How do you get a replacement?

[llbrown2]

So, I'm kind of in a bind right now. About four years ago I started helping my brothers run the sound, audio, camera, and lights at church. Two years ago they both left and gave me the job. Since then I have upgraded the media we use. One of the biggest upgrades has been moving from Power Point to Media Shout. After two years of working with Media Shout and Photoshop, I've learned how to run both of our services with only the assistance of a sound monkey. I make the sermon, prayer, communion, offering, and announcement graphics. I make looping backgrounds for the songs. & I run it all from Media Shout for each service Sunday morning.

So, I've now come to a point where I will be moving on and the church needs someone to replace me. However, in this process I haven't done the best job in teaching anyone how to do what I'm doing. If I know I'm going to be out for a Sunday at church I make all the cues in advance in photoshop and then put the in order in media shout. Then I get a person to turn on the computer and just hit the space bar the entire service. Even with that simple of a task, they still have problems.

The Worship Leaders wife has stepped up and I've worked with her in photoshop and Media Shout. She's got the basics down, but I'm really scared to hand it over to her. She doesn't really have the eye for graphic design. She lacks the basic concepts. I would like to sit down with her and walk her through things, but she's older than me and I'm afraid she wouldn't take me giving her a tutorial very well. The same goes for anyone.. they just see me as a kid, and they don't understand that there is more to it then clicking things together. I seriously think that they think "Photoshop" is a magic button I press and 2 seconds later a beautiful image pops out.

I want some peoples input on this though. I think my mind set might be a little whack, and I need someone to put me in my place.. or at least make me feel better about leaving. My mom always told me if someone can do something 60% as good as you can, let them do it.

... Another question: Am I doing to much for a small church? I put in about 20-25 hours a week as a volunteer. I'm afraid what I'm doing isn't appreciated, and I might be putting my God given talents to use in the wrong place. How can I know?

[waynehoskins]

Welcome to the forum place thing!

Oftentimes everything that's production-related -- sound, lighting, video, graphic design, and so forth -- isn't consciously appreciated by most people. If you do it well enough, they don't notice that you've done anything. This is good in terms of your production quality and production values, but it sure doesn't help you get good volunteers to take your place.

I would suggest that you might need to find two types of people to train: graphic designers (which sounds like it's the harder part of what you do) and trained monkeys. Trained monkeys can run something without having to either have the design eye or understand thoroughly how pieces of equipment work and exactly how they interconnect. You probably also need an engineer type to take care of that last part.

Trained monkeys -- that part is relatively easy. You could take one person, let that person shadow you for a week or two, watching what you do in a service, and then hand over the controls while you coach. Explaining the why behind some of the steps you do ("we always play this song like this, going through to the chorus and then back to the first verse" or "I like to change backgrounds between the fast songs and slow songs", for example) is good.

Graphic design -- that part's harder. I'm not a graphic designer, more the engineer type, so I let people with graphic design skills do that part. Having your worship leader's wife watch you while you make something in Photoshop would probably be a really good thing, as uncomfortable as it may be. Again, a thing of "I'm doing this effect because of this" is good to get some of the concepts across.

I've always heard that it's a four-step process:
1. I do
2. I do, you watch
3. You do, I watch
4. You do
(5. You do, somebody else watches)

A friend of mine who's media director at a larger church in town says that appreciating your volunteers is a very important thing.

I'm in a similar boat myself -- not with leaving the church, but with losing over half of my crew earlier this year. They're youth guys, and this winter they discovered girls -- in other words, they went stupid. So now we're on skeleton crew and trying to train up a slug of new people in relatively short time. Fun times. We've had to scale back some of the nicer things we started doing and some of the expansion plans for now. You may find yourself having to scale back some of the nicer things you're doing in Photoshop and such for the time being.

[Bob Almond]

Great advice above. I'm sure you've done this, but you also need to sit down with the Pastor and talk this through, explaining the whole situation carefully, and asking for direction. After all, the leadership of the church will need to monitor the situation after you have moved on, and the more notice they have, the fewer surprises.

[tedanderson]

This approach might seem harsh and abrupt but it works:

Have the pastor (or whoever makes announcements) inform the congregation that you are leaving. And then sit in service (without working) for the next two Sundays. One of two things will happen- Either nobody will notice that there is no powerpoint and then you are off the hook or someone will notice that you are not there and step up to the plate.

If nobody has expressed an interest in doing what you do after you have solicited for help from the congregation and if nobody is able to replace you after you offered to teach them everything that you know, then it will take more drastic measures to encourage someone to take over.

[NdEd]

One of the fundamental things I look for when working with a new client is having a discipleship mentality for the media ministry team. If they already have it, I work with them to make it stronger. If they don't have it, I explain the importance of making true disciple building part of the media ministry. This requires sacrifices, like making the control booth bigger (i.e. more expensive) to have room for at least 2 people at every position. It also requires the team members to humble themselves and be willing to share everything they know with everybody else - there is no room for "secret knowledge" in a church that is sincere about growing the kingdom. If the church balks at this philosophy, I walk away from the business.

I know this doesn't help with your current situation, but I hope you can learn from this mistake and take a discipling mentality with you into the next church you embrace.

[llbrown2]

Thanks everyone for all the advice. I'm so glad I found this forum. After reading everyones comments, I have several idea of where to go from here!