A life-long church tech, Todd Elliott started volunteering in high school. After earning an industrial engineering degree in college, he got a paying church tech job at his church in Oakland County, Michigan. Eleven years later, he moved on to Chicago’s Willow Creek where he worked for 10 years. “I was really amazed that many of the challenges, struggles, and successes I had at Kensington Church were very similar to my time at Willow,” he says. CPM talks with Elliott about how these early experiences led to FILO and how it’s grown.
CP: How did you come up with the idea for FILO? What was missing in the church market and how did you experience it?
Elliott: FILO really came out of my own need for community with other people doing production in the local church. As a technical director, nobody really understood what I did, which can be very lonely. There were resources for answering gear-related questions, but nowhere to recharge your batteries, be inspired [that] what you do matters, and get reconnected to why you started doing church production in the first place. In the early 2000’s I started reaching out to other churches and trying to build a community of technical artists, so we could know we weren’t alone and we weren’t crazy. Fast forward 20 years and this passion has turned into FILO. I believe the Holy Spirit convicted me—if I saw a need and was unwilling to try and meet it, I was being disobedient. Ouch!
In 2019, FILO added a coaching and staffing division. Here, Todd Elliott is shown in a coaching session.
CP: How quickly did the event grow and did that surprise you?
Elliott: Before I started, I decided all we could do was try. If it was a total bomb we’d pack it up. But if it was meeting a need and [was] sustainable, we’d keep doing it. That was six years ago. That is what surprises me. It feels like we are just getting started, but six years is a long time already. Our first year was a series of one-day regional events. Unfortunately, it didn’t meet the sustainability goal, so we made it a once-a-year, two-day event. We’ve had explosive growth every year, from 500 in 2015 to 2,300 in 2020. Being online in 2020 allowed over 600 technical artists from outside North America to attend. Our goal being to make technical artists more effective so their church is more effective; this excites me about the potential of the local church around the globe.
CP: Tell us your future hopes and dreams for FILO.
Elliott: Oftentimes, tech people are known for being burnt out and grumpy, which I don’t think is what God had in mind. If FILO could help to equip and encourage the maximum number of technical artists to live life to the fullest as Christ promised, not just as a tech person, but as a child of God, then I feel like we’re succeeding.
