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At Coastal Community Church, production isn't built around a few experts—it's built around developing volunteers who can lead with confidence.
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Consistency across campuses starts long before Sunday at Coastal Community Church—with centralized programming, structured training, and shared workflows.
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At Coastal, staff members step back from operating positions so volunteers can fully experience the ministry impact of serving.
Twelve years into his time at Coastal Community Church, Kyle LeForge doesn’t talk about production first. He talks about people.
That might seem surprising for a church running three campuses—with a fourth on the way—and averaging nearly 6,000 in attendance. But for LeForge, technical systems are only part of the equation. The real challenge is building something that can scale across locations, services, and teams—especially when those teams are almost entirely volunteer.
“We do not do anything on a Sunday. It is our responsibility as staff members to facilitate, not operate.”
That philosophy shapes everything at Coastal—from how services are built to how volunteers are trained—and it’s what makes their multi-site model work.
From Worship Leader to Technical Director
Kyle LeForge, Worship Leader-turned-Production Manager at Coastal Community Church, Parkland, Fla., built a training system that enables a volunteer-driven production model to work at scale.
LeForge didn’t start in production. He started as a worship leader.
After an internship at Bayside Community Church, where he led multiple ministries, he joined Coastal in 2014 as a worship leader. At the time, the church was portable, and like many growing churches, roles overlapped.
“I was responsible basically to train the sound engineer how to run sound while I was leading worship,” he says.
That dual role—leading worship while overseeing production—was demanding, but it also laid the foundation for what would come next.
A sudden facility transition accelerated the shift. When one of Coastal’s portable locations lost its venue with little notice, the team was forced to pivot quickly while launching a new permanent campus.
In the middle of that chaos, LeForge stepped into production.
“I thought it was temporary,” he says. “But during that time, I fell in love with production.”
Scaling Systems Across Campuses
Today, Coastal operates with a central broadcast campus supporting satellite locations. That structure allows the team to standardize systems while reducing the burden on local leaders.
“We build out our locations…so they are the same structure,” LeForge explains. “I actually send one lighting file to both locations…as well as all resources for ProPresenter every single week.”
The result is a hybrid model: centralized programming, localized execution, and volunteer-driven operation.
At the campus level, teams aren’t building services from scratch. They’re receiving pre-built elements—lighting, graphics, and structure—and focusing on execution.
“What they’re doing is dragging and dropping,” he says. “Do they have to troubleshoot? Absolutely. But it’s not the worship leader’s responsibility to build out lighting.”
A Volunteer-Driven Culture
One of the most distinctive aspects of Coastal’s approach is its reliance on volunteers.
At the broadcast campus alone, front of house, monitors, lighting, and production roles are all volunteer-operated. Each position has multiple trained operators, and staff members do not run positions on Sundays.
“I don’t mix,” LeForge says. “I teach sound. I teach lighting. I teach ProPresenter. But I do not operate any of those things on a Sunday.”
That decision isn’t about efficiency—it’s about ownership.
“It’s amazing when you get to run sound and then you get to see 40 people raise their hand for salvation,” he says. “I don’t want to take that away from a volunteer.”
A Structured Training Pipeline
To support that model, Coastal has built a highly structured onboarding and training system.
New volunteers typically enter through the church’s “Next Steps” process, where they can express interest in joining a team. From there, production volunteers follow a clearly defined path.
Training includes shadowing periods ranging from two to six weeks depending on the role, supervised operation, skills validation—including tools like MXU for audio training—and ongoing evaluations every six months.
Front-of-house engineers, for example, go through a 12-week process before operating independently.
“At the end of 12 weeks…we evaluate through virtual soundcheck whether or not they are able to do a service by themselves,” LeForge says.
There’s also a built-in progression system. Volunteers don’t jump into high-responsibility roles immediately—they move through a pipeline.
“If you want to be a producer, you have to go through lighting and then ProPresenter,” he explains.
Creating Consistency Without Burnout
The structure extends beyond training into weekly workflows.
Coastal uses a centralized planning process, with programming finalized midweek and distributed to all locations.
Monday is dedicated to service review. Wednesday is when final programming and resources are distributed. Thursday is reserved for rehearsals at each location.
Notably, production volunteers at satellite campuses are required to attend rehearsals, giving them more hands-on time with systems and transitions.
“That gives them more opportunities behind the consoles…to see everything in action,” LeForge says.
Building Culture, Not Just Teams
For LeForge, systems and structure are only part of the equation. Culture is what makes the system sustainable.
Coastal invests intentionally in community through all-team gatherings, annual appreciation events, and regular opportunities for connection across roles and campuses.
“We are huge on community,” he says. “If you’re a part of the production team, you know everybody.”
That culture shows up in unexpected ways.
LeForge recalls a young volunteer who initially had no interest in production but became engaged after witnessing the team’s passion during a build.
“He said, ‘I saw so much passion…that I couldn’t help but want to be a part of this,’” LeForge says.
One year later, that same volunteer was serving on Coastal’s advanced troubleshooting team.
The Role of the Technical Director
As Coastal has grown, LeForge’s role has shifted from doing to developing.
“I want to make sure that at the end of the day, they love what they do,” he says of his team.
That means equipping staff leaders, building systems that scale, and creating environments where volunteers thrive.
A Model That Scales
Coastal’s approach offers a clear takeaway for other churches: scaling production isn’t just about adding gear or staff. It’s about building a system that develops people.
At Coastal, that system includes centralized resources, structured training, volunteer ownership, and strong community.
Together, those elements make it possible to deliver consistent weekend experiences across multiple campuses—without burning out staff or over-relying on a few key individuals.
And for LeForge, the goal isn’t just execution—it’s impact.
“I don’t want them to operate out of ‘I have to do this,’” he says. “But out of a place of, ‘I get to do this.’”
