Church Sound: Take Your Ministry Seriously—Know Thy Stuff!

Fix Thy Stuff
Make it your responsibility to ensure that all of your mic cables and speaker cables are in proper working order.

Insist on an internal time limit, or your stuff will stay broken for months, even years. For example, make a commitment within your sound team ministry that you won’t let broken cables stay broken longer than ten days.

Be good stewards of the gear that God has entrusted to your care. It’s His anyway, right?

Make certain that broken equipment like headphones, mics, power amps, stage monitors and the like are repaired in a timely manner. That broken equipment represents a wasted investment of your church, and allowing it to stay broken indefinitely is fairly poor stewardship of that investment.

If you don’t need it, get it fixed and then seed it into another ministry either in your own church or in that church across the street from yours.

Make certain that you have at least a one month supply of batteries for your wireless mics, your flashlights, and every other battery dependent device that you use on a regular basis.

Don’t want to spend that much money? Well, it doesn’t cost any more to keep your car’s gas tank full than it does to keep it empty, now does it?

Buy the inventory – it’s cheaper to buy in quantity anyway. Keep in mind that traveling musicians often ask the local church for replacement batteries wherever they go. Isn’t it amazing – these guys virtually never have to buy their own batteries!

Deal With Thy Stuff
Likewise, make it your responsibility to ensure that the relationship between you and the other production team volunteers or staff, music pastor, or anyone on the worship team, is always at its best.

Make sure that you quickly deal with any strife that comes up between you and anyone you serve alongside. Make sure that you treat everyone in each technical area and everyone in the worship team as equal members of the same team with a single common goal. Only if you do this can you expect the same treatment and respect from them.

Okay, enough with that. It may sound like I’m jumping up and down on your feet, and I don’t mean it that way at all. Please, take this as an encouragement, and just do your level best. I realize that we’re not dealing with brain surgery or the national defense…

However, quite honestly, if more church sound team volunteers would take their service in the ministry a little more seriously, we would all find that achieving technical excellence is not quite as elusive as we often make it out to be.

Curt Taipale heads up Church Soundcheck.com, a thriving community dedicated to helping technical worship personnel, and he also provides expert systems design and consulting services with Taipale Media Systems.

Note that Curt will be hosting his Church Sound Boot Camp “How to Get the Sounds” workshops in Louisiana and California—learn more here.