Connor Mays began volunteering at Momentum Church at the age of 16 when his family moved to Pensacola. Three years later he was hired as part of the full-time production staff at the church.
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When Connor Mays was 14 years old his mother told him that he needed to start serving at his Ocala, Florida home church. After discovering kids’ ministry was not his thing, Mays wandered upstairs to the tech booth and fortunately the production director said, “Hey, you want to learn something?” And so began a life of learning lighting and video that continues today. At the age of 19, Mays is now on staff as the visuals director for Momentum Church, which has several multi-site campuses in and around Pensacola, Florida.
Joe Cross is production director at Momentum and nominated Mays for Church Production Magazine’s Hero of the Month.
“We couldn’t get him to stay away from the church,” Cross says. “We would tell him to take breaks and he wouldn’t. He would always just show up and he wanted to learn. He had such a heart for Jesus and taking the Gospel past the walls of the church utilizing production technology. He just wanted to be there, he just wanted to learn, he just wanted to be around what was happening in the name of Jesus through the production element.”
Mays says, “At Momentum it was everything from how the gathering flowed, to lighting, the worship, the message, and how the stage was lit during the message—it all combined [so] that I looked forward to coming back next week. It was like, 'Why do I have to leave, how can I get involved and start serving and learning how to do this?' So, it actually made church cool, which is something I never thought was possible.”
Mays came to Momentum Church at 16 when his family moved to Pensacola. He started as a lighting team assistant at the youth campus, and on his birthday in 2018 he moved up to the Sunday adult worship where he shadowed the lighting director. He learned how to program lights on multiple different consoles. Then he dove into extra research, learning where to place lights, how to utilize them, color calculations, and what gels to use for different elements.
“Being 19, I have a lot of things to learn, so anything I can do to watch training videos by MXU, listen to podcasts, go on YouTube and watch Elevation and Passion where they’re doing what we do on a large scale, and then seeing how I can take stuff they did in a 16,000-seat auditorium and do it in a school, portable, with an hour to set up and an hour to tear down," Mays says. "Figuring out logistics of things makes it a lot more fun than everything just being set up and turn it on and that’s all you do.”
His passion for the visual arts landed him a staff position at Momentum after he took the lead for a large special event in 2020. The church brings the entire congregation together in one place every January for Night of Worship. Cross says Mays took charge and showed his leadership skills.
“January 2020, we didn’t know what was coming," Cross describes. "We were still going normal for a very large night of worship. We rented a huge venue to make it [a] completely different feel from what Saturday and Sunday look like. I tasked Connor, who was still a volunteer and not on staff yet, with leading the charge [and] lighting for this whole event, and he did. He put the whole team together, [and] he had six or seven lighting people program the whole show and trained some volunteers to program. He staffed the event himself, loaded in and loaded out all with excellence. And at the end of that I was able to get some great shots of the lighting effects that he was able to do and we put them together in a montage/collage that we printed out for him for his first produced lighting event."
He adds, "The way that he led there was kind of a solidification of 'this guy’s the real deal.' He had been on my team for a year or so at that point, but when he showed how he could lead, he joined our internship program.”
Cross says Mays served the church through three internship programs. “He basically worked here 40 hours a week and wasn’t getting paid. He was doing it because he loved what he was doing and it was a no-brainer to bring him on at the end of that third internship.”
Just out of high school, Mays’ life could have gone in any direction, but he says he chose to pursue the church staff position because he knew this was the best path to learn hands-on.
“I had the great opportunity after I got out of high school and I didn’t want to go to college because AVL is more of an experience-based profession," Mays states. "So, I just started serving full-time because I had the opportunity to, [but] it is tough some days. I don’t deny that. Especially as a 19-year-old and people treating you like you’re 25-30 because they see that in you. Even though you’re like, ‘Oh, I’m 19, why are you basically asking me to run the whole world?’ which I’m happy to do, [and] it’s a lot of fun.”
Mays encourages other teens to get involved in production—and just do it. “If you’re 18 or 19, get the experience now. And if you hate it, then you know you don’t like working in production. If you love it, then you’ve figured that out early in life and you can pursue that. Obviously, being biased as a 19-year-old who works at a church, it’s the best thing that I’ve ever done with my life and I look forward to many, many more years of doing lighting and video and meeting people who do it on a much larger scale than we do, and learning from them.”
Getting young people involved and serving in production has become a priority at Momentum. The production team used to have an age requirement of 15, but now they judge on an individual basis, looking at a child’s interest and maturity. Cross says it’s never too early to start teaching kids. “We have an event coming up in a couple of months called Ignite, where we invite first through fifth graders to come [and] do production. It’s basically like a summer camp for three days. They get to come and the worship team will be there and our whole production team will be there and they get hands-on—with supervision (laughs)—and then we’re gonna have a thing called Ignite of Worship. On that Friday night the band is going to play and we’re gonna let those kids run production.”
Cross says the fruit of getting really young kids exposed to production technology might not pay off for a decade, and it may not be at Momentum, but it’s planting seeds for the Kingdom.
As for his future, Mays says only God knows. “God might say ‘Hey, I’m gonna completely pull you out of your comfort zone of working in a church and doing what you love and I’m gonna have you go be a missionary.’ Or instead of doing the production side, maybe I’m on stage communicating or leading teams and not in the weeds on the day-to-day basis. And [so] other people are running the consoles and I just have to be ok that I can’t do it myself, and equip people that are around me to do what I do, knowing that they might not do it as good as I can, but eventually, they’ll be able to do it better than me.”
Since it was a leader who was willing to be Mays’ teacher and sparked his interest in production, it’s not surprising that Mays wants to become that kind of leader himself.
