Archive for the ‘Leadership’ Category

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The Weekly Campus Promo

Thursday, June 16th, 2011

As any church grows in size and the amount of staff members increase, it can become more difficult to keep everyone in the loop. Some of the folks working with the kids ministry or small groups, for example, may not be fully aware of what the worship or video departments are even working on! With so many small details and tasks to accomplish in order to create the best weekend worship experience, it is very easy to miss something among all of the different departments that make up a church staff. So, we developed a document that I create weekly called the Campus Promo.

Elevation is made up of 4 campuses across Charlotte, and each week the campuses have individual campus meetings. The Campus Promo document is used in these meetings to get everyone from the different departments on the same page as we move into the weekend worship experiences. Here’s a link to a sample of this document that was used a few weeks back.

It gives Pastor Steven’s speaking schedule, meaning which campus he will be live at and when. It lists out any creative elements that we have programmed, it gives the length of the entire experience among other times… AND it even lets each campus know how and when to collect the offering. These may seem like small details, but when our eGroups director, or Student Ministries director, or eKidz staff aren’t heavily involved in the programming side of the worship experience, this document really helps bridge the gap among departments and get everyone on the same page.

So whether you’re meeting in multiple locations, or your staff is just growing larger, I hope this helps you! In our experience, it makes a tremendous difference when everyone on staff can go into the weekend fully knowing what to expect!

Posted in Leadership, Planning | 2 Comments »

The “Why” Behind Our Worship Experiences

Tuesday, March 29th, 2011

Several of you asked for us to explain why we design our experiences the way we do. Here’s some insight from our interns, Jane and Megs.

Posted in Leadership, Videos, Worship Experiences | 1 Comment »

Musicians

Thursday, March 24th, 2011

So based on a few of you guys’ comments on last week’s post, we wanted to address the subject of finding musicians in your area that are excited to use their gifts on your team. First, you should check out this older post “Need Players?”. We posted about the process we went through when we were brand new to Charlotte and trying to find excellent musicians for this growing ministry. It details how we’ve approached that very issue from the start.

As far as getting musicians “excited” or interested in playing at your church, here’s a couple of thoughts….

1) Set your standards high for your ministry. Create a culture of excellence. Don’t settle. It’s honoring to God. It’s attractive to people who are far from God. And excellent musicianship and professionalism is attractive to other excellent and professional musicians. It won’t be a “hard sell” to get great players and singers involved with your worship team if there’s skilled dudes and girls there every weekend making it happen!

2) Also, don’t ever underestimate the power of putting compelling vision in front of others. You may be able to snag a few players for a weekend here and there, but unless they’re tied to a larger vision that’s gripping their hearts as to why they should stay there, chances are they won’t. Cast vision. Cast it well. Cast it often.

We’ll continue to tackle your questions as best as we can in the coming weeks. Thanks again for your support and love for advancing his Church!

Posted in Bands, Leadership | 13 Comments »

So You’re Portable

Wednesday, March 16th, 2011

We shared this on the blog a couple of years ago, and thought it might be helpful enough to re-post, with a few updates….

So we thought we’d share a brief bit on how we prepare our bands for the weekends. It’s not always convenient being in 4 different campuses across a city, 2 of which are portable….but it can work. We can very much relate to those of you who are in portable church situations. So for us, we use Planning Center to host all production aspects of our weekly worship experiences. Many/most of you are familiar with and are using PC as well.

And because of needing to communicate so much weekly information, we’ve learned to use PC for every small detail. Every single player and singer we have (as well as all production crews – lighting, sound, stage hands, etc) are plugged in and scheduled through PC. We’ve got every chart and mp3 loaded on there for our players and vocalists to utilize for practice. There’s a separate BGV demo that’s posted for each song, so there’s no question about parts. We also detail out specific notes for our players under each song, mainly splitting up the guitar parts for both electric players, so they’re clearly communicated on which parts to learn ahead of time. We also input bpms for each song so our guitar players are clear on any tempos in case they’re using digital delays. And we post the click for each song for our drummers to download so they’re showing up with those ready to go.

As of now, we don’t hold mid-week rehearsals. So our only time to run the songs is on Saturday afternoons or Sunday mornings before the worship experiences. We don’t consider that time as much of a rehearsal time, but rather as a run through of the songs. Ergo, we set high expectations on every one of our musicians to show up overly prepared. That being the case, we’ve got to do as much legwork as possible on the front-end to make sure they’re set up for success to come in completely prepared on Sundays. If we expect excellence from our musicians, we’ve got to lead with excellence and leave nothing in question moving into the weekends. This means inputting For example….

**You’ll also see notes for our FOH, lighting, staging, and video guys**

So each one of our campuses has it’s own worship leader and band, and each worship leader is responsible for posting detailed notes on each song for his band. But the kicker is establishing a culture where excellence and professionalism is expected and required. And the good news is professionalism attracts professionalism.

So maybe you’re a portable church and you’re struggling to find a practice space and/or utilizing the short amount of practice time you have with your band. Here’s our advice: do the legwork of detailing out song directions, overly communicate details to your musicians during the week, use the power of Planning Center, and watch your musicians step up their game.

Posted in Leadership, Worship Experiences | 15 Comments »

Submitting Your Art

Thursday, February 17th, 2011

Here’s a follow up thought from yesterday’s post on songwriting for the church. Submission, when broken down, means “to come underneath someone else’s mission.” “Sub”-”mission.”  Worship leaders cannot be divas. Worship leaders cannot be men or women who think they have it all together, and/or have the only right way to do things. Worship leaders must be willing to put their own agenda aside…for the larger mission of the church…coming under submission of their pastor’s God-given vision.

With that in mind, when worship leaders are creating art/writing songs, we have to learn to put our personal preferences out.  If you’re writing songs for your local church, you need to be running those songs by your pastor to make sure they’re going to fit the vision of the church, the vibe of the worship atmosphere your pastor wants to create, (not to mention having your pastor double check all the theology in the song to make sure it’s correct). Learn to set aside your stylistic preferences, lyrical preferences, melodic preferences aside for the sake of the mission. Remember it’s not about you. Because what really makes our art powerful to others is when we submit it (our creation) to a larger vision.  People will connect with it on a whole new level because it’s so directly correlated to the vision of the house.  So artists, hold on to this: the ultimate sign of humility is when you can submit your personal preference to a larger vision.

Posted in Leadership, Songwriting | 5 Comments »

Turning Natural to Supernatural

Thursday, February 3rd, 2011

We just finished our Get Back series this past weekend where Pastor Steven taught on how to recover your spiritual momentum. In my opinion, it was some of the best teaching our church has ever received. One of the foundational concepts in this message that really spoke to me was utilizing the natural to position yourself for supernatural breakthrough.

In 2 Kings 3, the kings of Israel, Judah and Edom brought Elisha to prophecy to them in the midst of war and their armies having no water. When Elisha enters the scene in the midst of this dire situation, the first thing he calls for is a harpist. Think about if you were the king who had brought Elisha in and instead of giving you a message from God he asked for mood music?

But after the harpist began to play, the word of the Lord came to Elisha in a powerful way. Pastor Steven’s point was this – there are natural means in each of our lives that position our hearts to hear from God. Maybe it is music for you. For some of you it might be spending time in nature. We should all ask the question -what is the thing that recharges and refreshes your soul? And when you know the answer, make sure that it is a regular part of your life.

As a worship leader, I am reminded of the power of music to open people’s hearts and emotions to hear from the Lord. Yes, worship is much more than music, but when we lead people in musical worship, I believe God uses the natural of our music to bring about supernatural change when the truths that we are singing about begin to open people’s hearts to Jesus.

So worship leaders, my bring excellence to your harp playing, because God uses it in a mighty way to prepare the hearts of His people.

-Wade

Posted in Leadership, Personal | 1 Comment »

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