Tonight we had a work night at church with a couple of main objectives.
Reposition spots and floods
Get new audio computer in sound booth on the network
There is a whole list of things but those are the 2 that rose to the top. We also hung out and chatted a bit. Lately, I have considering this team that I have to work with and I see the various talents, skills and desires. I don’t want someone to come in feel like they are not important or what they do does not matter. I have come up with a new approach, which is to allow people to take ownership of an area. I see strengths in different people and this is due to their interests and abilities.
So, what do I expect when I say that someone is the owner of something like this? I want them to be the expert in that area and I want them to teach us something we don’t know. In the process, I want them to take things up a notch and increase the level of excellence that we deliver.
I think the way this came up was last night, Rachel, my 11 year old, almost 12 year old daughter, and I stopped by church to do something real quick. I think Mary knows better when I say I’m just going to stop at church for a minute. Rachel and I started talking about lights and somehow it came out that she wanted to be the lighting expert.
Cool! It seemed like a good fit. I am trying to be more intentional with lighting and so this is a good next step. I told Rachel she is the owner of the lights and she needs to lead the rest of us in how we are to do things in that way. I want her to be the light expert and research how to do lighting “right”. I told her some of my ideas and of course, she had some of her own. We actually implemented some ideas that she had tonight. I’ll let her share her thoughts and ideas with you soon. In this process, I want her to develop her leadership skills, gain confidence and learn to stand up against opposing ideas.
She will be understanding gels, spots, floods, coverage, artsy kinds of lighting and more, I’m sure. At one point, I set her loose on the Google to begin her research and she ended up on a thread on ChurchMedia.net. Awesome site! I should have thought to direct her there.
Also tonight, Donna, Daniel and Chris showed up and the 4 of them, including Rachel, are my core team, so I’m glad we were all there. Someone once asked Rachel if she was just following me around and the truth is, she loves being at church and she especially loves becoming the lighting expert! Donna helped Rachel talk through some of the creative elements of what we were trying to do and she also hooked up a new PC to the network in the sound booth. Daniel worked on a registry hack to add Windows MCE to our domain, which he was successful in doing. Chris helped with the lights and climbed the ladder a little bit. I mostly climbed the ladder and did what Rachel told me to do! 
We swapped out gels and repositioned lights and more.
In the end, Daniel and I discussed the future of our Tech Arts ministry and the virtually limitless possibilities that lie ahead of us and I shared some about my past and where I came from, including how I landed at Fairview.
It was a fun night and I knew I had to write it up tonight, yet now it’s very late.
One of these days you will get hooked on Churchmedia.net and never look back
dj
Great idea involving youth (even if she is your daughter
. We have found that some of our best video directors are high school youth, and they are second to none on the remote control camera. All that Xbox experience, I guess.
Jim,
This is totally the right approach – one can never know it all and as a manager of people (especially tech people) one has to be super careful in how you handle them.
I am currently battling with my Church to create this “super-manager” position that oversees all tech but all the pastor and senior deacons are seeing is “someone whom wants to control”.
That is so far from being me (and they know this) and I’ve tried to combat this by saying I believe the role is right for our Church but I’m not saying it should necessarily be me either. Secondly I’m saying that the role is mostly a single point of link to the pastor – so instead of multiple folks moaning about the lights, they get one clear concise approach to the issue.
It is, as you say, about making that tech own their area of knowledge and then reporting to one overseer who knows when the wool is being proverbially pulled but can also translate tech-babble into real world speak.
Keep on bloging …