Many folks who serve in technical ministry are really serving out of love. Their hearts are in the right place, and they really are doing their best. In twenty-five years of doing technical ministry I have only seen a small handful of folks were involved in technical ministry for the wrong reasons. For your willingness to serve and to spend and be spent for the glory of the kingdom in an often unthanked position, we commend you.
I personally love whenever visiting a church, even if just attending, to check out the tech ministry to see what they are doing and gain new perspectives or new ideas. Unfortunately, as I talk with the techs I normally find that this wonderful helpful servant tells me, “Well, I just help out. I don’t know much of anything.” or “Well, we all kind of just help each other out back here, we don’t know what’s really going on.” One theme I hear over and over: “I don’t know.”
I want you to ask yourself this question, “Why did I get involved in technical ministry?” If God has given you a desire and a talent to serve Him in this type of ministry, wouldn’t it make sense to exercise (you know, “work out”) your gifts and talents? to grow in knowledge? to sharpen your skills?
“But my church doesn’t have the money to send me to training classes.” (Question: have you ever humbly asked?) “I don’t have a big fat electronics degree, and I only serve 3 times a month!” Yes, we’ve heard them all. Unfortunately, these are excuses. A key aspect of our ministry at Ministry Tech is helping. (Have you checked out our resources?) In addition to our resources there are lots of others out there—free videos put out by manufactures, tips and tricks from experienced users, webinars, forums, social media… (Did we mention the Ministry Tech website?) Maybe you might even need to personally sell something or think of another creative way to earn some extra money to pay your own way to a conference or to attend a workshop? And don’t forget the most often neglected means of learning a system… read the manual!
It is so important to know thy stuff. What do we mean by that? Know your gear, inside and out. Know how it works, how it’s connected, what it’s connected to, what do different settings do, and why is it setup this way? Most often the settings put in place by the installer are not the best for every situation, in fact almost never. But not only do you need to know your gear, you need to know your church’s policies and practices… Know why you do what you do—why you don’t do this or why you do that.
If you played in the church orchestra or sang in the choir, would it be appropriate not to practice? Would you pastor be right in not preparing properly for his messages? Of course not. So how do we as techs then think we can show up 5 minutes before the service, throw the mics on stage, run the faders up and hope it all works without even knowing exactly what we did or why we just did it?
We need to be equipped to serve the King of kings; we need to be ready to serve the folks in our congregation; we need to have the tools and knowledge to do the job God has called us to. We’d love to help you with that, so get in touch!