If you’re used to being the place your community comes for existential help, you might not always recognize it when you need it yourself.
Point blank, help is the hardest thing to ask for when you’re “supposed” to have it all together.
As a church production team, you’re juggling events throughout the week, services on weekends, and hundreds of “helps” coming in through every line of communication. You’re the team that’s supposed to come running every time they need music or a mic check.
Amidst amplifying the many facets of your church’s message, maybe it’s time you stepped back and asked, “Where in all of this might I need help?” This will be your ticket to a more stabilized year for production.
Finding the Problem
As an AVL company, we’ve been hands-on in the stories of many churches. We’ve come in to help churches realize a better production philosophy and actualize it in their house of worship.
Working with countless churches through design, installation, and support has given us a context for every movement in the church AVL experience. What we’ve noticed is that helping a church get into its dreams isn’t the hard part.
Most of the churches we work with are equipped with decades of industry equipment and know the catalog and what each thing does just as well as we do.
What lacks isn’t that the church isn’t aware of what they want, or that they don’t have the money to purchase it. It’s that they don’t have the capacity to maintain the solution they want when they get it.
Without proper maintenance, the million-dollar AVL investment is squandered, and churches go on reacting with their budget, buying on impulse or trend instead of buying and producing from a well-formed plan.
While it may go unsaid, most teams think that if there’s not enough time to do maintenance really well, they’ll do just enough to get by. This, of course, never works.
While you may not be able to maintain your solution the way you should, you could reconsider the way you see audio, visual, and lighting services altogether.
AVL as a Service
AVL as a Service (AVLaaS) provides you the space needed to focus on what matters.
For example, we support the worship space with a full assessment and an inventory on each piece of equipment (including life cycles). We document your space and research the kind of purchasing habits you should employ to achieve max efficiency with your solution.
Imagine a company coming in and helping you set up an organizational flow for your space. Maintenance shouldn’t be your worst nightmare, and neither should your tech room.
With a partner, you get the peace and of mind you need to be present in every worship service. AVL maintenance for many churches would be a solution in itself.
With an AVLaaS partner, your staff is more able to focus on the worship experience at hand, and not the problems they don’t have the time to solve.
Stewarding Your Solution Well
Another benefit to having a support team is you get freed up to plan for the future. A team of experts comes alongside you in this venture to discover the shape of your next solution. There’s something about the current setup being stewarded well that gives way for the next solution to be put in the budget.
A partner’s relationship with vendors in the AVL world allows your current solution to be replaced piece by piece, as needed. These will all be proactive purchases since we will have already done an assessment of the space.
Final Thoughts
Production thrives when adequate attention is given to maintenance. Team members then have space to run production and have room to develop a future vision.
We think the No. 1 thing hindering the worship experience from an AV side is the team’s capacity to thrive in maintaining the equipment. While we can’t run the show, we can keep your show running.
Make this the year you ask for help and experience the clarity you need to lean into your church’s dreams.
This article is courtesy of Ellis Pro Media, www.ellispromedia.com. They are serious about their clientele, serious about the future of Pro AVL, and passionate about their part in the worship experience.
