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Church Sound Files: Making The Big Recruiting Announcement

Sometimes we must go beyond the traditional to creative means to succeed in our recruiting efforts.
This article is provided by ChurchTechArts.

I hate recruiting. I’m really not good at it, and I’ve always found it difficult.

But, as TDs, it’s something we need to be doing. Somehow, we need to be finding ways to expose people to our ministry and offer them a chance to get involved.

Like most TDs, I’ve tried bulletin announcements, personal recommendations, walk-in slides and ads on the church website. Most efforts don’t go so well.

Several years ago, I became convinced that we need to put serious effort into building our volunteer tech teams. I remembered something Daniel Murphy said once. When he found himself in need of volunteers, he prayed and asked God to provide some.

So I did. And we came up with a creative way to let people know about our tech serving opportunities.

In our weekend planning meeting, we considered having me come up on stage during announcements and having my boss Todd, who is the Pastor of Weekends & Communication interview me.

But the more we talked about it, the more it sounded pretty pedestrian. Someone, and I don’t recall who, suggested that I show up on the big screen, all Hal 2000 like. Perhaps I could take over the service and do the announcement from there. We all loved the idea and set to figuring out how to make it work.

We chose to run this on a weekend when Todd was announcing and I was mixing FOH. We placed one of our Sony Z1s on the left NS-10 monitor at FOH. A little tweaking put the lens pretty much at my eye level.

We found that the LED lamps on the SD8, when turned up, provided nice illumination for my face. We took the S-Video signal out of the Z1 and ran it into the Blackmagic Intensity Pro card we have in our ProPresenter Mac Pro (that’s a lot of “Pros” now that I type it out). We created a slide with a live video input on it and loaded it into the announcements presentation.

Todd and I worked out a loose script (and when I say “loose” I mean it was really a very rough outline of what I thought might happen). After greeting, Todd went up to start announcements as usual.

Except, his mic was not on. I let him hang there for a minute, until he started waving his arms around. I brought his mic up and he started into a goofy story about his self-proclaimed “mustache March.” After about 20 seconds, I brought his mic down and started the Jeopardy theme.

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