It’s quite possible that the majority of complaints received by the modern church, at least the ones not directed specifically at the pastor, are about the audio presentation.
If you’ve spent any time in the audio seat, you’ve heard all of it. Too loud, too quiet, can’t hear the pastor, can’t hear the vocals, too much bass, not enough bass, the guitar is piercing, the drums are too aggressive. I’ve sat through plenty of services with those exact thoughts myself. So to all of that I say, yes. Yes and amen.
Complaints come with the territory. Some are thoughtful and worth considering. Some are emotional reactions in the moment. Some are a little weird. And some are delivered with all the grace and warmth of a letter from your HOA.
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The trick is learning the difference between a complaint and a critique.
A critique is usually meant to help. It may come from leadership, a trusted peer, or someone with enough experience to offer something useful. A complaint is often something someone needs to get off their chest. That doesn’t mean there’s no value in it. It just means you may have to get past the tone, the timing, and the unnecessary drama before you can find the nugget of truth.
If you’re the FOH engineer, congratulations. You’re often the front desk at the complaint department. Welcome to the jungle.
Some churches I’ve worked with refer to the FOH mixing position as “the seat” or “the chair.” And honestly, sometimes it does feel a little like being in the chair, with all the implied connotations attached.
I spent a season mixing for a large church where the FOH position had a telephone-style handset tied into the comm system. The pastor and senior staff sat on the front row each Sunday, and if they wanted an audio adjustment during the service, they could call directly to the booth.
And yes, the phone was red.
The unspoken scoreboard in that church was simple: the fewer calls you got from the red phone, the better day you had.
I’m Batman
The first time it lit up while I was mixing, I decided to try and defuse the whole concept by poking a little fun at it. I picked up the handset with my best Bruce Wayne impersonation and said, “Yes, Commissioner.”
For whatever reason, during my season there, I got very few calls on the Batphone. And when I did, the comments were usually pretty generic. A little more choir. The subs feel a little too hot. That kind of thing. Nothing very granular. Nothing to get bent out of shape over.
That was very different from the experience some of my peers had sitting in the same seat. For me at least, the perception of being micromanaged was far more intimidating than the actual reality of it. Still, the fact that a red phone existed at all says something about the culture.
A lot of that could’ve been avoided with a clear mix philosophy, defined leadership expectations, and a healthy process for feedback outside of Sunday morning, not from the front row in real time. I’ve written before about the value of post-service reviews, and those conversations are far more useful when everyone has had a minute to breathe.
Whether you agree with the red-phone method of communicating with senior leadership or not, let’s be clear: direction from your boss, healthy or not, isn’t technically a complaint. It may feel like micromanagement, but leadership direction and congregational complaints are two different things.
As a general rule, I try to receive every comment politely and then internally sort it into one of two categories: complaint or critique.
If someone takes the time to write a thoughtful email, I’ll try to respond with the same level of thought. If someone makes a rude comment while walking past the booth, I’ll usually thank them for the input and keep moving.
“A gentle answer turns away wrath, but a harsh word stirs up anger.”
I don’t usually quote scripture in my content, but Proverbs 15:1 is great advice and has helped me immensely throughout my career.
Several years ago, a woman approached me before a service while I was mixing FOH. For the sake of this discussion, we’ll call her Susan.
Susan was agitated about her experience the previous week and wanted to discuss the church’s volume policy. I didn’t bother telling her I wasn’t the one mixing the previous Sunday. That detail wouldn’t have helped anything at the moment. Instead, I listened.
She’d clearly been preparing for this conversation all week. She offered to show me studies on her phone about the effects of long-term exposure to high decibel levels. She also told me she’d majored in vocal performance in college, and had sung professionally, so I could be assured she knew what she was talking about. She was polite, but in her mind, she had the receipts.
As the countdown got closer to service time, I thanked her for sharing her concern. I briefly explained a few points from our mix philosophy, including our general volume range. I told her I’d pass along her comments, but the most helpful thing would be for her to send an email to our TD (I gave her the contact info) so the concern was properly documented. I also asked her to mention that she’d spoken with me, by name.
Then I asked if she was currently serving anywhere in the church. She wasn’t. So I told her our worship team was always looking for talented singers who cared about worship enough to have strong opinions about it. I wasn’t being sarcastic. She obviously cared enough to have the conversation, and that was worth acknowledging. Part of me wanted to point out that she was only using her education, talent, and experience to validate her complaint instead of using those gifts to contribute to the worship ministry. But this wasn’t the time or place to try and win an argument. It never is.
After the service, she came back to the booth and apologized for being negative and accusatory. As far as I know, no email was ever sent. In a world of automated customer service AI responses and web surveys, sometimes just feeling like you’ve been heard and listened to is enough.
Susan was not a Karen. Most complaints probably come from a better place than we assume.
That interaction went well compared to some I had when I was younger and less experienced with these situations.
A few good practices are worth thinking through before someone approaches you, because eventually someone will. Make eye contact. Introduce yourself. Ask for their name and tell them yours. Let them speak without interrupting. Ask where they were sitting. Ask what specifically stood out, without using techie language. Was it volume? Harshness? Muddy vocals? Not enough clarity?
The more specific and understandable the question, the more useful the answer.
Also, don’t immediately defend yourself. I know that’s hard. Audio engineers are often our own worst critics, and by the time someone complains, we may already know exactly what went wrong. Or, just as often, we may strongly believe the person has no idea what they’re talking about.
Either way, defensiveness never helps.
That doesn’t mean every complaint deserves equal validity. It doesn’t. A random comment from someone who simply hates drums in church shouldn’t carry the same value as a thoughtful observation from leadership or a trusted engineer. But dismissing every complaint as ignorance is its own kind of arrogance.
A wise audio friend once asked me, “If you were wrong, would you want to know it?”
The answer should always be yes, regardless of the messenger. Sometimes the person complaining is wrong. Sometimes they’re annoying and right, which is a particularly difficult ministry challenge.
Church leaders also need to understand the difference between a one-off mistake and a pattern. If your audio engineer is usually prepared, reliable, and attentive, an occasional fat-finger event probably doesn’t need a dramatic post-service meeting. Trust me, if the pastor’s mic was late, the engineer knows. Sometimes I think we should all experience one self-inflicted, embarrassing, fundamental failure early in our career. It’s a mistake you’ll never make again.
But repeated misses are different. If the same failures keep happening, that may indicate a process problem, a training problem, or a lack of preparation.
Leaders, grace is appropriate for isolated mistakes. Accountability is appropriate for patterns.
The same goes for complaints. One person saying the music was too loud may simply mean one person thought the music was too loud. Ten people saying vocals were unintelligible from the same section of the auditorium is worth checking into.
That’s why documentation helps. Asking someone to send an email can sound like a dodge, but collecting that kind of information is valuable. Sincerity in these conversations is required. If you ask someone to send the email, it needs to be read. It helps leadership identify patterns. It also tends to separate people with genuine concerns from people who just wanted to take a quick snarky shot at the booth.
How many times have you heard someone in leadership say, “Everybody is saying X, Y, or Z”? Everybody? Really? I’m not saying church leaders exaggerate... all the time. I’m saying three people confronting the pastor about the audio can feel like “everybody” in those moments.
Audio teams should also invite helpful critique before complaints become the only feedback mechanism.
Bring in trusted outside ears. Ask experienced engineers to listen. Let leadership know what kind of comments are useful. Build a culture where the audio team can receive feedback without feeling attacked, and where leadership can offer feedback without mixing the service from the front row. #noredphones
Lead by example
Whether we like it or not, sitting in the FOH seat comes with authority, or at least the perception of it. Church leadership put you there for a reason, and that usually means there’s a level of trust behind the scenes, even if nobody ever says that out loud. This makes you, in some ways, the face of production. I’ve had people approach me to complain about the lighting. Don’t get me started on how many hazer complaints I’ve received.
Your mix isn’t the only thing people notice. Your body language and tone are on full display. The congregation, staff, volunteers, and media team are front-row witnesses to your interactions. In those moments, you’re representing more than the audio presentation. You’re representing the church. So don’t get pulled into an emotional exchange. Take the high ground, even if the other person doesn’t.
If you do this long enough, it’s not if someone will be unhappy with something, it’s when. The more prepared you are to handle those shots, the less likely you are to get caught off guard and drawn into an emotional conversation. So think through how you’ll keep your cool before the comments come. Sometimes you may simply need to say, “Thanks for your input. I was thinking the same thing, and you just confirmed it.”
Accepting that complaints are part of the job and keeping a cool head makes it easier to evaluate what you actually heard. Some complaints are just complaints. Others are useful critiques disguised as complaints.
Don’t let your ego keep you from learning, and don’t let one cranky comment ruin your Sunday nap.
And as always, don’t forget to listen.
