Big Church

I gave a tour today to a new employee of our church. She is taking over some administrative responsibilities for our musical worship area, which I am currently and interimly supervising. I thought that it might help her administrative understanding if she was able to see all of the different parts that go into producing a worship service at our church. I figured that if she could see the big picture and how all of the pieces fit, it would bring to life some of the more mundane but critical administrative functions that are necessary to support it.

As I was giving her the tour, I realized: there are a lot of pieces.

It's a huge undertaking to produce a service in a big church. We have a digital board that mixes sound in the house, along with a large analog board that mixes the monitors on stage. We have a top-of-the-line computer with several monitors that runs the three projectors, managing slides and video. We have another board dedicated to running all of the house, spot, and intelligent lights. And those are the things that are back in the sound room.

We have a video room that manages three live and human-operated video cameras in the house. It also manages the switch between live video and character generation. There are more monitors, flat screens, and TV's in there than you could shake a stick at. Above the video room is another room housing all of our amplifiers, breakers, and a sequencer for turning it all on and off. There's also a big rack of something in there for which I can't even guess its function.

We have a catwalk that extends the width of the worship center on which thousands of dollars of lights hang, and on which countless feet of power and other cable traverse. We have a stage that can (and has) house an entire high school band, with imputs galore.

Millions of dollars are invested in that facility. Thousands of man-hours are required to operate and maintain it.

I mean, I knew that it was "big." But, in giving this tour today, I realized even more: this is one big, complicated, complex thing that happens every week.

I'm tempted here to do some sort of evaluation of it. But I'm not going to. Right now, I'm still somewhat in awe of just how big the whole thing is... and I'm content to leave it at that.