I’ve been leading church production for more than a decade. For a few years there, it nearly broke me, but I’m in a healthy place now and I’d like to share some of the practices and mentalities that helped me manage the stress of events and services.
But before we dive into all that, some caveats.
First caveat: your leaders matter. If you’re serving under a driven micromanager who wrestles with perfectionism or is an outright perfectionist (which is often the case in non-denom, growth-minded churches), grace and peace to you. You will need an extra measure of the Holy Spirit. Excellent production is hard enough as it is, and serving under someone who is never satisfied with their own work, much less yours, is untenable in the long run.
What should you do if you find yourself in that situation? You need to have a conversation with your leader and explain that you need their trust. Make it plain that you’re doing the very best you can with the resources and volunteers you have and that you feel their expectations are too high. Now, I’m sure you’re saying to yourself, great idea—that’s gonna go well and probably get me fired. I understand. I’ve been there. If you’re not given that extra measure of grace by the Holy Spirit to stay and serve while your leader does some work on their inner life, it’s time to quietly look for another job. But consider that you may be the person God has placed in their life to help them along. If their ears are open at all, if any part of their heart is soft, gently reach out to them with your kind feedback. You could be the difference between their own longevity or eventual burnout.
Second caveat: production might not be your thing. I know many of us stumbled into production, simply serving because we displayed technical acumen and a well-meaning pastor or elder asked us to serve. Most of us are self-taught, just really good at reading operation manuals and querying YouTube for help. If your church is stepping up to higher levels of production and you’re not excited about that, you may need to consider having a conversation with your leadership about finding someone who really wants to make that level of production happen. And that’s OK. You have run the race well. Take joy in that and then go find some peace.
Getting Out from Under Stress
Honestly that idea is a little misleading. Stress is a normal part of life, but how we respond to stress is what really matters. Stress, to some degree, is actually a good thing. It activates the processes in your body that are designed to help you perform quickly, acutely and accurately, sort of like a hypermode. However, your body can’t stay in hypermode all the time—it will implode. In some particular cases, heightened stress over long periods of time can lead to a condition called Continuous Traumatic Stress Disorder. Unlike the PTSD we’re all familiar with, the sort that soldiers experience after the sudden and intense trauma of battle, CTSD is like death by a thousand cuts. Your body remains in a heightened state as if it’s always trying to deal with stressful challenges because it is always trying to deal with stressful challenges. It’s almost like it forgets that it can calm down and so it does not. CTSD is not uncommon among church leaders, especially since the onset of the pandemic and the church schisms relating to political tensions and the 2020 election.
Chances are, you don’t have CTSD, but if you’re constant stress will create other long-term health issues. So what did I do to manage the natural, heightened stress of church production?
I went to therapy. A sister church in our organization generously keeps a couple of therapists on retainer and I went to see one. He was a kind, nearly elderly man with a quiet demeanor who approached our sessions with prayerful consideration. We talked through practical means of managing stress and joined those means with mindful prayer. He gave me a particular scripture that has stuck with me to this day, a prophecy from Zechariah to Zerubbabel, who was charged with leading the reconstruction of the temple in Jerusalem after the babylonian exile. Zechariah 4:6 says “Not by might, not by power, but my spirit, says the Lord of hosts.” I had to realize that not only was I working for the Lord, but the Lord was working for me. Yes, he’d given me a vision of something to build and I felt wholly inadequate to the task, but the raising and the working the wisdom to accomplish it was on Him, not me. I just had to stay humble, faithful, and keep my heart open.
Therapy then led me to helpful practices. My therapist taught me some techniques to use in the moments I felt I was losing control of my body, things like diaphragmatic breathing, a great technique that forcibly reduces heart rate and blood blessure. We also talked about what hobbies or activities help me relax. At that time in my life, I had access to some of the most pristine fishing rivers in Michigan, and I had just got into flyfishing. To this day, nothing undoes the knots in my soul like water rushing around my legs and the good tug of a lively trout or smallmouth bass. A couple of years later I started running, and found that long distance work forces my stress into the pavement. I ran my first half-marathon this spring, and running is now part of my weekly routine. I’ve lost weight and I sleep better. My resting heart rate sits in the mid forties. That alone helps my body manage stress because it takes less work for it to get all that extra blood to my brain.
Another practice we talked about was checklisting. I initially learned about this during my short stint in flight school, and after therapy I adapted it to production. Why try to memorize everything you need to do to get your systems running and all your content loaded before an event or service when you can write it down and trust the checklist to keep you safe? Checklists clear your mind for solving problems in the moment. You don’t have to remember everything—free up your mind and make a checklist.
I then read a couple of life-altering books. First was The Contemplative Pastor by Eugene Peterson. His take on the rhythms of pastoral work helped me shift from task-keeping to people-listening. I also learned from him to delegate in a healthy way, to lean into my team, train my team and trust my team. I learned how to abide with the Father and with his people in such a way that my value to my leaders shifted from my ability to get things done (which didn’t go away; work has to be accomplished) to how I connected with my team and the congregation at large and ministered to them by the help of the Holy Spirit. I actually found that shifting my focus from tasks to people made me more efficient at task keeping because I wasn’t as worried about tasks as much.
I also read Managing Leadership Anxiety: Yours and Theirs by Steve Cuss, a pastor from Longmont, Colorado. This book and some more therapy helped me learn how to listen to my emotions and my body to get to the root of my anxieties and then bring those anxieties to the Trinity and replace them with trust. It helped me more fully understand that word to Zerubbabel that I would accomplish God’s purposes not by my own small will and limited power, but by God’s will and power. The book is also full of practical advice for working through stressful situations that are typical to church leaders. I can’t recommend it enough. He also hosts an insightfully pragmatic podcast that you should listen to.
Some Other Smaller Steps to Reducing Stress
Along the way through the years of work I’ve mentioned above, I picked a few other tricks to help me reduce stress. I learned about Stephen Covey’s Time Management Matrix and adapted it to all the various tasks I’m assigned each week.
This matrix helps me prioritize the various tasks and projects I’m assigned. I have altered it somewhat by further honing down priority tasks that fall in the Q1 and Q2 quadrants to a secondary list called “This week.” I live in that list. I know that if I work through that list each week, I’m going to stay ahead but also have space for fires that need to be put out. I don’t have an actual matrix on my wall or my computer; instead, I use the Apple reminders app to organize the quadrants into lists. It looks like this—
That being said, I try to stay ahead of things. I plan events out as far ahead as practical by scheduling meetings with relevant event leadership and staff that way we set expectations and avoid as many last minute changes as possible.
That also being said, I say “yes” to just about every last minute change proposed by my leadership. Maybe the idea of that stresses you out, but if I can make a change without adding extra stress to my team and jeopardizing the event flow as a whole, I work hard to make it happen. Saying “yes” so often helps build trust for when I have to say “no.” If I have to give them a no or some sort of other pushback, they know I’m not just being lazy or mailing things in.
Last up, I try to focus on what I’m especially good at by delegating various tasks and responsibilities to my staff and volunteers. I’ve mentioned before that I delegate according to a 70% threshold—if someone can do something 70% as well as I can, I delegate it. That doesn’t mean I dump it on them; I work hard to make sure my direct reports and volunteer team aren’t overloaded and are properly trained and equipped for their assigned tasks, but if they have the space and the gumption, I give away as many tasks as I can. I know my sweet spot is connecting with the team personally and spiritually while creating systems and processes that support the team and set them up for home runs every week. I love to train them and equip them for good works, so I focus on that and lean into my staff production tech to help with midweek tasks and fixes as well as other team members who like to put in extra serve time outside of weekend teams.
I love to help other leaders work their way out of stress. If anyone is reading this who needs help, please don’t hesitate to reach out at the links below.
