We talk alot about excellence in worship and in church services these days. Sometimes, we misunderstand exactly why excellence is important; its because God is perfect and holy and He deserves our very best and that’s why we strive to do things well. It’s an act of worship!
Doing things well doesn’t just start on Sunday morning; it starts long in advance with strategic planning and attentiveness to detail. Kevin Poole is a friend of mine who is the tech director at Mobbery Baptist Church in Longview, TX. I had the opportunity to see his workflow and ideas first hand as they were planning things out for their Christmas production this year. He goes into detail on how they’ve planned automation in worship and for special events that they do. The only way you can get to this level of excellence is through careful planning, attention to detail along sensitivity and maturity in understanding how the Holy Spirit will lead the congregation and anticipating it. Kevin gets it. This article may be advanced for some but I do believe that there is something that every church can take away from it. Make sure you follow Kevin Poole on Twitter at @kevinrpoole …he’s full of great insight and ideas! Check out his article:
Automation in Worship
Before I start this, let me give credit where credit is due. There are three men that taught me and led me along this workflow, I would know none of this without the help of Jon Daggett, Mike Gerringer, and Daniel Albert of Thomas Road Baptist Church and Liberty University.
Excellence is critical; Make it as easy as possible
In worship settings, we strive for excellence. In a volunteer driven technical ministry, many of the team members have careers that are none technical. They serve faithfully, learning the craft as they go. My goal was to create systems that could be used in worship and production that would allow anyone to operate the gear. The preproduction planning of people who have chosen the technical disciplines as their ministry would help lower the learning curve of technically advanced gear.
Sync is a big deal in production. Time is constant and can never be paused or slowed down. Therefore, we as a team all have to be in sync. Musically, this is accomplished through a director with tempo. Technologically, this is accomplished with timecode. These are the two foundations of this post. This does not eliminate the need for execution by a technical ministry, but it helps control the number of moving parts and failure points.