You Should Get a Guide

I recently spent some time in Colorado, fly fishing with my two sons.  It’s a trip we’d been planning for a year and had really been looking forward to it. We fished for three days, with varying results each day.

Day 1:  We fished by ourselves and caught one fish between us.

Day 2:  We fished by ourselves and caught nothing

Day 3:  We fished with a guide and caught a dozen fish between us.

 

Drew Fishing with our Guide, Doug

A dozen fish between 3 fishermen may not sound like a lot, but it’s a lot better than a big goose egg!

Here’s my point:

There was nothing wrong with fishing by ourselves, but our success sky-rocketed when we had the advice of an experienced guide.

In your ministry, do you have someone who has gone before you?  Call it mentoring, friendly advice, whatever. Unless you know it all (and who does?), you need the help and advice of someone more experienced, or maybe more mature, to show you the way.

A Couple of Examples

*A few years ago, I needed to bone up on podcasting.  When Apple came out with the podcasts feature in Itunes, I dismissed it because it sounded like “Party Shuffle” or something like that.  So I was about  year behind the curve.  After asking around, I found an expert at another church in Dallas, and I hired him to come spend about three hours with me.  He ended up not only giving me the basics on podcasting, but also gave me a primer on blogs as well.  The time I spent with him gave me a head-start over what I could just figure out on my own.

* Early in my career I produced a christian radio program called Hope For The Heart.  But I didn’t start out producing.  I started as an editor.  My boss, who was much more than just a boss, was always mentoring me.  Mentoring in how I saw life, mentoring in audio production skills, management skills, etc.  Andy would explain things to me until I understood them.  He wanted to make sure I GOT things, so I could apply them to similar scenarios down the road.  He really worked himself out of a job, and when he moved on took his place as producer for the program.

* My friends Sammy and Julie:  They are such examples of how to treat others with dignity and grace.  I have watched them both pour their lives into other people, and I’m thankful for friends like these who, by their lives, provide an example for me to follow.

I promise you, there are people out there who are more skilled and more experienced than you and me.  And there are those who are just waiting to share their experience with us.

 

 

Jesters Theater Troup

This weekend our church embarks on a very, very exciting ministry.  Jesters is a drama group for teens and adults with special needs.  The group starts meeting this Saturday, and will meet during September – February, with a break during December.  This program is inclusive of all who wish to participate.  Staffing will include a director, assistant director, and a music therapist.  This program is modeled after a very successful one in Indiana.

Here’s what our website says about Jesters:

Do you have a heart for theater and for people with special needs?  Then learn about JESTERS!  HPUMC is developing a performing theater group which will star teens (age 16 and up) and adults!   Perhaps you know someone who has autism, Down syndrome, cerebral palsy, or other disability who might enjoy a theater experience.  A team of theater professionals and music therapist are developing the script and will stage, direct and coach the performance.

Applications for actor participants are available now.   It is not necessary to be a member of our church to participate. Rehearsals begin on Sat., Sept. 11 from 10-12 noon in Wesley Hall, HPUMC.  Rehearsals continue each week until performances on Feb. 12-13, 2011. If you are interested in more information about how to volunteer or to refer a participant to the program, please contact Sue Ringle at  jesters@hpumc.org or 214-519-8523.

We welcome and encourage volunteers to serve in many capacities.  Help an actor learn the lines or practice movement sequence.  Assist with registration.  Promote Jesters.  Host for the Performance.  If you can imagine it,  then Jesters will have an opportunity for you to share your interests and gifts!

What creative or innovative ministries ideas have you seen lately?  Leave a comment!

Like Jesters on Facebook.

Visit the Jesters homepage

How to Fit a Countryman E6 Microphone

This video from Countryman is slightly different than the E6 Fitting instructions I received with the last E6′s i bought.  this is much simpler.

Cox Chapel Gets an Audio and Video Upgrade

My church has four main worship venues. Our main sanctuary, Cox Chapel, The Great Hall, and Wesley Hall.  Each facilitates a very different style of worship.  The Sanctuary is home to our traditional worship service, while Wesley Hall is where our contemporary body, Cornerstone, meets.  The Great Hall hosts our teaching service, Kerygma, and Cox Chapel is where we have our Methodist worship in the Anglican tradition.  For some time Cox Chapel has limped along with some old TOA powered mixers providing input to a small Symnet DSP unit.  The output of the Symnet fed our Rankus Heinz PA, along with a hearing assistance system and a CD recorder.

Out with the Old, In with the NEW

Since tech needs are minimal in Cox Chapel, we are forgoing a sepeate mixer altogether and simply using the London Blu DSP with some touch panels on the wall.  Mixing is done internally.  Our inputs are Pulpit, Lectern, and four wireless lavs.  Pretty basic.  It’s also a chance for us to really clean up the rack after years of patching, re-wiring, and well, you know . . .

Another upgrade is to our video recoridng system.  We have been feeding the video output of a Canon XL2 to a DV deck and recording each service on MiniDV tape.  With our upgrades we’re re-tasking a Canopus DV converter and a Mac Mini.  We’ll capture video using Adobe OnLocation.

Our biggest hurdle has been trying to locate some conduit that connects Cox Chapel with the rest of the building.  With the help of a faithful volunteer we were able to determine where that conduit is and will soon have network connectivity for both the Blu DSP and the Mac Mini so we can transfer video files after recoridng.

My next post will be a results post where I’ll share a few pictures, and let you know how our first Sunday goes.

Vision and Resources

For months I have heard Paul Rasmussen say, Don’t let resources dictate vision”.  As a resources manager, I live in a very concrete world of what we have and what we don’t have – what’s real and what’s imaginary.  I know what gear we have available, and what money we have in our budget. So I have to live with the tension of what we have and what everyone would like to do.  Recently in a staff meeting, Paul fleshed out what he means, and I think it’s worth a few bullet points here.

• Resources is not the same thing as money.  Resources include money, but also include  you (what you personally bring to the table in terms of influence, skill and other traits), systems, and human resources (volunteers).
• Most people are pretty good with the You. A talented video producer might tend to simply take all the assigned videos and crank them out by himself.  That might be because he’s a perfectionist or control freak.  But it may also be that the systems aren’t in place to accommodate volunteer editors.  Or maybe there isn’t a system in place to allow the video producer enough time to develop people in that role.
• Many people who may be in good shape with the You or the money, but meet with opposition when trying to expand or change systems.  In church work we often tend to operate without much personal margin, so when we are met with the slightest opposition, we retreat back to what we know.  It takes continual pushing against the status quo to affect change.

Andy Stanley has said “Your people are exactly where they have been led to be”.  And I’ve heard it another way – “Your systems are perfectly designed to give you the results you’re getting”.  Historically, our church has not had a really strong emphasis on volunteering.  In some areas, yes, but certainly not in the areas of music and worship service production.  We are committed to changing that.  At the very least, it will require three things.  First, our people have to be led to a different place.  Led by our pastor, led by me, led by our tech staff.  Secondly, it will require a culture change on our part.  We have to change the way we think about our work – who owns it, who we’re doing it for.  We’ll have to be prepared for volunteers be better at our jobs than we are (that can be intimidating).  Paul told us “The reason for increasing our volunteer force is not to get free labor, but to increase buy-in of our mission”.  Lastly, we’ll have to change our definition of success.  Success will have to mean much more than successful operation of equipment, and “professional” performance.  We’re not giving up on that, but success has to be expanded to how well we engage the body and allow our people to increasingly  take leadership in our services.

I’m convinced that doing this will help our people grow.  And it will help us grow, too.

Munger Place Church

I’ve been working on something for some time, now, but haven’t really been talking about it here on the blog.  In fact, I haven’t been saying a whole lot about anything here.  So here’s what’s going on . . .

Munger Place Church

The conference our church belongs to has recently worked with us to facilitate the re-opening of a neighborhood church in Lower East Dallas. This church is almost 100 years old, but for several years was worshiping only bout 25 on Sundays, and had fallen into dis-repair.  So this is Cornerstone’s first video venue.

A very important part of our philosophy is that we are not transplanting our current culture into another part of town, but rather we are re-opening this church to once again be a light in the neighborhood it’s been in for so long.

I’ll let you read more about the mission of Munger place here, but I also wanted to give you a basic run-down on the audio, video, and lighting for this facility we’re remodeling.

Audio

We have had a good relationship with Clair Systems, and they are doing a design/build for us.

• The main PA is the Clair i208 line array.  We’ll have a stereo configuration, and are using eight boxes per side, along with flown Clair Subs that fill out the sound of the array.  A couple of Clair dual 18 subs on the floor will also be used.
• Avid SC48 at FOH.  Monitors will be sourced from FOH as well, with Aviom  mixers and a few wedges on the stage.
• An assortment of SM57′s and 58′s, Heil drum mics, and Shure UHF-R with Sm58 capsules and a couple of E6 mics.
• Sennheiser IEM’s with Westone earphones.

Lights

• ETC Element 60 Lighting console
• An assortment of Source 4 par and elipsodial lights.
• 16 LED lighting fixtures for color washes.
• Trusses will be flown in the worship space, marrying new technology with this beautiful, old building.  You can get an idea in the rendering above.

Video

• Christie rear screen projection
• Ross Crossover HD-SDI switcher
• ProPresenter on an Imac.
• MATV to all narthex, cry room, and fellowship area televisions.
• Sony HD video player to play back sermon recorded earlier at the main campus.

These are the basics.  We’ve gone over and over each part of the system, cutting where we can to arrive at our budget.  Some things are being cabled but no gear installed, and in some cases only conduit is being run and we’ll add systems at a later date.

I’ll post more along the way.  Blessings!

Social Media Revisited

This morning we’re walking some of our staff through  social media 102.  We’ll be covering facebook, twitter and a few others, and helping to lead each department in effective strategies.  We’ll be covering the Why’s of social media, and start to get into some of the how’s of social media.  Should be a fun morning.  Does your church have regular communication on how to best position your message and using social media technologies?

This picture is from despair.com.  For the record,  this isn’t how we actually view social media here at the church, but it’s too funny not to post.

New Personal Monitoring Technology

Just saw this today.  David McLain is at InfoCom 2010 and tweeting about different technologies he is looking at.  You should probably follow David on Twitter.

This is a personal monitoring system by MyMix Audio.

It might be tempting to think “Oh, another Aviom” – but you’d be wrong.  Some significant differences:

• No special hub is required.  A standard $50 network switch works fine.  Or, if you don’t want to hassle with a wall-wart, you can use a Power Over Ethernet switch and clean up your rig on the stage.
• Individual channel tone control.
• Parametric E.Q. on the main output.
• Internal effects than can be applied to individual channels.

I’m going to try to work out a demo of this system in the very near future.  Here’s a video from MyMix Audio, and you can follow them on twitter – @mymixaudio

Red Giant Plastic Bullet Iphone App

This weekend I downloaded an iphone app, and have a had a lot of fun with it.  It’s called Plastic Bullet, by Red Giant.  Basically, you select a photo, then scroll through different random effect treatments of your photo.  Here are some examples of some photos I ran through Plastic Bullet.  This $1.99 app is very, very cool.

Be Careful What You Say

A recent near-miss in some of my own personal communication has prompted me to take this opportunity to remind you to WATCH WHAT YOU SAY.

The other day, I was in a co-worker’s office when she asked me to shut the doer so we could discuss something without everyone hearing it. So I shut the door, and sat down in the chair across her desk. In fact, I sat down with my Motorola radio on my belt. so after a few minutes of this private conversation, one of the staffers in my department radio’d me “Hey Brian, I think you’re siting on your radio and keying your mic”. It jolted me to a stop, and I heard the “stylus scraping across the record” sound. Nothing that had been said was inappropriate, but also wasn’t for just anyone’s ears. lesson learned. Take off my radio anytime I sit down. it got me to thinking about other scenarios that we can review here . . .

1. When you’re using an intercom, your mic is on. Even if it is off, it is on.

2. When you’re on a stage, every mic is on. Even if they are off, they are on.

3. When you’re wearing a lav or headworn mic, it is probably on, unless you are in the restroom. In that case, it is most definitely on!

4. When you post something on Twitter or facebook. believe me, your mic is on – maybe more so than any other time.

In all these scenarios, not only is your mic on, but people are listening. and it will come back to you. I guess the best advice is straight from scripture . . .

He who guards his mouth and his tongue keeps himself from calamity.
Proverbs 2:23

An Open Letter to Event Planners and Wedding Consultants

My comments here are simple:  Live rock music is loud. After I-don’t-know-how-many-times of people coming to me and asking me to turn down the band so people can talk, I have a few bullet points I would like to share.

• When you place a table two feet in front of a loudspeaker, the people at that table will most likely not be able to converse easily.
• “Brown Eyed Girl”, “Sweet Home Alabama” and “Superstition” are great songs, but not dinner music.
• If you dictate that the audio mixer MUST be located behind the band – well . . .
• Lastly, so I’m not an all problem and no solution guy, if what you want is dinner music, here’s a great resource.

Got any to add to this?

Automated Video Recordings

I recently set up an older MacPro to do a live capture for our Anglican service. It’s in our smallest venue, and when things get a little hairy on Sunday mornings, it’s an easy venue to forget about. So I also installed QuicKeys, an automation utility. We set our triggers to be timed, 5 minutes before each hour to the end of each hour.Last week was the first week with the system. I didn’t leave Final Cut Pro as the front application, so the trigger didn’t fire. I’m tweaking the process a little, and this week will tell the tale.  I’ll update with how it works.

I used QuicKeys years ago, and wrote some pretty slick shortcuts for editing spoken word in Pro Tools.  They’ve continued to develop the program, and it’s easily worth the $60.  Shortcuts can also be triggered with their Iphone app.

Missions Emphasis

Recently my church focused all our energies  emphasizing our missions work in the church, in the community, and in the World.  As a part of that emphasis, we decided to take a wall outside our sanctuary and make it a three display video feature, along with a touch screen attached to a computer for online sign ups and to collect email addresses, etc.

Challenges

• We wanted the wall to be a plain wall the week before, then totally changed for Missions Sunday.  So all the installation work had to be done in one week.
• There was only about a 6 inch space behind the wall for running cables a good distance to the DVD players.
• There was no blocking in the wall for hanging LCD’s

Prep Work

• Our graphic artist designed a large scale image that would eventually become wallpaper, giving a context to our wall.
• I got dimensions of the wall and mocked it up using Google Sketchup.  As you can see, we went through a couple of versions of the graphics before we settled on one.

• I purchased the three televisions, (42″), and the mounts, three high quality HDMI cables, and three Panasonic Blue Ray players.  We considered using ProPresenter, or ProVideoPlayer, but ended up going with the Blue Rays to keep our costs down.
• We got our church electrician on our schedule for helping us during the installation week.
• I used a video monitor we had in storage and bought a source selector at radio shack for monitoring the DVD players without having to look at the televisions, since they are around a corner from the players.

Installation

• The Wallpaper was delivered and installed on a Monday, and the installer told us we would need to wait until Wednesday before mounting any televisions.
• Our electrician got our power and video cables tun on Wednesday.
• We hung televisions on the wall, connected power and video cabling. Note – We measured everything several times, and checked each other for accurate measurements.  Inaccurate measurements would mean nasty holes in the wallpaper.

• On Friday, we got our cables run for the computer to capture data, and got the touch screen powered up and working.

• Our process is fairly low tech.  We’re feeding the televisions with three Blue Ray players.
• Our video editor developed content and burned it to Blue Ray for us.  None of the videos have sound, since they would compete with each other.

Results

• The Missions wall made quite a buzz around the church and helped  to make Missions Sunday a huge success.
• Something that important to us, is that projects like this are scalable both in technology and in purpose.  The cables are run so that in the future we can deliver videos from a computer rather than the Blue Ray players.  Right now the plan is for this to be a missions wall only, but in the future, we could re-purpose the wall simply by changing the wallpaper and changing the content of the videos.
• Here’s some video of the wall I shot with my Flip camera.

How to Set a Stage in Thirty Seconds

While our contemporary worship venue is being renovated, we are having to do portable church.  So for six months we are setting sound, lights and video on Friday afternoons in our gym, then striking it right after church.  My hat goes off to people who do this indefinitely.  Here’s a video I made by using my time lapse program in my Iphone, then editing it in Final Cut Pro.

Video Webcasts

I’m always looking at other churches to see what they do well and what I can gain inspiration from.  Here’s a list of a few churches across the country who are doing superb webcasts.  Some of these inspire me because of the content, some by the simplicity of the player, some because of the beauty of the video, or the enhanced features of taking notes in the player.  Some of these webcasts are the product of self hosted, in-house work.  Others are the product of paid hosting services.  I’d love your thoughts on these and others you may like.

National Community Church, Washington DC

Gateway Church, Southlake, Texas

Granger Community Church, Granger, IN

Highland Park United Methodist Church, Dallas, TX

Prestonwood Baptist Church, Plano, TX

Seacoast Church, Mount Pleasant, SC

Mosaic Church, Pasadena, CA

Questions

1. Does your church webcast?

2. If so, do you pay for a service, or do it in-house?

Social Media Strategy

Recently,  our tech , I.T. and communications staff met with one of the members of our church to discuss social networking strategy.  It was a good discussion ranging from Facebook, to Twitter, to blogs, to video sharing sites.  Several of the ministries at our church are getting Facebook pages and Twitter accounts, but no-one is really keeping their eye on the larger picture of what we’re messaging, what kind of consistency we have, and whether we’re really maximizing our impact.  A couple of highlights from the yesterday’s meeting:

1.  Consistency is saying one voice saying the same thing across all avenues of communication, and it is also repetition.

2.  You don’t need to look for additional work to start a social media strategy, just look for ways to share what you’re already doing.  If you’re already capturing video, then it’s not that much more to go ahead and podcast or webcast it, for example.  If you’re preparing a sermon, then why not blog about it to create buzz for the upcoming weekend.  Why not give the weekend’s scripture in advance so your body will be more prepared to hear what God has given you to give them? In other words, it doesn’t need to be something ELSE to do, but rather AS I do, how can I share?

There are so many options out there for content delivery and for communicating your church’s message, it’s a good idea to get your staff, and also some internet users in your church to develop a strategy of how you position your church,what is said, and how it is said.

I’ll post more on this later as we develop our own strategy, but let me leave you with some links to good resources.

Greg Atkinson – Hosts Church 2.0 conferences all of the country.  Please try to go one of these.

LifeChurch.tv – Innovators in applying web technologies to the mission of the church

Theater Church – As far as I know, these guys were some of the first to podcast a sermon.  Led by Mark Batterson who says “If it’s worth preaching, it’s worth podcasting”.

The Lord’s Prayer

Many of you know that I recently left the Bible Church I worked at for 14 years, and started a new job at a large Methodist Church here in Dallas.  Since then, I have joked about becoming much more familiar with The Lord’s Prayer.  I just found this video online of a three year old singing this prayer. No joking – this has to be music to God’s ears.

Stuff Christians Like – and What to Do In a Technical Difficulty

I have been reading a website called Stuff Christians Like. It’s pretty funny stuff. Click here to discover what you should do the next time your church experiences a technical difficulty.

Free Resources form Greg Atkinson

Recently, my friend Greg Atkinson experienced a total blog makeover.  If you alredy read his site, but use a reader it’s worth your while to actually visit his site.  Right now he’s giving away 30 social media icons, made by his friend and web developer Ben Jordan.

Church Sound Tweaks – DBX Driverack Installation

Mackie tt24 console

The other day I went to a friend’s church to help with their PA.  Their FOH system was bi-amped, but the subs were not sourced from an aux buss.  They were experiencing lots of problems with to much low end on everything.  Enter the DBX Driverack PA. I have used the Driverack 260, and didn’t care much for it. The audio quality is good, but the computer GUI is lacking.  The window is too small, and the software is not intuitive like the Ashley Protea, for example.  But the Driverack PA doesn’t even have serial control, which surprised me – but it was not a handi-cap.  As much as I disliked using the 260, I really enjoyed the PA version.  Here’s what we did at my friend’s church:

1.  We decided to source the subwoofer feed from an Aux buss.  Since we had limited drive lines, we took the system from stereo (which they did not care about) to mono.  So the left out was changed to the mono out of the Mackie TT24 console, and the right out was moved to Aux 12 out.  We put a curve on the output of aux 12 with the on-board 6 band EQ of the console.  The curve looked something like this:

It’s not the ideal curve – I’d like a steeper slope, and all I got was about 12dB per octave.  24 dB per octave would have been more like it, but we made do.

2.  The DBX Driverack PA was installed in the amp rack.  The Wizard feature on the driverack was very intuitive.   We connected a reference mic to the front panel input, and followed the easy instructions in the quick start guide.  The quick setup guide was all the documentation we used.  So we EQ’d the room and set up some notch filters. I added a crossover filter to the the input to keep the very lows out of the mains.

I would not have done some of these things if we were putting in a new installation, but working with a limited budget and the need to be pragmatic informed the decisions we made.

There’s more work to be done, specifically with the monitoring system on stage.  We’ll tackle that in the next couple of months.

Small steps.