We’ve all had bad meetings.
The sort of meeting when the lead pastor brain dumps an ambitious vision for an event, a service or a big conference and you, the production leader, just don’t see how to make that happen, at least not like how the lead pastor envisions. You say as much and for whatever reason, you get what we’ll call “negative feedback.” You feel like you need to defend yourself, so you further explain the complexities of your answer, but the jargon and tech speak go over your leader’s head. He or she pushes back, hinting that maybe you and your team need a little more commitment and drive to share the gospel and grow the church. Things start to spiral because you know your commitment level and your team’s hard work. Maybe you raise your voice a little, maybe your leader raises theirs too. It ends in some sort of frustrating stalemate or perhaps your lead pastor just says “Make it happen,” and walks out of the room, leaving you holding the bag.
Some meetings are worse than that and some aren’t as bad, but any meeting of that category is never fun, much less productive or healthy. A question pops up, then—how do I not have another meeting like that?
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James Harding, Director of Ministry Coordination, First Baptist Rogers
Meet James Harding. “You have to stop, pause and think through—is there any way we can come anywhere close to a yes for this?”
He works as the Director of Ministry Coordination at First Baptist Rogers, a multisite church with three campuses in the Rogers, Arkansas area. The role was created specifically for him after working at the church in media and communications as well as student ministry, worship ministry and adult discipleship. As the church grew, so did friction between the needs of various ministry leaders and the capacity of First Baptist’s production teams. Senior leadership recognized a need for someone who could speak both languages and help each side find a “yes.” He spoke recently with Church Production about his unique role.
“So what I do is I sit in between those two groups, and I kind of pay attention to what's happening,” James explains. “I see what's coming down the calendar. I'll also, you know, be the preemptive bad guy and say, ‘Hey, listen—you're trying to schedule this at a time, which is perfect for you, but here's what you don't understand: this is what else is going on.’ The other side of the coin is I will jump into ministries that need help because they've got a lot going on and they don't necessarily always feel like they're getting help. They're not being supported from [production]. And so it's kind of a twofold thing, right? I'm here to protect support [teams], in the idea of production, communications, media, all that kind of stuff, but I'm also here to make sure that ministries' needs are being met properly.
“…in order to say no, you really have to have the support of your senior leadership.”
—James Harding, Director of Ministry Coordination, First Baptist Rogers
One main idea helps him find yesses—“Basically, our mantra here, and my mantra in general is, it's about the relationship. Be that person that says, ‘Hey, listen, we'll do everything we can to help you. Maybe you don't need a full-on production team, you just need something simple, because what you're doing is really simple and it doesn't need to be overdone.’ Maybe it's, ‘Hey, the reach of what you're doing is going to be 10 people versus the reach of this is going to be 1,000. So, we really have to make sure that we're supporting appropriately.
And that building of relationship helps when you do actually have to give a fairly hard no. “You've got to build that relationship to where people understand when you're having to tell them ‘no’ it's not because you're just not wanting to help them or whatever. It's simply because there's a limit on resources and time,” James notes.
And he especially emphasized relationships with senior leadership in particular. “No. 1, in order to say no, you really have to have the support of your senior leadership. If they're not going to support you, then that's going to be a challenge because you might say no, but people can go around to you and you're going to be stuck doing it anyway, which then just takes away your credibility for saying no in the first place.”
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Andrew Hunt, Technical Arts Pastor, Church Elder, Blue Ridge Community Church
Church Production also spent a few minutes with Andrew Hunt, the Technical Arts Pastor at Blue Ridge Community Church in Forest, Virginia.
While working on staff as the Technical Arts Pastor, he also serves as a church elder, putting him in a peculiar place between the senior church staff leadership and his own staff ministry. He offered great advice, “The biggest thing for us is communication, you know—over communication. In the absence of communication, people get negative. And so I think we have a pretty healthy culture of between my role and then senior leadership of just dialoguing back and forth,” Andrew recalls.
His approach requires flexibility and a servant's heart on the tech leader’s part. “I remember years past, I [came] in with a huge budget because we wanted to replace our old audio system. I would go in and I would put it in the budget, I would make the case for it, but I was always holding it loosely saying I trust my senior leadership team that I know they have a much wider view than I would have had at the time,” Andrew says.
He noted that humility was key for his success in the in-between role. “I need to be a little more open and humble. Maybe I'm going to learn something in the process of this. Maybe there's something for me to learn here.”
“The biggest thing for us is communication, you know—over communication.”
Andrew Hunt, Technical Arts Pastor, Church Elder, Blue Ridge Community Church
Other times, the only way to communicate is to simply show leadership just exactly how something works, to take the time to show what you mean. Andrew told a little story— “I don't remember the reason why, but somebody got the idea of taking a whole bunch of these LED lights and then putting them into audio mode, so that they would all change with the beat. And in this meeting, I'm saying, ‘It’s not gonna work like that. It's gonna be so loud, [and] it's not even gonna resemble what you think it’s gonna look like.’ But they were insistent. ‘No, no, I think it's gonna work; can we at least try it?’ And in that moment, I thought, humility.
“You know what, I'm gonna do it. I'm just gonna go pull them all out, 30 of them or whatever. I'm gonna add them all, link them all together, put them all in, you know, change their addresses, put them in audio mode, whatever, and then have them there at rehearsal, and then let them see for themselves what it will do.
“And, you know, it didn't work. And they pretty quickly were like, ‘Oh, yeah, this isn't gonna work.’ And I didn't say I told you so,” Andrew remembers.
Our thanks to James and Andrew for such great advice for communicating with senior leadership and other ministries about church production capabilities:
- Try to find the “yes.”
- Build trusting relationships
- Have the support of senior leadership
- Stay humble
- Sometimes, you just gotta try it
