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Sometimes our pursuit of perfection prevents us from building an excellent team.
“God deserves our best.” I've heard this phrase so many times in church production, and honestly, I've said it just as many times. It's one of those catchphrases that just rolls off the tongue.
And it's true. What we do matters. We should be diligent in our preparation, our maintenance of equipment, and caring about the details. A poor mix, a missed cue or lyrics up at the wrong time can be distracting and pull people out of the moment. Excellence matters.
But if we are not careful, excellence can stop being something we offer to God and become something that we demand from everyone around us. And when that happens, excellence can become an idol.
The goal isn’t simply to create a better service. It’s to create a healthier team serving a greater mission.
Excellence is a terrible master. You can begin to tell when excellence has crossed the line into perfectionism when the production starts to be more important than the people involved with it. A volunteer misses a cue and we make them feel incompetent. A new sound guy struggles, and we decide it would be easier to do it ourselves. A worship leader makes a last-minute change and we spend the entire service irritated at them.
The congregation may still experience a great production while the team behind it faces tension, frustration, and exhaustion.
We call it “excellence” but maybe it is just insecurity dressed up as spirituality. We want everything to be perfect because we think that the production of the service is a reflection on us. We don't want to look like we didn't prepare. We start comparing ourselves to ministries with larger teams and bigger budgets. We watch their services online and start chasing a standard that God hasn't called us to meet.
“God deserves our best” can start to mean, “I need this to make me look good.”
Excellence and perfection are not the same thing. Excellence says, “Let's be faithful using the resources that God has given us.” Perfectionism says, “Nothing less than flawless is acceptable.”
Excellence helps people to grow. Perfectionism makes people feel afraid to fail. Excellence will create a culture when a mistake becomes an opportunity to learn. Perfectionism creates a culture where people try to hide their mistakes and eventually stop serving.
A missed cue can be corrected. A volunteer who is afraid to serve is a much bigger problem.
This distinction matters because the production team is a place that requires people to develop in public. No one can ever become a great camera operator, lighting designer or audio engineer without first being an inexperienced one. So if there is no room for someone to be bad at it there is no room for them to become good at it.
Sometimes our pursuit of perfectionism actually prevents us from building an excellent team because we don't want them to touch anything important.
Maybe excellence isn't perfection. Maybe excellence is just faithful stewardship. It's doing the best we can with the people we have and the resources that have been trusted to us. It means that we can prepare seriously without taking ourselves too seriously. It means taking care of all of the details while also taking care of the people who are handling them.
[1 Corinthians 16:14 NLT] [14] And do everything with love.
Paul gives us a great example of how to handle people and this applies to the people on our production teams. Do everything in love. Excellence may shape what we do, but love should shape the way that we do it
The goal isn't simply to create a better service. The goal to to create a healthier team who is serving a great mission.
So pursue excellence. Train your team well. Fix the problems that arise. Prepare diligently. Be willing to raise the standard. But don't raise it so high that your team gets crushed underneath it.
Goes does deserve our best. And our best should include how we treat the people on our team.
