If your church is planning a big stage overhaul this Christmas season, I’m with you. While my current church no longer alters the stage from season to season (we have a big LED wall now, so big stage overhauls aren’t something we do anymore) my former church did, often twice a year at Christmas and Easter.
That being said, I still manage a number of big projects at our three campuses, so I’ve been doing these builds for a while. Here’s what I’ve learned in ten years of big overhauls.
For every minute of planning, you’re going to save yourself 30 minutes of extra work down the road.
Plan, Plan, Plan
For every minute of planning, you’re going to save yourself at least 30 minutes of extra work down the road.
I don’t have a study or a quote from a productivity guru to back up that statement; it’s purely anecdotal, but I’ve found it to be true, nonetheless. Now, I’m talking about a meeting where you’re with leadership or your team trying to decide on a design. This is after all that. This is just you and the project, in your office or maybe at a coffee shop on the other side of town with your headphones on and set to noise cancellation. Don’t get interrupted if possible.
Start at the end with the finished product you want to see, and then work your way backwards in time to the present moment, step-by-step, writing each step down. Tasks and subtasks. Be over-detailed here, because the more you catch now, the less you’ll miss later.
Once you’ve got a solid breakdown of each part of this stage build, break it down realistically week by week. This will give you benchmarks to know if you’re ahead or behind, and you can track your progress on a calendar or productivity suite of your choosing.
This breakdown will help you bust-up what can be a massive undertaking into small, manageable, time-stamped steps.
Speaking of time…
Start Early
We said recently that you should start planning your Christmas production in August; all the more so if you’re overhauling your stage as well.
Now, the truth is, you can’t get to the nuts and bolts of it until the week (or few weeks) before your Christmas production. Big stage overhauls like these are almost a kind of surprise that creates shock-and-awe for the congregation when you flip over everything in a few days, but that doesn’t mean you can’t start staging your equipment right now.
Few things in the production world feel so foolish as having volunteers standing around because their leader wasn’t prepared.
If you’re adding new fixtures, get them bought and ready for load-in. Adding some new LED panels or maybe a whole new LED wall? Make phone calls to integrators this week and get a plan together. Set up your install date, the labor you’ll need to make it happen, all of that. If you need to add electrical infrastructure, now is the time. You don’t have to wait for that all.
You get the point. Sit down, probably right after you put your main plan together while you’re still at that coffee shop and figure out what steps you can get out of the way to make install day smoother and simpler.
A smooth and simpler install day is vital because…
You Will Need Help
You want to honor your help by having only the work they need to do ready to be started when they walk in the building. Few things in the production world feel so foolish as having volunteers standing around because their leader wasn’t prepared. Don’t be that leader. Get everything done that you can do ahead of time.
Don’t be afraid to ask for help. It turns out that people love to serve, even serve extra, and they don’t get the chance if you don’t ask them.
There’s a caveat, here. The extra asking only works in cultures where your team isn’t regularly overtaxed. If you have an already tired team, you might want to be ready for some long days getting this work done yourself, but hopefully that isn’t the case. If your team is tired and subsequently unavailable, you need to pump the brakes and ask why that is. Maybe this isn’t the year for a big overhaul, which might mean an uncomfortable conversation with upper leadership, but your team will thank you.
...you work at the behest of Christ himself, hand-in-hand with his very own Spirit, and that Spirit empowers you to complete the work given to you.
Pray, Friend
This is your means of worship in the church, and so it should be infused with prayer. You are not unlike Stephen, who worked diligently at simple tasks with the full anointing of the Holy Spirit. Stephen was not Stephen without prayer.
Prayer is a lot like planning—a little goes a long way, so please understand that I’m not admonishing hours-long prayer sessions about your big Christmas stage overhaul. What I mean is that you are not the Thing behind all of this; rather, you work at the behest of Christ himself, hand-in-hand with his very own Spirit, and that Spirit empowers you to complete the work given to you. Too often, we drive ourselves into the ground with anxiety because we think this is all on us. It’s not. It’s on Him, and He is in you, which means the work will be accomplished. This work doesn’t depend on your faithfulness alone, but on the faithfulness of Jesus that is present in you.
You simply cannot tap into that Jesus-faithfulness without prayer.
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Here’s a Simple Prayer to Pray If You Need One
Lord, thank You for the privilege of serving Your people with my talents and skills. I look to You for the wisdom and endurance to complete the work set before me in this season. Make me quick, make me neat, and make my working peaceful, that I might bring Your peace on earth, which Your angels proclaimed to the shepherds on the night of Your birth. This isn’t on me; it’s on you, and I trust you to work through me to accomplish it.
Amen.
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