HomeSundaysWorship3 Critical Steps for Church Tech Growth

3 Critical Steps for Church Tech Growth

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As a church tech or worship leader, growing your team and growing your ministry is often at the forefront of everything that you do. Without a clear direction for your team and yourself, growth could be minimal and your ministry may not reach the full potential that God has planned for it. There are three critical steps that every church tech or worship leader can take to inspire productivity and growth.

Step #1 – Grow Yourself

Leaders cannot expect a team to grow if they are not also growing. The most critical part of our own growth is spending time each day with God's word. God offers us clear instruction and encouragement in the Bible. We need to be in his word, studying it, meditating on it, and memorizing it. With hectic schedules, this practice often gets pushed aside quickly when it should be a priority.

Equally important as time in God's word, is time spent in prayer. Without seeking God's guidance for your life, it is difficult to lead a team and move it in the direction that God wants it to go. Everything we do as leaders needs to point people to Jesus. Building that healthy relationship with God should serve as the entire foundation of your ministry.

Another key step of growth is improving skills and increasing knowledge. Reading the articles on this site, attending conferences, listening to podcasts, and reading books should all be a part of a yearly growth plan for church techs and worship leaders. With the rapid rate of change in church technology, you can't take two years off from learning and expect that your ministry will continue to grow. Take the time to develop yourself, your skills, and your knowledge base and watch your ministry grow and develop with you.

Step #2 – Train The Team

Teams need to hear from their leaders on a consistent basis. Weekly invites via your scheduling tool are not enough. Teams need to know where the ministry is heading and how it's going to get there, and clear and realistic expectations should be outlined for every team member whether paid or volunteer. Work with team members both during services and at regular intervals throughout the week to help them improve their skills. Strong teams need and appreciate active and consistent leadership.

Do you have a training program in place? Utilize the technology that is already in place at your church to teach what you have learned to others.  This same training should be used to continuously bring on new people quickly. If your church has multiple rooms that are equipped with tech tools, try to use the same software and hardware whenever possible. This will enable new people to quickly plug-in to different ministries easily and efficiently from any location.

Another key component of training is having a comprehensive operating guide for your technology. This operating guide should provide all of the necessary steps needed to get videos or images on screens, your sound system turned on, and microphones un-muted. Clearly documenting and presenting the set-up and operating procedures for all tech tools will reduce the complexity of any system set-up, make it less daunting and time-consuming, and inspire more people to help out when needed.

In addition to good leadership, communication, and regular training, your team should also know you. Likewise, you should know them. Leading a church tech or worship team is discipleship. Pray for your team, pray with and for your team. These connections on both a personal and spiritual level will inspire a sense of commitment, ownership, and responsibility and build a strong, connected, spiritual team.

Step #3 – Delegate Tasks

God created the sun and moon. And within our 24 hour days and seven day weeks, we work. Obvious? Yes. And yet, we often believe that as our tech needs grow, we can continue to take on more and more responsibilities and keep cramming tasks into schedules that are already full. This is not necessarily realistic or practical. This is where leaders and teams can begin to delegate tasks to others. Sometimes this may mean that portions of your ministry are given entirely to someone else. We all know that taking on too much will likely lead to burnout. A good leader knows what to delegate to others and when to delegate.

Succeeding in growing yourself means learning to share the load and work as a team. Picking the right things to delegate and the right people to delegate to is a balance that may take time to achieve – and hiccups can happen along the way. Knowing your team, who they are, what they can handle, and where they are in the different seasons of their lives will allow you to make the best possible choices.

Take Inventory

Where is your tech team at right now? Where are you as a leader? Take a personal inventory of what you have been doing well and what you haven't been doing with your team. What have you been doing to grow yourself? Start first by connecting with God and seeking his direction. Then make a plan to train your team members and to meet with them regularly. Begin to identify capable team members and give them some of the tasks that you usually work on. Then go out and start building new relationships with people and bring them on board too. Over time these practices will build your own leadership capacities, a thriving tech team, and help your entire church grow.

Todd Heft
Todd Hefthttp://hillsidebristol.org
Todd Heft is the director of media arts at Hillside Community Church in Bristol, Connecticut. He also is the social media coordinator for Racing with Jesus Ministries He holds a bachelor's degree in Computer Science from ECSU and a Master's degree in Computer Information Management from CCSU. Todd also has a full-time position at ESPN as a Systems Administrator. He enjoys spending time camping with his wife and their four children.

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