Photo by Priscilla Du Preez 🇨🇦 on Unsplash
Any production leader is skillful. That’s a given. You can’t lead well without tactile knowledge of your craft—how to frame a camera angle, how to set a lighting cue, how to mix a worship set, at least with some level of competence. You don’t need to be an expert, but you need to be able to speak the language of your team.
However, I’d argue that skill is the least important part of your job, production leader.
It is deeply spiritual work if we let it be...
The most important parts are the intangibles you bring, and we can see those intangibles in the life and work of Jesus. One of those primary intangibles is Presence.
Your Team Needs You
What’s interesting about the Gospels is that Jesus had a personality, and his personality in the Gospels is consistent across all four texts, especially the source texts, by which I mean John and Mark. Matthew and Luke, while distinct from each other and the other gospels, build much of their narrative from Mark, which is likely the first-hand account of Saint Peter. John is the first-hand account of Saint John. Both books were written within 50 years of Christ’s resurrection, and both describe Jesus as a man of calm zeal, level-headed and quick-witted with a dry sense of humor at times.
Jesus did not hide his personality for the sake of his calling. He was fully himself, with all his emotions and quirks. In the same way, your team needs the person you are. They don’t need a person hiding themselves; they need a real person with real needs and real passions, otherwise they’ll hide too. A hiding person creates a culture of hiding.
...we bring our skill as an offering...
You carry your own presence. It is a special imprint of the imago dei that only you can bear. It is a gift—share it.
Your Team Needs the Presence.
You carry the holy presence of God himself. The temple veil was torn because the presence of God left the holy of holies to descend upon his church on the day of Pentecost, and you don’t have to be a Pentecostal to walk with the presence of the Holy Spirit. It is a free gift for all who claim the name of Jesus.
If you’re coming to productions without an attunement towards, an awareness of, and a submission to what the Holy Spirit would like to do, you do yourself and your team a great disservice. It’s all too easy to pass off what we do as mere operations, but the Lord considers our work worship just as much as any vocalist or musician who leads from stage. It is deeply spiritual work if we let it be, and we should not only invite but also deeply surrender that spiritual work to the guidance of the Holy Spirit.
This doesn’t mean we abandon skill for wispy notions, but it means we bring our skill as an offering to be enflamed, and we walk with a readiness for our workflows to be interrupted by the Holy Spirit and the work of healing, prophecy, and wisdom that he wants to perform.
A Prayer for Presence
Lord, bring us to a place of comfort in our own skin, to honor the person you’ve shaped us to be. Help us remove the layers of guardedness and shame that keep us hidden. Help us to be open in a healthy way, to be ourselves.
Lead us with your presence. We surrender our work to the work of the Holy Spirit, to the will of the Holy Spirit. Go before us, lead from us.
Amen.
