beside those that served this week. It was a beautiful sight and I was grateful to God.

Obviously, there is a lot of excitement and momentum with a new building and new equipment, but I also think it helps to have more of the team visible to the congregation. In our old worship center only Front of House audio was visible to the people. The lighting, graphics, and video team were hidden upstairs in the “tech booth”. Now there is a large Front of House booth in the middle of the worship center where lighting, our Service Director, Producer and Front of House audio team (A1 and A2) are. We also have 3 camera men up on platforms (a left, middle and right camera) that are seen in the house. FYI - Our graphics operator, video director and video shader are in a video control room, which is in a building behind the worship center. They have an “eye in the sky” camera that they look at on a big plasma monitor, so they can see what’s going on on the stage (note the control room picture in my next to last post).

Another thing I did was to order new tech team polo shirts. We did a whole new branding campaign when we moved into the new worship center, which changed our church’s logo. I waited until the first Sunday in the new building to utilize our new, black tech team polos, which feature our church’s new logo. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: You wouldn’t believe what people will do for a free shirt. Our team looks sharp and people have taken notice. Below is what the logo looks like on the shirt:

Some have asked, so I’ll list these two groups out for you:

• The Technical Arts Leadership Team consists of: Myself, a person over audio, a person over lighting, 2 people over video (one over live video and one over video production), a systems person, a person over graphics and social events, a person over volunteers/assimilation and Service Directors and a person over stage managers. NOTE: Each team member plays a role in assimilation, as I match them up with newcomers to shadow and learn from. them
• What it takes to make Sunday happen: 4 audio engineers (A1 and A2 at FOH, a monitor engineer and a broadcast/recording engineer), 3 camera operators, a camera shader, Video Director, graphics operator, lighting operator, a Service Director (who executes and calls cues) and a Producer (who takes in the overall experience and offers artistic suggestions for creativity and different looks/feels each week). I simply float around and spend sometime in the video control room, some time at the FOH booth and sometime in the audience just taking it all in.

What does it take to make Sunday happen at your church?

The much anticipated and highly stressful “first Sunday” in the new worship center is behind me now. What a day it was! We had an amazing time of worship in both morning services and celebrated God’s faithfulness to us. It was the 32nd anniversary of our church (I’m 32, too) and my 1 year anniversary of being at Bent Tree.

We had 5 on hand from Clark ProMedia, including 2 of their executives that flew in on Sunday just to be there for our first service. Word is they are going to use our worship center as a “show room” to demo and show other churches that are building - pretty cool.

I know many of you have asked for pics, so I had our Visual Arts Coordinator take some so you could get a sense of what yesterday was like (keep in mind that this is not our “Grand Opening” - that will be in May).

Looking down on front of stage:

Side view of stage:

Video Control Room:

Closing Song - featuring real stories of lives changed:

* On another note: What a game last night! Wow.

Sorry for disappearing. This week has flown by - let me catch you up. Wednesday, I worked a long day with the highlight being taking my Visual Arts Coordinator and my Audio Coordinator over to another local church to meet with their tech team and see what they do that’s unique.

We went to my friends, Russ and Camron Ware’s church: Irving Bible Church. Russ wasn’t there, but we had gone to meet with Camron and let him show us what he’s been up to lately. I had been hearing a buzz from many people about what they were doing with lighting and effect projectors. Camron has a side ministry now, where he helps other churches do what he did at IBC (see picture above). I highly recommend you check him out - they’re doing some very cool stuff that inspired us and gave us some great ideas.

The rest of the day was full of meetings and new building stuff. After work, I wanted to get away from it all for a much needed break. To have fun and spend time with a friend, I took my video intern to a Dallas Mavericks game. They were playing the Detroit Pistons and it was just what the doctor ordered. The Mavs spanked the Pistons and a great time was had by all - plus I got a coupon for a free taco since they won - Woo Hoo! We stopped to eat and get coffee after the game, had a good talk and didn’t get in until very late and I went straight to sleep (so there was no blog on Thursday).

Thursday was a day of a hundred projects (literally). I had teams of people working on different things all over the building. The highlight of Thursday was our weekly rehearsal where we were training people on our new monitor console and also hosting 2 tech guys from another local church: Lovers Lane UMC. They are looking at purchasing the Yamaha LS9, which we’ve been using until we get into our new building. I invited them to come out and see it in action. It was great to see my audio team interacting with them and trying to be of help to them. It was a beautiful sight.

After rehearsal, it was back to finishing projects. I got home from the church at 2am and hit the sack. That’s why this blog is coming late today. Okay - we should be all caught up now. I’m off today and plan on having fun and not thinking about church.

Tomorrow evening, I’m taking my tech team to Lake Pointe Church in Rockwall, TX. They are a great church and do things very well technically. We’ll hang out with my new friend, Jason Cole - AV Director there, who will give my team a tour of the behind-the-scenes. I’m looking forward to the fellowship and just hanging out with my tech team (we’re going together in the church bus).

In closing, I just want to reiterate what I often live and preach: GET TO KNOW CHURCHES IN YOUR AREA. It’s all about the Kingdom. We have so much we can learn from each other. From us visiting Irving Bible and Lake Pointe to hosting Lovers Lane to us gathering together on Sunday morning to watch LifeChurch.tv and Seacoast via the internet - there is so much we can offer to and gain from other churches. That’s “Church 2.0” - sharing and being a resource to other churches. Learning from one another. More of that to come in my book. I’ll step down off my soapbox now.

By the way, HELLO to all of you who took me up on my offer in my last blog post to connect with me on Facebook. I’m glad we’re Facebook friends now!

EXTRA:
Don’t forget, as a reader of this blog, you have until January 31st to take 30% off at Crossroads Creative.

BONUS:
Check out this FREE new video from SermonSpice and this FREE worship countdown from WorshipHouse Media.

Each year I make “New Year Resolutions”. Of course I’m doing the standard: spend more time with God, spend more time with my family, lose weight, etc. I take all those seriously and plan to do all three, but I wanted to blog about a more specific list of ministry goals for 2008. Here they are:

• Lead, empower and develop my Tech Arts Leadership Team
• Lead a smooth transition into our new worship center and the remaining projects and renovations
• See our team double in size
• See our team become closer and share more social time together
• Develop and lead well those that I oversee
• Have a better process for assimilation for newcomers to the team
• See that our team and each volunteer does what they do better
• Video and catalog special moments throughout the year for a highlight video at the end of the year
• Raise the bar for excellence and quality in our corporate worship
• Offer more training for our Tech Arts team
• Help train and develop other tech teams and leaders for children and youth
• Improve upon and expand my knowledge of Final Cut Pro
• Go on a mission trip
• Read several more books (ministry, business and leadership)
• Continue writing for several magazines
• Complete at least 2 of my 3 book projects before the year ends
• Add some new classes and information to the conferences that I teach at
• Work with more churches to help them grow in their worship and technical ministry

EXTRA:
This just in from Matt at fortyonetwenty: “We want to give your readers a promo code for a FREE mini-movie from our site. The mini-movie you will get is called “Anything But Silent”". To get it just use the Promo Code: free4120

Usually I do a thorough (and very time-consuming) review of all Christmas media resources each year, but this year I am swamped, so I’m going to link you to my review from last year HERE and the best of the new from this year HERE. I’ll be reviewing some select Christmas media products that are new for this year soon.

Also, a few years ago I worked on a template for a traditional “Lessons and Carols” service. I make it available to churches every year for free. If you’d like to use it, base yours off of it and make it your own, however it can serve you - download it HERE.

EXTRA:

A few years ago I arranged “O Holy Night” for worship leaders that lead from acoustic guitar and want something more modern sounding. You can download the chord chart HERE and listen to the arrangement HERE. On the recording, I’m playing guitar and a local worship leader friend (remember my blog on “The Network”) is singing.

PERSONAL:

I’m on vacation today through Wednesday. I hope to do a lot of reading and research for my book, as well as spend some time with my family and not think about church for a few days.

Yesterday I met with a tech director at another church here in Dallas. This is something I’ve done for the last 13 years. I guess you could say I’m a “networker”. It really comes natural to me and is a passion of mine. Everywhere that I’ve lived and each church I’ve served, I’ve always got to know the local churches and staff members. From my days as a college student serving part-time at a small church and meeting with a local mega-church staff member to meeting with churches the same size as mine and on and on.

I like to meet with churches that are smaller than mine to be a resource to them. I LOVE meeting with church leaders that serve at churches around the same size as mine. And I always love the sharing and learning that I do with church leaders that serve at churches larger than mine.

I’m glad to say that I have friends from serving in the Carolinas and friends in Washington DC, where I served before moving to Dallas, and these are guys that I stay in touch with and am glad to call friends. Here in Dallas, I’m a member of a few network groups: One is a group of Dallas area worship leaders, one is a ‘yal come/large group of tech staff from all size churches and the other is a small group of tech directors from churches around the same size as my church. I can’t recommend the food, fun and fellowship highly enough.

A couple of thoughts on networking:

• Church size doesn’t matter… no matter what size your church is, you can benefit from a local network.
• Denomination doesn’t matter… this is something I had to break free from years ago. You have a lot more than you realize in common with those from other denominations.
• Vent - take the opportunity to share struggles and frustrations with your local group. You’ll find that many others have some of the same frustrations. You need to be able to talk about these with someone outside your church.
• Share with each other. My local group shares equipment with each other and tries to help one another out with ideas, resources, contacts, etc. Just yesterday, I called up a local tech director (from the group) to ask where he would go in Dallas to rent wireless mics, as we’re going to have to rent some for Christmas.
• Be proactive. 95% of the time, people that I’ve had breakfast, lunch or coffee with were people that I called up or emailed and took the initiative to introduce myself to them. Again, this comes natural to me and may be out of your comfort zone, but it will be well worth your while.
• Take advantage of Web 2.0 technologies: things like Myspace and Facebook are great ways to meet people. I’ve met several people through one of them and then met them in real life.
• When you can, try to visit other local churches (for one of their services). I see local tech directors (and their teams) at my church from time to time and the past 2 Sundays, I’ve visited two different churches. It’s good to get out and see what others are doing.
• It’s ALL about the Kingdom. You’ve got to get this point. I can’t stand to hear of churches in competition with one another. We’re in this together. The reason I write, blog, speak at conferences and consult is because I want to help other churches grow, dream, do better, lead better and reach more people for Christ. Any spirit of competition is not of God and should be seen as sin. Get rid of it, friends!
• Not everyone will get this. I wish I could say that every person I’ve called or emailed has contacted me back and we met - that’s not the case. Some people have no desire to meet with someone from another church. What a shame and what a way to miss out on a blessing and possible new friend. My two cents: keep moving on and keep searching. Someone in your city will be interested in meeting and may turn out to be a great friend and resource for your ministry.

EXTRA (Free Christmas Countdown):

Get a really cool free, winter countdown from my friends at Igniter Media Group HERE.

The holidays are the biggest season for volunteering. In the spirit of the Christmas season, I wanted to see if you might consider checking out ChristianVolunteering.org.

ChristianVolunteering.org is a FREE directory with over 2,000 volunteer opportunities in ministries serving the “poor.” The site’s partners include the Salvation Army, GospelCom (BibleGateway.com), World Vision, the Association of Gospel Rescue Missions and over 1,000 ministries serving under-resourced communities. In addition to volunteer opportunities for individuals, you can also search the site for opportunities that might be appropriate for church small groups and for short-term missions trips. If you just type your postal code, you can get a listing of the volunteer opportunities in your region.

Yesterday I took a day off. I had worked many hours the week before and just needed a day to chill. Plus we (as you can relate) have a busy season coming up, so I’ve got to take the time when I can. I’m also planning on taking off the week between Christmas and New Years. What about you? Do you have a day or two that you can take off before your crazy week?

Today, we have a retreat for all pastors and directors at my church. I’m looking forward to the time together.

Today we have another meeting to plan for our Christmas Eve services. We’re doing 2 services on Sunday, the 23rd and 3 services on Monday, the 24th. We’re doing a mixture of special music, a small dramatic presentation and a message. This is a small Christmas for us, as we’re maxed out with the new building coming soon. I’m curious… what are you doing at your church for Christmas?

Also, if you did something special for Thanksgiving, I’d love to hear about it.

EXTRA:

Many of you have emailed me about the audio equipment we’re selling at my church. Tomorrow I should have a complete list of model numbers, prices, etc.

PERSONAL:

It all comes down to the showdown tonight - the Cowboys and the Packers! Wouldn’t you know we have rehearsal during the game?