Sometimes it can feel like tech people are from Mars and everyone else (including your lead pastor and worship leader) is from Venus.
Maybe you’ve experienced the frustration of trying to work with people in your church to accomplish a goal and it seems like everyone is trying to tackle the same task in a different way. It can be difficult! Things would just be so much easier if everyone thought the same way as you, right?
While it can sometimes be challenging to navigate, when God designed the Church, He was intentional to bring together people with a variety of personalities and gifts. Until we embrace this, it will always feel like we’re just butting heads with everyone on our team that thinks differently than us.
While there is no magic bullet to improve all of your interactions with others you’re working with, there are a few things that all media techs can do to make things significantly better. If we do our part, that’s half the battle, right?
1. Speak Their Language, Not Yours
Communication is important for everyone who works together. The more that your team can be in sync, the more likely you are to succeed at creating the Sunday morning experience you desire. When talking with others, remember that while tech is everything to you, it may be only a small piece of the puzzle for them. They likely don’t care about the model of that SM58 microphone, the latest update to ProPresenter, or how many DMX channels a lighting fixture uses. And that’s okay. They just want to know that all of the production elements in your service are going to function correctly.
Skip all of the fancy terminology and speak to others in words that they can understand. Speak the language of your audience.
2. Support Their Ideas, Not Just Yours
Creativity is an important part of every church body. Fresh ideas for sermons, times of worship, and ministry opportunities are what keeps the body of Christ moving forward. Being creative shouldn’t be limited to just technical artists like you. When others on your team have ideas, especially your leadership, it’s crucial that you embrace them. But you know how it feels, right? Their ideas just aren’t as exciting as your ideas. Part of working together is showing support for plans that don’t come from you. As a tech person, there are a million excuses that are easy to come up with for why something “just won’t work.” You could list a dozen limitations just about your gear that would crush the plans presented by someone else. But, your church deserves better.
Even if it comes with complications that you’ll have to figure out, legitimately try to make the ideas of others happen. Be a team player.
3. Share Your Mistakes With Them
Mistakes are a regular part of serving in church media. Even the most experienced techs will have fumbles. A lighting cue will fire at the wrong moment. There will be a typo in the lyric slides. You’ll have mic feedback in a critical moment of a service. This kind of stuff happens all the time—sometimes from our own lack of preparation or sometimes when it’s completely out of our control. When a glitch happens, it’s important that you acknowledge it with others that you’re working with. If not, they may think the worst—that they see a problem in your area that you don’t recognize. Instead, own your mistakes. Bring it up before your leaders have a chance. Explain what went wrong and how you’ll make it better in the future. This shows humility.
Give your team the assurance that while something may have went wrong this time, you’re working to keep it from happening again.
What Do You Think?
Do you need to improve on any of these? Which one? Do you ever get frustrated working with others on your team with different personalities? Let us know by leaving a comment in the section down below.
Working on the production side is challenging because sometimes it feels as if that is always the standard by which we evaluate the services. We don’t talk about the two chords that the piano player played wrong or how the drummer rushed toward the end of the song. But everyone sees the production errors loud and clear. This can create an environment where the production team is always looked at as being at fault and no responsibility is ever given to the musicians. This can cause it to be harder to publicly “own” mistakes when others on the larger team aren’t called to do the same, so guarding against over analyzing the production is just as important as owning mistakes.
Rose, I understand your frustration with this. I was shaking my head right along with you as I was reading this. Hang in there! Sometimes we just have to remember that all we can control is what WE do. Hopefully others will follow in our example. Blessings to you! Keep doing what you’re doing. It’s important!
Hi my name is Juan Cancel I am introducing my church to the new era of technology I am not a expert so i need assistant I would like to start with how with do the announcement want to project them i love the example you show on your website. How can I do something similar ? what program i need to buy? hope you can guide me thank you blessings