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.