Church Production Magazine, We challenge YOU!

[WOLtech]

I just wanted to send a challenge to church production magazine out there. I read this magazine and pay for it but find myself constantly thinking the same thing when I am done reading it.

" Can we get some help?"

There are so many ads, so many "big" churchs that are spotlighted for there installs, new gear, new buildings, great ideas but it never goes to the glory of God and never highlights how the church volunteers and staff broke there backs, ignored there families, and labored hard to make the install possible also.

There is so much corporate high fiving and it just seems to me like the entire magazine has the completely wrong idea about church production.

I challenge them to get in the trenches, talk to volunteers that excel in there skill set, talk to tech directors BUT not just sugar coat things. There are frustrations, challenges, and hard times in ministry daily that NO ONE seems to talk about in church production magazine, or any other magazine.

Church production, stop highlighting the $40 million install so much and help out the day to day people that glue, gaff, and screw things together to save the church and the ministry money, or becuase we have no money to work with.

They have a great product, but I believe if it focused more on what God is doing in the lives and hearts of believers and not in companys....we might read it more, and actually sell more. Just my two cents.

Blessings,

Joe

[Ebroach]

I too wish they would have more info for the smaller churches. especially since smaller churches are the majority. Yes it is great to read and dream about some of thes kabilion dollar projects. Where the mixer board cost more than the whole A/v budget for a small church.


But Production Magazine is not the only one. Many of the church related A/v magazines do the same thing. Lets face it, that is who there advertisiers are targeting.

I know of one church who runs about 50 in membership did a complete A/V upgrade last year. Sound and Media projection for less that 20K..

[kbob]

Maybe we should generate one out of here instead. It's not like we don't have the source materials here, for all phases of church media-

sound
lighting
projection
video

so why don't we pull something together and show them how it's done?

[WORDpictures]

Why not write the magazine a letter suggesting this? And kbob has a great idea there too.

[AlexH237]

I wouldn't mind contributing to it.

[zackw250]

Agreed. CPM is kind of what I don't like about Christians.. the fake, look good on the surface, no real depth, no honesty, not actually helpful.

Anyone read there TD profile articles? Those are a joke. Every TD they interview seems to have the same awnsers to every question. I don't know if they are coached, or if they too have read previous TD profiles and are just trying to fit in. If I was asked "What do you think the most important quality in a TD is?" My awnser would not be "love people" or "remembering that your the spiritual leader of the team", or blah. I think a good TD is someone who can leverage the mission & vision of your church, both now, and into the future, with technology that allows ministry to excel into people's lifes. The ability to take what the church wants to do, and help them understand how technology can help them accomplish that vision. Loving your techies is important, but I belive it's not the most important role as a TD.

Disclaimer: I work at contemporary mega church - and I'm dissapointed with CPM. Let's see some helpful information, in the trenches, lets hear about remodels done in house, amazing volunteers teams, how technology is being used to reach the loss (not how much cool technology you can put into a brand new 40mill auditorium).

[MediaGuy]

This discussion is a self-defeating one. Don't get me wrong... I find little help in CPM, too. But the idea for a magazine goes like this: Select a target group, sell advertising for that target group, and write articles for that target group (in that order). CPM is definately not targeting the small church, so they won't listen to your cries - the only thing they want to hear is how to better serve their target market.

The suggestion of writing our own is, I hope, tongue-in-cheek, because we have no one to advertise for this market (at least, none off the top of my head). If you can think of all your resources, I'm pretty sure you still can't find enough who could pay to fill the ad space for a magazine. I'm stuck in a bad position where I'm at, and we're a big small-church (or a small big-church). I can't buy what we need, because most often they still cost way too much to justify the need.

This web site will probably be the closest thing we'll have to fill the need for a small-church tech magazine. Maybe someone on the BOD could select a member and have them fill out a questionaire which could be turned into an article featured off the front page.

We could also vote for our favorite ministry resource provider, and someone could interview them. This begins to open up the website from a message board to more of a portal. What do the powers-that-be think of those things?

[Mark Finley]

an interative forum is 1000X more helpful and eaiser to manage than a magazine.


I dont even look at CPM anymore

[brenthomer]

I really like CPM. I think the big mistake that smaller churches make is they think they shouldn't be looking at what the mega churches do. I have bad news for everyone...most everything the mega churches do scales down pretty well to small churches.

COMMA is getting pretty successful. The number one comment we get is, "We can learn so much more from you guys then from mega churches."

It's sort of funny because all we do is retell them what we learned from mega churches. We are now running close to 700 people a weekend now. 5 years ago we where 250-300. The reason why we started growing? We joined the willow group and started modernizing. We don't have time to reinvent the wheel. We can't afford to make mistakes. A purchase mistake can really screw things up, because we don't have the funds to redo them.

Now CPM has some issues. Remember they don't make people in churches buy them. They will give you the copy. Just fill out a subscription card for a free one. I am sure Tim or anyone who has the magazine has a desk draw filled with free subscription cards. You should never really have to pay for trade magazines. That is what those ads are for

My biggest complaint with CPM is the same one I have with a lot of CMN reviews...no one is allowed to really give a negative review of products b/c they are both so dependent on advertising dollars.

The best source of learning church media is right here on these forums. Even tho a lot of subjects you might be interested in go untouched, you still have access to the PM system.

Many a times I have asked for reviews of products and people have pm'd me their personal reviews (positive & negative) . I have gotten calls from people at cmn from all of the country asking me what I thought of products. I have called a ton of people up just to ask them simple workflow questions. When I go on vacation, I almost always put a post asking if I can visit peoples churches.

It's a new day, and tech magazines are great to get glimpses of what other churches are doing, but the real way to learn is to start talking to people. Call the bigger churches up in your area and talk to their techs...they usually are introverted people who love to share with someone who cares

[tedanderson]

It does not surprise me that CPM (amongst other publications of its type) make a great looking magazine but you walk away scratching your head thinking to yourself, "they just don't get it." But one good thing that I can say is that pictures of $100K lighting rigs and 100 cabinet line array systems gives smaller churches something to conceptualize. They look in the magazine and say to themselves, "That could be us one day."

I am part of what is defined as a mega-contemporary church but in spite of our large budgets, mega-installs, etc. we also gaff, glue and screw. If anyone else on here has a ministry that's anything like mine, you know that being innovative is the only way that we can make things work the way we want them to. No amount of money can "buy" the solution to a problem or idea that comes up in the ministry. Whenever we are called upon to fufill an unusual task or to create a temporary fix, we can't just walk into Radio Shack and say "gimme a device that will make it possible to do 'xyz' at our church."

Because CPM is corporately driven, it would take a publication that was more "underground" and grass-roots oriented to really get an honest and unbiased perspective. I mean Shure would probably pull the plug on their sponsorship if CPM ran an article on how to make your $20 microphone sound as good as a Beta 87.

[kbob]

Listen guys-there is a reason that both eq & mix magazines exist-in order to service different aspects of the market. One is much like cpm-big stuff, product roll outs, etc, with lots of industry insiders providing "insights" into their next line of products.

There's nothing wrong with that at all. We need to see the products we hope to be using, even if it's three or five years before we can get there. It gives us something to aspire to.

However, knowing how to set up an eight year old outboard effects box might be just as useful for some of us. Full on instructions on ringing out a live setup quickly and how to tweak for you music and audience.

What you need to make that pc and your ancient of days videonics do overlay with live switching-what boxes work well for a given budget?

Those kinds of questions and answer sessions could really use an audience. Instead, the closest articles I can usually find deal with "low end" products costing $7-15000. That's not low end for us, and we're much larger than the "typical" american church (at 600 different people+/- attending per month on average).

I like some of the suggestions here. Pick a couple/four people a month to write something on spec, and highlight it as a featured series.

One of the nicest examples I've seen of that was the free dv tutorial I referenced that ran on camcorder info. it ran long, at 21 entries, but took each article as a nice short set of how-to's on a given introduction to that version of an editor, while referencing how you'd do it on other platforms.

Now they're running a beginner's corner, with single articles on different subject, such as video'ing plays, birthdays, etc.

We could easily do both here-the talent is here, that's certain. I know writing can be tough to do, but it's much easier when you're writing about something you're both knowledgeable and passionate about.

I do agree that we aren't poised to start up a new printed magazine, but utilizing the existing church media university concept with a series of feature articles on various how to's, perhaps one for each of our main lines of ministry each month.

IMAG
Video recording/editing
Audio-both live and recording
Projection/worship software
Graphics-still photography and graphics
PC hardware/software

We could have two each month-one each for both hardware and software for most of those-imag could be split between cameras/operators and mixers/directing for instance. Probably a few articles on team building, copyright (maybe interview a few actually versed in that subject for instance?), and other issues could be useful as well.

It would require a bit more out of us regular contributors than just answering other's issues, but I'd enjoy it if I had something to contribute.

Maybe some of us should just put up, and write some articles on different subjects. Share them around some of the board members (you know, the ones Tim appointed that none of us have done much with yet?-meaning, not the board of directors types-you guys are welcome to help, but you already do so much!) to beat them into shape first, then start it up with a couple of articles in each category already banked.

I'm guessing here, but if we kept it up, I'm betting we could get interviews with both resellers, installers, techs, and even manufacturers on topics we need answers to every day, instead of just the usual what's next type stories we usually see. We might even make some money for CMN in the process by attracting both more traffic and more advertisers.

What do you folks think?

[WORDpictures]

Originally Posted by kbob

What do you folks think?

I think you're volunteering to head this up.

(Despite running a couple thousand people on Sunday, low-budget=no budget to an extent here too)