Blog – Motion Worship – Video Loops, Countdowns, & Moving Backgrounds for the Christian Church

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Tips for Buying & Tuning Church Drums on a Budget

Drums are incredibly expensive. I know because I’m a drummer. And I have a drum gear hoarding problem... But buying drums on a budget is a bit different than other instruments. With a guitar, bass, or keyboard, you have to buy one at it’s list price and that’s what it costs – you have the instrument. With drums, it’s much easier to mix together snares with different drum kits, cymbals, hardware, and heads. And it’s not too hard to find a good deal on a drum set. But it can be hard...

Worship Pastors: Building Close Relationships with Your Team

You wear a lot of hats as a worship pastor. You’re doing a lot of administrative organizing tasks throughout the week, you’re finding songs and curating setlists, coordinating with staff members, and communicating to the team. But while an effective worship pastor needs to be good at driving the bus from a managerial standpoint, they also need to be relational and empathetic with their team members. After all, worship team is about pointing others to Jesus through worship, and if we ourse...

Tips for Encouraging Students to Take Ownership of Their Time With God

As a youth pastor, one of your greatest desires is to see your students taking ownership of their relationship with God. At youth group or bible study or on retreats, it’s easy for students to feel close to God. But what about when they go home, or they’re at school, or hanging out with their friends? Pursuing Jesus on your own time, in your own life, can sometimes feel paralyzing. Much of the spiritual shame and guilt I felt as a teenager came from feeling like I wasn’t “doing” Chr...

3 Tips for Managing Details as a Church Admin

As a church administrative assistant, you’re constantly juggling details. Your day is jam packed with going to meetings, taking notes, revising plans before Sunday morning, scheduling building rooms for groups, and standing in the middle of a hurricane of last-minute requests. It can be… draining to say the least. Being a church admin is a very dynamic job, and it can be difficult to properly manage everything. If you feel like you’re constantly in a zone of “information overload”, ...

3 Tips for Prioritizing Rest as a Youth Pastor

When you work in ministry, you’re never really “off”. For every crisis, every life change, every tragedy, you’re the person people know, even if they don’t really know you. While it comes with the calling, it doesn’t get less exhausting. With youth, emotions are even higher, angst is off the charts, and prefrontal cortexes aren’t yet fully formed. For a lot of your students, you might be one of the only, if not the only, reliable adult in their life. It can feel like a huge respons...

Managing Younger and Older Leaders in Youth Ministry

It’s important to have a mix of ages of leaders involved in leading your youth ministry. Leaders of different ages contribute in different ways to youth ministry, and it’s often the case that a diverse set in the age of your leaders will lead to a healthier ministry overall. If you’re trying to figure out how to manage your current volunteer leaders in youth ministry when you have a mix of older and younger leaders, here are a few things to keep in mind: Assign Appropriate Leadersh...

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Four Tips for Elevating Production Quality Right Now

When it comes to tightening up production quality on Sundays, a few tweaks can go a long way. Often, it’s not about adding more, but about making sure that what you already have is clean, consistent, and ready to go come the weekend. Here are four tips you can apply right now to tighten up your production quality week after week: Slide to the Right For most small to mid-sized churches, slides and graphics are a key player for setting the atmosphere. Slides not only deliver information...

Church Decisions: Trading the Projector for an LED Screen

LED screens vs. Projectors: How do they compare? Technology can make or break a weekend experience. If your church is like most, you depend on quality images and visuals that are consistent and engaging. LED screens are pricey, but deliver dividends upon dividends over projectors when it comes to image quality and lifespan. If your church is considering making the leap from projectors to an LED screen (or two), here are a few facts to help you weigh your options: Visibility and Image Quali...

Reasons Churches Become Insider-Focused

New churches don’t grow as a result of being insider-focused. The reason church plants often gain so much momentum in the early stages is due to an ambition to reach others for Christ. When a church first starts, everyone understands it’s time to kick everything into full throttle and focus on the community around you. But somewhere along the way, many churches start focusing inwardly on taking care of the community they already have. And while that’s certainly important in many regards...

The Church Admin’s Guide to Bridging Communication Gaps: 3 Steps to Reframe and Refresh Administrative Processes

Most of the time, the success of a team boils down to the quality of its communication. A church staff is a delightfully diverse array of people who all have different ways of thinking and communicating. There are big-pictured visionaries, energetic people-lovers, and detailed thinkers, like you. The good news? Despite your differences, you all share a greater vision that brings you together. As an administrator, you speak a language some of your visionaries might not readily understand. Purc...

Casting a Vision for Church Video Production to Your Pastor

Video is one of the most effective ways of telling a story. Visuals draw people in and create connections regardless of where they are. And often, video is the medium through which new people connect with a church. Before they visit in-person, their first connection point is often through a video - livestreams or videos on your church’s social media pages. That’s why it’s so important to invest in quality church video production. But if you work as a church tech director or video produc...

Making Livestream Church Services Look Professional

Church service livestreaming has certainly gotten popular since the pandemic hit. While it’s a step in the right direction, it’s been a huge stressor for several churches across the nation. Making livestream church services look professional is tough. There are so many factors that contribute to the look of your services online - lighting, cameras, lenses, number and angle of shots, and the skill of your video team among many other things. Churches often envy the look of another ministry�...

Getting Students Involved as Church Video Team Volunteers

Being a part of the church video team on Sunday mornings is pretty intense. There’s a lot going on at every second, and it’s easy to get burned out quickly if you’re not careful. If you’re running a camera, you are committed to a single seat for an entire service, and you never get the chance to let your guard down. You always have to be ready to follow the pastor and change things on the fly if necessary. The single biggest burnout factor for video team volunteers is being scheduled ...

Building a Volunteer Church Film Team

Every church knows that volunteers are the backbone of their activities. Volunteers are the reason the church is able to do so much, and no matter the size of your building and staff, every department will fall short without people volunteering their time to help the ministry. The same is absolutely the truth for film teams at churches. It’s common that video directors/tech directors at churches will rely on their own skills and abilities to carry the ministry, but it truly is an uphill bat...

New Worship Team Orientation Meetings: Best Practices

While an audition process is great for gauging someone’s capability, it’s not the end of the onboarding process for new worship team members. Maybe a singer passed worship team tryouts but after you get them involved, you begin questioning whether or not you were right about them. Are they actually ready? It’s not uncommon after a new team member is brought on to experience a rehearsal filled with awkward questions and pauses, constant IEM adjustments, not knowing the song form your tea...

Hospitality at the Heart: A Pep Talk for Tech Directors

I once worked with a tech director who was supremely talented and could solve any fix in the nick of time. It was actually quite impressive. The problem? All of these saves could have been preventable with a little bit of forethought. However, this director thrived on the attention he received for “saving the day” and consistently failed to put in the preparation necessary to avoid issues. Instead, he’d rely on his instincts and skill to solve problems as they appeared. Being skilled a...

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Worship Ministry: Balancing Volunteer and Paid Musicians

There are several churches that rely entirely on volunteer worship teams, while others rely 100% on a paid contract musician structure. It’s pretty easy to keep everyone’s expectations similar when the whole team is comprised of all volunteers or all paid musicians, but once you start mixing them together, the balance can get difficult. Who should be paid and who should be a volunteer? Should expectations be the same for everyone or higher for those who are paid? Should you have more paid...

Tips for Training in New Worship Team Volunteers

As a worship pastor, you deal with people of all sorts of skill levels. Chances are if you’ve worked in churches for long enough, you’ve seen people volunteer to help out who can hardly play an instrument, as well as volunteers far beyond your own skill level. That’s the nature of working in a church – you see a very wide array of skill and commitment levels in volunteers. And while most people understand that volunteering to play on a worship team requires a greater deal of excellenc...

Top 4 Mistakes of Church Tech Directors

“Church Tech Director” is a pretty high-intensity position. Not many congregation members see you since you’re not on stage like the worship pastor and lead pastor, but the truth is that none of it could happen without you. Depending on your church staff and organizational structure, you may be helping with a number of things – lyrics, designing slides, running the computer, running lights, mixing the band (and maybe being everyone else’s IT support... sorry, it just comes with the ...

Church Admins: Handling Last Minute Requests

Church admins are some of the busiest people working in a church. Due to the nature of the job, sometimes work blends into your personal life and vise versa. It’s tough, there’s a lot of moving parts, and it requires a ton of personal investment to make things run smoothly. Before we continue, know this - you are appreciated, and while not everyone may know how much you do, the church wouldn’t be able to operate at the level they do without you! But it can be difficult to convince yours...