Are we working with or against each other?

[The MO Guys]

Many churches attempt to design worship as a team (or worse, a committee), but few are successful at it. There are many obstacles that get in the way of effective worship design, and sometimes it seems individuals work more at preventing group design than for it.

We get territorial about our domain, but some have felt the freedom of giving it all up to acheive team synergy. When teams work they're a blast, and our worship is so much better for it.

Which is it for you? Does your team excel at designing worship in a team, or are they working against each other? What is it that makes your team what it is?

Feel free to share and start topics about these and other team related issues.

[sewing]

My crew consists of myself and 2 others. We each take a week on rotation. I am the leader of the crew. I do not have a full time job so I take the majority of the work on.

I think our crew does a pretty fair job but we each have different ideas of what the purpose of the images and backgrounds should be. One person likes to do seasonal images. Spring flowers now. Hearts for Valentines day. That sort of thing. The other is so busy with work and other ministries in the church that often it is generic backgrounds.

I use the topic of the sermon as my inspiration for the images. The music minister does the same thing in choosing the music. I try to find images which enhance the theme.

With allowing the different people to use their time and inclinations it keeps things peaceful. Even though I am rather frustrated at times with the images used it is their week and I can only hope that they will develop as time goes on.

[Gene]

We design in a team consisting of myself, the pastor, the traditional music minister, the contemporary music minister, and a couple of members of the congregation that the pastor and I selected. The pastor and I are involved every week, but other people's input varies from week to week.

Sometimes the pastor has a firm idea of what he's planning to talk about, other times he asks what people think about the readings for the week or about a particular aspect of it that he's planning on talking about.

Once we start getting some ideas flowing and have some possible titles/themes/metaphors, I start creating images for a title slide. Sometimes the pastor has a specific kind of image in mind, or someone will come up with a specific idea, but a lot of times it's less clear so the images may be all over the place. People comment on things they like and don't like about the images leading to refinements, and as the pastor refines his sermon, we narrow it down to one image and possible refine it futher.

Contrary to what's recommended, we do it all through email, not face-to-face. That works well because we all know each other, and it puts less pressure on people to fit a meeting into their already busy schedules. And it gives people more time to consider the ideas at hand, a chance to look up Bible references connected to the readings, etc.

[Jason Moore]

This is a little off topic, but I just had to say it... Gene also does incredible design work and he's a heck of a photographer. Check out some of his work here.

He's done some really great metaphor-based images as well as some more "traditional" and stylized imagery.

[Gene]

You're much too kind. And a lot of what I've learned about using metaphor and imagery in worship has come from you and your books, and from the helpful souls over at CMN. Without your encouragement, I may not have even used the detergent / "be made clean" metaphor, and that ended up being one of our best efforts.

[psychsunshine]

I'm going to bring this thread back to life, kinda like when Jesus healed Lazarus...

Right now, it's just my stepdad & running the whole show. This includes creating all the multimedia stuff & running it at two services on Sunday & an evening service on Wednesday.

My stepdad & I have a good relationship & we work well together. We differ in how we do things, but somehow we make it work. I usually put together the 11 AM Sunday service, since that's the service I run. He does the 8:30 AM Sunday service & the Wednesday service.

We each work with one of the pastors to prepare the sermon. Whoever is not prepping a sermon that week, prepares the scripture slides.

Sometimes the "usual" way of doing things goes completely out the window & one of us ends up doing everything for a week or two. This usually happens when I'm in the hospital for another surgery or like last week when my stepdad had eye surgery. One week, I did everything because I was home on medical leave & my stepdad was just really burned out because of all the other conflict going on in our church.

We've been trying to recruit more people to work with us, but we really haven't had any takers at all. How do you all get people to help with multimedia? Any suggestions?

Emily

[pinball]

My team mostly consists of people I've caught hanging around the booth on Sundays. We have recruited a complainer once, and it worked out really well for a time. When he moved off the team, he became one of our biggest defenders.

I'm the primary designer, but since I took the bull by the horns, a couple of other people with design inclinations have created stuff from time to time.

We don't have formal creative team meetings yet, so I beg for creative input. I always get the input of whoever's preaching, of course. Our worship leader is quite a Renaissance artist, so he gives me good input. We share the booth with the sound guys, so I get their opinion a lot. Both are good at helping me tweak designs and sometimes help me decide to scrap them altogether. I also get input from the praise team, since we often design during praise band practice.

Last week was awesome (see Life Upside Down on the Graphic Critique forum). I had the sound guys more involved in the design than normal as I did color correcting, lighting adjustments, and placement. Somewhere in the course of our conversation, the 6-year-old son of our pianist had wandered into the booth. He started contributing to the conversation, and his insights were very keen. The shading layer on the trees (which I messed up and got off-kilter, as you can see in my other post) was a result of one of his comments, and the final placement of the three guys walking was all his. I'd move it away from the title box, and he'd say, "A little more. A little more." until it was just right.

I thank God for preventing me from ignoring him, just because he's a rambunctious little boy. I think the way he slipped so easily into the conversation and the fact that I was sitting and he was standing (which put our heads at about the same height) helped me not to think of myself as superior to him.

You can bet I'll be getting his help again!

[Oldview51]

We have a Worship Committee and it really doesn't work at planning worship. Mostly it revolves around things, and maintaining the status quo. We are talking about switching to a team concept and I am hoping that will work better. It can't be much worse than what we have.

[FlamHappy]

We rotate everything but my position on the drums as there has not been anyone expressing a desire to play. I would gladly rotate that position with anyone. We have 3 pianists, a pool of singers, two guitarists, 2 bass players, 3 leaders, 4 guys who do av which is only needed to be run by one of the four on any given Sunday due to our small size of the church.

Nobody afaik is territorial at the our church. As a matter of fact we might have the opposite with people trading Sundays with each other all the time for this reason or that.

We have been blessed with so much vocal talent at our church. Nobody really sticks out too much but all are simply phenomenal.

All in all we have a great spirit filled group of individuals from which to choose.

[Esoteric]

I worked for a large church that used a fairly large creative team. There was the Worship Pastor, the Technical Pastor, three Producers, a Lighting Coordinator, two of the band members, two visual content guys, and a couple of other people. We all work toward the same goal with everyone using their unique talents to get us there. We have weekly meetings about services and then monthly and bi yearly meetings for reviews. We absolutely excel at teamwork, and everyone is on board or they aren't around very long. In addition everyone knows their place in the hierarchy and when to speak up and when not to. It is a great dynamic, but not for everyone.

Mike

[tedanderson]

We absolutely excel at teamwork, and everyone is on board or they aren't around very long.

Same here. The funny thing is that as large as our church is, (5000+ members actively participating and over 14,000 on the roster) it is always easy to identify an outsider or a new member just by watching how they respond to some of the competitiveness that takes place within our walls. For instance, we give awards to members as well as tokens of recognition amongst departments that have exhibited outstanding work in their area of ministry. But when we see another department win an award, it is understood that we ALL win! Not just the people being recognized but each and every one of us had something to do with a job well done by a particular department.

It seems like when ANYONE is given recognition EVERYONE applauds and cheers!