Church Media Team Volunteer Burnout

Along the lines of my last post.  How many times have you gotten just burned out as a volunteer?  It’s happened all too often to me.  I guess I brought this on myself by my desire to get involved in the first place, but now I get phone calls from church staff members telling me what I need to do.  I love the staff, they’re great people, but they need to understand that this is not my job.  I don’t get paid to do what I do, I’m a volunteer!

If I had the time, I would love to create graphics, videos etc. every week, run powerpoint and audio for all those little events that happen each week, but it’s just not possible.

If you’re a church staff member or pastor and you’re reading this, please make sure you consider that your tech volunteers are just that: VOLUNTEERS.  They most likely love to help you out, but can’t always do what you’d like them to do.

More churches need to consider hiring technical people.

Media Team training

I’m a volunteer at church for audio and visuals.  My time has always been somewhat limited to spend in training and recruiting new people to help with media, but it’s not been more limited than it is now.  With my kids so heavily involved in activities, I just don’t have a lot of time.

So in talking with my associate pastor last night, he helped me figure out how to get the ball rolling on training new people.  We’re going to get a big boost in the number of people to help out in running things on Sunday mornings, as well as to create the content during the week.

We have several hundred people who come to church on Sundays and aren’t involved in anything.  I know there’s a few who want to do something but just haven’t been asked. 

Forming a team

This article from Midnight Oil Productions has really affected me.  I was part of a meeting for our Eleventh Hour worship service last night and even though I wanted to talk about assigning team roles, I wasn’t prepared to do it.  However, when our associate Pastor started talking a little bit about it, I felt compelled to discuss the roles as explained in the article.  I also had the opportunity to listen to Jason and Len from Midnight Oil talk about this very thing at the CMN national conference.

Any worship service that wants to reach out to the culture needs to have a good solid team in place to plan their services.  It takes a group of people working as a team to put together all the elements necessary to reach out to today’s digitally minded culture.  It’s just too much for a pastor or one or two lay people to do.

I’m working with an awesome team of people who are very concerned with reaching out to our culture here in central Ohio.  We continue to work toward creating a service that will really connect with the unchurched and make a difference in their lives.