Sometimes the fastest way to improve your Sunday is to understand someone else’s job. Moody Bible Institute's Aaron Wong, explores this and more at the Worship & Tech Director Leadership Collective at CFX.
A worship leader walks into rehearsal thinking about songs, arrangements and transitions. The FOH engineer is thinking about inputs, gain structure and the mix. Musicians are dialing in tones and monitor mixes. Someone else is making sure the right lyrics appear on the screen.
Everyone is preparing for the same Sunday.
But are they actually preparing together?
For Aaron Wong, Assistant Professor of Worship and Music Technology at Moody Bible Institute and Director of Moody Worship Collectives, that question gets to the heart of a challenge he has encountered throughout his years in worship ministry.
Great musicians and great technicians don’t automatically make a great team.
“It is very easy for any environment, any church to have two separated areas,” Wong says. “Even though they work together, it’s a stage and it’s a tech booth.”
That separation may be natural. Musicians concentrate on playing and singing. Production volunteers concentrate on mixing, cameras, graphics or lighting.
The problem comes when neither side understands what the other needs.
“If they will intentionally try to think about what the other people are doing, they will become a much better team together and also have less frustration,” Wong says.
It’s an idea Wong will explore at CFX, Sept. 14–16 in Birmingham, Alabama, both during the Worship & Tech Director Leadership Collective and in his session on effective communication between musicians, singers and tech teams.
Knowing the Music Isn’t Enough
Wong’s interest in the relationship between worship and production grew out of his own experience in ministry.
After earning a bachelor’s degree in music, he entered full-time church ministry confident about his musical preparation. He soon discovered that knowing the music was often the easy part.
“I felt like musically I was ready. I felt I was equipped, but I always wanted to know how to work with people more,” he says.
The difficult questions involved scheduling volunteers, introducing technology, managing change and helping people understand why a new way of doing something might ultimately make ministry better.
That realization eventually led Wong to pursue a master’s degree in transformational leadership rather than another music degree.
Rehearsal shouldn’t be the first time production discovers what’s happening onstage.
Today at Moody, the combination of music, technology and leadership is central to what he teaches. Wong says churches looking for worship leaders consistently want graduates who can do more than sing and play professionally. They also want someone capable of leading a tech team.
That doesn’t mean becoming a system designer or Dante expert. But a worship leader should understand enough to communicate with technical people, make informed decisions and know when to ask for help.
Make Someone Else’s Job Easier
That understanding becomes particularly important during weekly preparation.
Wong says one of his most important working relationships as a worship pastor was with the person responsible for production.
“I spend a lot of my time communicating and making sure that I make the job easier as much as possible in my weekly preparation,” he says.
Sometimes that means something as simple as making the song structure clear to the person running lyrics. Instead of assuming the operator understands exactly when a repeated chorus or tag occurs, Wong became meticulous about communicating the order.
The larger principle is simple: What can I do to make somebody else’s job easier?
That principle works in both directions.
A worship leader can ask the FOH engineer what is needed from the stage. A drummer might discover that playing differently helps the mix. An engineer frustrated with a singer continually asking for monitor changes might benefit from understanding how different it feels to hear yourself entirely through in-ear monitors.
“Try to put themselves into other people’s shoes first,” Wong says.
For Wong, that isn’t merely a strategy for producing a better service. It changes what serving feels like for volunteers.
“If I ask somebody in my church to say, ‘Can you help? Can you join our team to serve?’ the least that I owe to them is to help them to have a good experience serving,” he says.
Stop Using Rehearsal to Get Ready to Rehearse
One of the practical habits Wong wants churches to establish is separating three parts of preparation: line check, gain check and rehearsal.
Too many teams effectively skip the first two.
They pray, count off the first song and start playing while the production team is still discovering connection problems, establishing levels, adjusting instruments and building monitor mixes.
“The worship leader never gave me time to do that and I didn’t want to ask, so I’m going to use the first five songs just to dial some of the EQ,” Wong says, describing what can happen from the engineer’s perspective.
His alternative is deliberately sequential: make sure every signal is connected and going where it belongs. Establish appropriate levels. Then rehearse the music.
And once that becomes normal, it becomes culture.
“When you show up in the worship team as a volunteer and you realize that the first 10 minutes, nobody really plays anything but one at a time, you start to understand this is what we do,” Wong says.
Preparation also creates something production people need: margin.
An engineer who spends the service trying to catch up has little capacity left to respond to what is actually happening onstage. Wong argues that production people need enough preparation and confidence to move beyond checking boxes and pay attention to the environment around them.
That’s the difference between simply operating equipment and participating in what is happening in the room.
Church Isn’t a Concert Tour
Churches also operate under unusual constraints.
A touring band might spend weeks refining a show before taking essentially the same musicians, equipment and set list on the road for months.
Church production gets no such luxury.
“This week, play with this group of people,” Wong says. “This time we have two hours for you to not only rehearse the song, but also make it sound good and get ready for Sunday.”
Alongside that technical and musical preparation is the spiritual responsibility of preparing to lead a congregation in worship.
“What a tight schedule,” Wong says. “But that’s the nature of what we do.”
That makes small improvements in communication and preparation disproportionately valuable.
Bring the Problem With You
The problem frustrating your church probably isn’t unique to your church.
“The things that frustrate me probably are frustrating other people as well,” Wong says. “And the problem that I think is so hard to deal with, I almost just want to give up and avoid, maybe other people have conquered them.”
That idea will also shape Wong’s involvement in the Worship & Tech Director Leadership Collective at CFX.
Wong doesn’t want the four-hour Monday session to become an extended lecture. He wants participants to bring their own experiences and specific challenges into the room and learn from one another.
In other words: Bring the problem with you.
The person sitting beside you may have already worked through the issue your team has been fighting for months.
And perhaps Wong’s message suggests another way to approach CFX: don’t come alone.
If the recurring challenge at your church is the relationship between the stage and the booth, consider bringing someone from the other side of that equation. Some conversations are easier when both people hear the same thing at the same time.
Getting Better Is Stewardship
For Wong, getting better at worship and production ultimately goes beyond efficiency, better rehearsals or even better Sunday services.
It is stewardship.
“Going to conferences, reading articles, listening to podcasts to get better at your own craft is very much so a spiritual matter,” Wong says.
“We are trying to give God glory out of the best of our ability,” he adds. “And that involves our diligence.”
CFX offers an opportunity to practice some of that diligence—to learn from people who understand the work, bring your questions into the conversation and perhaps discover that another church has already wrestled with the problem your team is trying to solve.
And if that problem is the distance between your worship and production teams, start by understanding what the people on the other side need.
Better yet, bring them with you.
Because you’re not preparing for two different Sundays.
You’re one team.
