The Christmas season - it comes every year. We know it’s coming, but it sneaks up on us. It seems to take forever while we’re in it, but it’s gone before we know it. We love it, we hate it. Truly, Christmas is a contradictory time for those of us in the church media world.
However, if we look at it from the right perspective, the Christmas season affords us some great opportunities to try new things. Now, I’m not typically an “opportunity-minded” guy. I’m more of a problem-solver. But I have learned over the years how to identify chances to make changes or progress simply due to a unique window of time. Christmas is definitely one of those times. Our churches have services like “Hanging of the Greens” or various styles of Christmas Eve services. Many of us put on some sort of special Christmas concert or show, or maybe we do a big night of worship. In all of these events, our congregation and pastors are open to, or maybe even expecting something different from what they experience Sunday mornings.
Go to live shows, watch TV specials, search YouTube—get out there and see what other people are doing.
Ways to Take Advantage of the Season
In order to take advantage of this unique moment in the church calendar, there are a few things you and your team need to do.
Go see a musical and get inspired by a certain moment that struck you musically or visually. Seek out experiences that stir your creative juices and see how God might use it.
First, get inspired. Go to live shows, watch TV specials, search YouTube—get out there and see what other people are doing. This is a muscle that has to be developed. Most of us are “too busy” to have time to do things like this, but that is why we have to make time. Inspiration is vital to creating new things, but it doesn’t come to us while we’re sitting at our desks answering emails. Put it on the calendar. And, by the way, I’m not just talking about looking for Christmas shows. We should be ingesting all kinds of content from various creative mediums. Go see a musical and get inspired by a certain moment that struck you musically or visually. Seek out experiences that stir your creative juices and see how God might use it.
Design well—not in a hurry.
Now, don’t plan on going to a show during Thanksgiving and expect to be able to do something with that by Christmas Eve. This brings us to the second way to take advantage of the season, and that is plan ahead. Collaborate with your Worship, Media, and Comms teams, or even the Pastor, early in the year. Start in January. Turns out, there are no rules against that. Starting early means you can spend plenty of time in the “blue sky” phase where there are no bad ideas and anything is possible. It gives dreams time to ruminate and mature into realities.
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Remember the famous law of “Good, fast, cheap - pick two?” Well, when you start dreaming early, you remove the “Fast” option and create the opportunity to do things less expensively and with excellence. You can take the time to talk with experts about how to do something properly. You can rent or demo pieces of gear to see if they will work for you. You can give your team a long enough runway to successfully execute your desired end product. And you’ll sleep better.
The third way to take advantage of the Christmas season is to try new things as “proof of concept.” Again, people expect things to look and feel different at Christmas, so what are the ideas that you’ve never been brave enough to try? Give them a shot, but make sure they are calculated risks. Communicate well with your pastor and other executive leadership - no surprises. And test your ideas ahead of time to ensure they won’t be distracting. If it doesn’t work, no harm, no foul. Just go back to normal after Christmas. But here’s the up-side: if it does work, keep it. People have a way of getting used to something very quickly when they don’t see it as a threat, and it is way easier to introduce new ideas during a different season.
Things to Try
Here are a few ideas that might provide some inspiration. One of the most common things churches try at Christmas is new/more/bigger LED walls. Let your congregation see what your room could look like and how worship and teaching could be enhanced with these visual tools. Again, it is vital that you prepare well in advance for this. LED walls look good for two reasons: quality hardware, and quality content. The most expensive [insert high-end manufacturer here] LED tiles and processors don’t mean a thing if the content doesn’t appropriately support what is happening onstage. Design well - not in a hurry.
Here’s one that’s a little less obvious or exciting: try new key lighting.
Another design element that I have used in the past during Christmas is adding side light, back light, or breakups to the audience. This helps to immerse the audience into the same lighting environment as the stage lighting so that you don’t have a “wall” between the two areas. It also allows you to set a worship mood in the congregation without just turning the house lights off. Using color and texture in the audience connects them with the worship team or pastor onstage, and, in my opinion, is way more effective than turning the audience lights off and creating a “show” to watch Sunday mornings.
Here’s one that’s a little less obvious or exciting: try new key lighting. All of us are going to have to get away from tungsten lamps in the not-too-distant future, so take advantage of a lighting rental for the month of December to try out LED fixtures for your front light. This could be LED ellipsoidals or LED movers. Try a new color temperature, like 4,000 Kelvin, and see how it looks on camera. You may be surprised how much it improves the look in the room, too.
Christmas is a challenging time of year in the life of church techs, but we can balance that out with some “wins” that will carry into the rest of the year. Remember the parable of the talents in Matthew 25? The Christmas season has been entrusted to us by God to steward well. Don’t waste it, invest it. Get inspired, prepare well, and try new ideas.
