Blog – Page 2 – Motion Worship – Video Loops, Countdowns, & Moving Backgrounds for the Christian Church

A New Sound System Won’t Make Your Musicians Better

I love new gear, don’t get me wrong. Diving into a new piece of equipment is inspiring, both creatively and technically. Whether it’s a new instrument, a new light fixture, or simply some new hardware, new gear opens new possibilities. Herein lies a common trap. While new gear may create renewed creativity and encourage you to spend more time honing your craft, it won’t inherently make y...

When Should You Start Planning Your Christmas Church Services?

What if I told you that it’s possible to relax during the week leading up to Christmas, even as a senior pastor, worship pastor, or tech director? I know, I know, sounds crazy, right? While December 22nd is traditionally reserved for crippling anxiety and last-minute service planning, I’m here to tell you that it’s possible to be prepared and give yourself space to soak in the holiness of th...

Why You Should Talk About Labor Day At Your Church

If you lead a church, you’re used to making time in your services to speak into various national and cultural holidays. Beyond the major Christian holidays like Christmas and Easter, many of us in the United States recognize and celebrate holidays like Memorial Day, MLK day, or the 4th of July. One holiday that seems to fly under the radar in most churches is Labor Day. Frequently this is tr...

Worship Pastors: Importance of Positive Feedback to Musicians

Being a pastor of any sort is an incredibly busy (and often draining) job. You’re shouldering the weight of daily responsibilities, constant meetings, endless to-do lists, and on top of it there’s the entire relational aspect to the job. Don’t get me wrong – I know pastors love their congregations and volunteers, but when you stack the responsibilities of being personally involved in all y...

Hire or Contract? Sound Professional Edition

Most churches find it important to have someone available to run sound for rehearsals and services. While some are lucky enough to have a sound-board-savvy volunteer on the roster, most of us find that hiring a professional either to be on staff or contracting week to week can be a simple way to elevate production quality. When it comes to contracting or hiring, how do you know which route is b...

6 Tips for Attracting Children’s Ministry Volunteers

Recruiting, developing, and retaining volunteers for your children’s ministry is no small task. If you’ve been working in a children's ministry for any amount of time, you understand what an important role volunteers play in the lives of your kids. They interact, lead, and shape these young minds and help make your gatherings safe and possible. Finding and keeping volunteers engaged can be ...

Worship Pastors: Why and How to Start Using Music Directors

I’ve been to a lot of churches that don’t have assigned music directors. It seems to mostly be smaller churches that feel they either don’t have the resources/personnel necessary for a Music Director (MD), or just generally don’t feel it’s needed. I’m here to tell you that almost any church is not only capable of introducing an MD role to their teams, but will actually be better off fo...

Circumvent Common Easter Sunday Disasters

Easter Sunday is one of the biggest weekends of the year for churches. While you’re putting finishing touches on your resurrection celebration, it doesn’t hurt to incorporate a plan for how to manage any potential fail points. Securing a few precautionary measures will help you feel confident to tackle any last minute issues or demands when Easter rolls around and elevate your peace of mind so...

Churches: Creating a Positive Feedback Culture Among Staff

We throw around the terminology, “plateau” a lot, but the truth is, plateaus never exist for long in a church. Quality in production, ministry, and other areas of your church is usually traveling in one direction - forward or backward. For a short season, your church may seem to plateau in some way, but the problem with plateauing is that after a while, things shift. Staff members leave or ...

5 Tips for Improving Church Security

It doesn’t matter where your church is located. Anyone who has worked in ministry for more than a few years has a story or two about a security issue - someone trying to break in, equipment being stolen, etc. Regardless of your budget, there are things you can do to improve your church’s security moving forward - all of which are worthwhile to consider. 5 Tips for Improving Church Securi...

Recruiting Parents to Volunteer in Youth Ministry

In youth ministry, you usually want to take all the help you can get. A lot of times, those extra hands can be additional staff members or recent high school graduates, but it’s important to have parents involved in your youth ministry for several reasons. Parents have a unique perspective and place to be involved when it comes to youth ministry. They have a personal vested interest in seeing...

How to Measure Success in Kid’s Ministry

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if there was an easy button we could press or formula we could use to determine whether or not our Kid’s ministry is thriving and seeing success? Unfortunately, measuring success in ministry simply doesn’t work that way. I actually think many pastors and children’s directors feel a little out of touch with whether their children’s ministry is thriving or not. ...

5 Strategies for Managing (and Preventing) Christmas Ministry Burnout

Christmas is one of our busiest seasons for those in ministry. That’s just the way it is. For many churches, the Christmas season means a month of events, service opportunities, and services, media, and more opportunities to celebrate advent. For this reason, Christmas is an incredible opportunity for churches. Come the month of December, our culture at large, not just the church, is ready fo...

When and Why (or Why Not) to Split Up Your Middle and High School Ministries

Middle school and high school might be generally categorized as “youth” but anyone who works with students knows that there’s a big difference between an 11-year-old sixth grader and an 18-year-old high school senior. For youth pastors, one of the most pressing questions you face is whether or not to split up your youth ministry between middle and high school students or whether to keep them...

3 Steps to Build a Small Group Ministry with Roots

Small groups are the lifeblood of church communities. While big Sunday services might draw people in and introduce them to Jesus, small groups take discipleship to the next level. It’s within groups that people find meaningful friendships, experience spiritual development, and learn to put their faith into action seven days a week. If your church doesn’t have small groups yet or is looking ...

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 o...

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 ...

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 churc...

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? Shou...

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 mos...