Blog – Page 4 – Motion Worship – Video Loops, Countdowns, & Moving Backgrounds for the Christian Church

8 Tips for Finding and Hiring Pastoral Staff

Adding new members to your team can feel like a daunting task. There’s no one clear path to finding candidates, especially when you’re looking for someone that can be both competent for the role and fit in with your staff’s culture and church’s mission. However, with a bit of planning, strategy, and a whole lot of prayer, even that tall order is totally achievable. Here are eight way tips ...

How to Plan a Sermon Series with Impact

Creating a sermon series can feel overwhelming. Maybe you’ve been inspired by a creative hook, but don’t know how to keep the momentum going for multiple weeks. Maybe you can get lost for hours exploring themes and big ideas, but are struggling to distill that information into a format that will actually translate with your congregation. Planning a sermon series is an organizational art, an...

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...

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 ...

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 migh...

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...

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 ta...

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 ...

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...

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 fi...

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. Ins...

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...

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 lig...

5 Ways Your Church Is Losing Money

Managing finances in any organization is difficult. Each department/staff member has different expenditures happening at different times, and it can feel like money is constantly going out the door. Churches are no different. While some churches and small church plants have a good grasp on their finances, the truth is that most of us struggle to keep control of all expenses. If you are trying t...

Lent 101: How Fasting Can Fill Us

It’s a new year. Thank goodness. And while we’re still in the heart of winter, the days are slowly but surely getting longer. In this season, the slow thaw of late winter into early spring, the liturgical calendar brings us Lent. Although often associated with the Catholic church or other liturgical denominations, these days, Lent is being observed by more and more church communities. If...

4 Reasons Your Congregation is Disengaged from the Sermon

People in your congregation don’t think you can see them, but you know as well as anyone that you see everything they’re doing… all the time. And when eyes begin to wander about the room, thumbs twiddle, and for a few shameless congregants, phones light up their faces, what do you do? Call them out publicly from the stage. Kidding. Please don’t do that… But it’s so tough as a ...

Children’s Ministry Directors: Getting Young Kids Excited About Church

Being a children’s pastor can be an incredibly enriching job (if you’re the right kind of person that is!) Kids are full of energy, and it’s such an important time of their life developmentally. Being a part of their journey means a lot to them and can be very fulfilling to watch them develop as they grow up. But anyone who works with kids knows there are pros and cons to the job. While k...

Leading Worship With Confidence

Searching for confidence can so often feel self-defeating-— the more you try the muster up a feeling, the more elusive it becomes. I’ve discovered that confidence is less of a feeling and more of a choice. Building confidence, like building muscle, takes work, consistency, and trust in the process. Here are a few tips to get you on the path to leading worship with confidence. Tune Your Ins...

Getting Young People to Volunteer in the Youth Ministry

Properly balancing your volunteer-to-student ratio can be difficult. For smaller churches, it can be difficult to keep volunteers committed over the years to maintain a healthy leadership culture in your youth ministry, and for growing churches, it can be difficult to properly staff all youth events with enough leaders. This is especially the case as various different types of events come up: yout...