Maintaining Excellence in the Summer Months

Summertime is awesome, but with so many people gone on the weekends over the summer months, it can be difficult to maintain the proper level of excellence in our worship services. Here are a few tips for keeping the quality high when volunteer staffing gets challenging: 

• Cross-train.  It gets much easier to fill holes when you have a large number of people that know how to do a job.  Use worship rehearsal nights to cross-train your tech volunteers at different positions, so they will be ready to step in if needed on Sunday morning.
   
• Require advance notice for absences.  Last minute phone calls can be a nightmare.  Sometimes, they cannot be helped (e.g., in the case of sickness). Summertime vacations, however, can be planned for, and your tech team should be required to give reasonable notice if they are going to be on vacation.  Some churches even make it the responsibility of the volunteer to find a replacement when they are going to be out of town.
   
• Add an "on-call" position to the schedule.  Because absenteeism is so frequent over the summer, it often makes sense to schedule an additional volunteer to be "on-call" for each service.  If a need arises, you have someone ready to step in, and if they are not needed, they are free to participate in the service.

• Simplify.  There are sometimes ways to simplify what we are doing over the summer without sacrificing quality.  For instance, maybe you can design your staging so that the same set is used for the entire summer (instead of changing it out more frequently); it may be possible to come up with several generic lighting schemes that can be used repeatedly, instead of having detailed plans for each service;  or you may even want to use the summer months to experiment with an "unplugged" version of your worship team.

The summer is generally a more relaxed time of year, and that is great.  But when it comes to church tech duties, we cannot afford to let "relaxed" become synonymous with "sloppy" or "lacking".  We can continue to give God our best while enjoying the summer, and we do so be being prepared, and by being faithful. 

Microwaves and Crockpots

It's a fast-paced world. Technology has brought us to the place where we can get a large portion of what we want instantly.  And that has conditioned our thinking about life in general.  But spiritual things are not subject to technology.

At our local church, we have been working in an inner-city neighborhood for over 2 years now, and the progress is very slow.  I wish I could tell you that people began to give their lives to Christ the first week we were there, that all our initiatives were immediately (or even ultimately) successful, that the people we minister to are always grateful and have no sense of entitlement.  But that is not true.

Here are a couple things that are true:

1. Community outreach is a crockpot-kinda-thing, not a microwave-kinda-thing. People have to know that you genuinely care about them before they will listen to what you have to say.  (BTW, "genuinely caring" and trying to sell someone on saying the “sinner’s prayer” are not necessarily the same thing.) Love that reaches out, in order to be believed, has to be long-term, consistent, and frequent.
   
2. Discipleship is ALWAYS a crockpot-kinda-thing.
    
3. Handouts are a decent starting point, but they don't change anything long-term.  We have to work towards partnerships and shared responsibilities that help the people being ministered to see their own value, and ultimately, that they are valuable because God has set His love on them.  Anytime we bestow dignity on someone who lives without it, we move them closer to the person God created them to be.
    
4. Desperate physical living conditions blind people to their desperate spiritual condition – often they can see nothing but the immediate physical need until it is dealt with.
    
5. It is never a waste to love on people, even if it is refused.  It all counts.
    
6. Maintaining energy and enthusiasm on ministry teams is really difficult over the long haul, especially when positive results are slow.  Encouraging and exhorting one another is critically important - God gave us each other for a reason.

Our small team here at WorshipFilms is passionate about seeing the community we live and work in transformed by the Gospel of Jesus Christ.  We believe it will happen, and that it can happen where you live too, if people who love Jesus Christ will begin to take big risks and set their hearts on loving their neighbors.  Start somewhere.  Do something today. Then do it again tomorrow and the next day.                     

Give It Up

In America, we have almost a preoccupation with individual rights – it’s part of our national identity.  Our public discourse is filled with discussions of various rights on a consistent basis.  And I have started to wonder how much that has influenced the way we walk out our faith. 


If you study the word “right” in the New Testament, you find out that it is hardly used at all. 


As believers, the rights it lays out for us are, basically, 1) to be children of God and 2) to have eternal life.  That’s it.


As a matter of fact, if you listen to the whole of what Jesus said, you hear, "If you are going to follow Me, you give up all your rights - you die."  He says radical stuff like “If a person hits you on the right cheek, turn and give him the left one to hit.”  He says, “If somebody tries to steal your coat, give them your shirt too.”  Does any of that sound like standing up for your rights?


In the time and place we live in, we can read many articles that say things like, “It is my right as a child of God to have a decent car and a nice house.”  But the truth is that while that might sell magazines, you cannot find it in scripture.  Name one significant New Testament figure who got materially wealthy because they accepted Christ. 


Based on the characters we find in the New Testament, the abundant life Jesus promises us has everything to do with things like peace and joy and fulfillment and spiritual fruit, and very little to do with material things.


True enough - God delights in giving His kids good things.  But that is exactly the point – they are gifts God gives.  And when we recognize them as gifts, we can be free to enjoy them – they are great!  The problem comes when we take something God has given as a gift, and make it into a right.  The great danger of taking a gift and turning it into a right is that it binds us and restricts us and keeps us from doing the will of God.  We are not free to give and go and do as He leads us. Whereas if we see all our stuff is a gift that we can easily give back to God, we are free – free to live life abundantly.


So the road to spiritual maturity forces us to give up our rights, and to hold the gifts God gives us to enjoy with a open hand, ready to give any of it back to Him if He asks.

Setting the Mood:  Choosing Color

We have focused in previous articles on the importance of coordinating lighting and projection background choices (when you have the ability to vary lighting) in a worship setting. But let's say that we are already in agreement that these two tools should be coordinated. Is there an effective method for choosing color schemes for worship?  Does it make any difference?

Projection and lighting are tools to help the folks in our congregations enter into a place of true worship where their hearts are connected to God's.  They merely help to set the table and make a space for spiritual things to happen.  They are sensory in nature, and it turns out that our choice of colors does significantly influence our response and mood (even though actual worship itself is still a choice and decision of the will).
Although reactions to colors are, to a degree, subjective, there are some universal truths regarding the way most people respond to certain colors.  Here's a brief, generalized run-down:

Red.  The color red is the color of intensity and energy (think love, anger, etc.).  It can actually increase our pulse rate and breathing.



Orange.  Orange tends to invoke feelings of warmth, energy, and excitement.



Yellow.  Most people associate yellow with hope, happiness, and cheerfulness.  What you may not know is that yellow creates the most strain on the human eye.  And as a side note, people most often lose their tempers and babies cry more in yellow rooms. Hmmm - I don't really need more of either one of those.

Green.  Green is the easiest color on the human eye.  It tends to have a calming, relaxing effect on people.  One negative with green however, is that in stage lighting, green light on human skin can sometimes produce an undesirable, washed-out look - so experiment, and be careful with your light focus.

Blue.  The color blue causes the opposite reaction from red. Blue is calming and peaceful, and actually causes the body to release calmining chemicals.  It lowers the pulse rate and can even lower the body temperature.  The downside of blue is that is can invoke feelings of cold, and dark blues tend to invoke feelings of sadness.

Purple.  Purple tends to have the same calming effect on people that blue does, but without the sense of coolness (warmer).  It tends to have a restful quality.


So what does this mean for your worship space?  Only that you might want to experiment with differing color schemes matched with different types of songs.  For instance, you may want to try more reds and oranges with a high-energy, upbeat praise song or "power song", and test more blues and purples on slower, more "worshipful" songs.

If you make the decision to experiment with color, afterwards ask whether or not the different service elements seemed to flow together better.  The answer will determine whether or not color schemes are worth considering.