If it doesn’t, both the techs and the musicians will be frustrated, the techs will burn out and the whole thing will collapse.
This is a classic case of being only as strong as the weakest link.
In this case the weak link is the tech team (a lack of trained multi-disciplinary techs), and thus that becomes the limiting factor of the program.
And understand it’s not for lack of trying; the techs we have in our church are the best I’ve ever worked with.
But not every one is trained yet in all disciplines, and it takes a lot of years of experience to cover 2 or 3 roles in a tech booth at once.
I would like to propose a radical concept – simplify down to the level of excellence.
What does that mean?
Look at it this way; design your program (worship, new ministries, that big Easter musical, whatever) around whatever the weakest link is, and do what you can do with excellence up to that point.
If you don’t have enough musicians to pull together four different full on bands for a month of worship services, make one a simple acoustic set. If you can’t staff the tech teams to do a wild musical production, simplify it.
Once you simplify to the weakest link, you now have the ability to be excellent.
Too many ministries think that bigger is better. It’s not. Better is better. Excellence should be the goal, not getting bigger. Putting more bodies on the battlefield before they’re ready simply results in more casualties.
Do what you can do really, really well. Then stop.
Raise the bar when all the elements are in place to do so. Want to do a huge musical production that requires 20 actors on stage with wireless mics?
You’d better own (or be able to rent) high quality mics that are frequency coordinated, a soundboard with automation capability, and have a couple of high quality sound guys.
Miss any of those elements and you’re asking for trouble, and you will not have an excellent production. If you can’t accommodate that, scale back until you can do what you do really well.
Stretch the crew, yes. But if you push too hard, things break. Don’t do it.
So what’s the solution for our new ministry? It’s easy—simplify. Go back to a split track CD for music with one or two vocalists. Stick with simple PowerPoint presentations.
Continue to recruit and train tech volunteers. Once they are ready, we can add musicians. It will happen, but it needs time. Failure to pull back will ultimately result in failure of the ministry. That benefits no one.
Those that come into our ministries deserve excellence. God wants our best, not our biggest. We can get bigger as we get better, as we add volunteers and the equipment to support them.
But we should never get bigger before we get better.
Mike Sessler has been involved with church sound and live production for than 25 years, and is the author of the Church Tech Arts blog. Based in Nashville, he serves as project lead for CCI Solutions, which provides design-build production solutions for churches and other facilities.