In production leadership, and ministry in general, it’s not uncommon to fear not having enough volunteers. In fact, you may have already noticed something: we’ll never have enough volunteers.

At least not enough to make us comfortable.

Confident, yes.
Effective, yes.
Comfortable, probably not.

So what do we do? We set the bar low and beg anyone we can to help. It’s a natural reaction. We can’t find enough high-capacity, passionate volunteers to help us with our ministry so we lower our expectations and beg people to help us. And while this may make us fully staffed, it doesn’t make us good. In fact, it is a recipe for disaster. Here are 3 common problems and their solutions.
(more…)

I had a great lunch today with Kent Boyd, my production director at our Dalton Campus. We got together to talk about something that I’ve noticed in the past few weeks.

As I’ve moved from leading volunteers directly into leading leaders (who lead volunteers), I’ve become more disconnected from the daily lives of the volunteers.

For some reason, it took me by surprise. I really don’t know why. It shouldn’t have. In fact it makes complete sense. The problem is that when I became disconnected from the daily lives of my volunteers, my ability to care for them decreased. So we had a good long discussion about deliberately trying to care for our volunteers. It can’t be driven by my personality or ability to “catch” when someone is hurting. We have to make sure that we’re being deliberate and asking the right questions – the system to care for people has to be in place. Why did this take so long?

Think about it this way. As churches, we typically know where every dime gets spent. We spend hours and hours budgeting and planning and tracking and reporting about our finances – whole teams are devoted to managing the budget and to making sure we’re being good stewards of those resources. How much time and resources do we spend stewarding our people?

I let this happen to me recently. A volunteer was not meshing well in her new role and I let it slip. She didn’t tell me, but if I had been around to ask her she probably would have told me. She lost the vision, got burnt out and no longer comes to church regularly.

It hurts.

I really believe that God cares more about the one person who fell through the cracks than your whole budget.

Ed Lockett came to visit us at Rock Bridge a few weeks ago. This is his story.

*photography by Jeremy Owens from our recent mission trip to Haiti

We recently did a ProPresenter 4 training for about 40 people here at Rock Bridge Community Church. Between the three campuses and various ministries, we have 22 machines currently running ProPresenter 3. In order to upgrade (which you should totally do if you haven’t already) we needed a large scale training to get people comfortable with the basics of the new program.

Most of the content of the training was provided by Stephen Proctor (@worshipvj www.worshipvj.com) so I won’t get into content too much on this post, but I do want to talk about setup.

Thanks to a little help from Renewed Vision, we were able to use an HD projector on a 16’ x 9’ screen in the center of the stage mirroring the laptop display while simultaneously using two 8’ x 6’ screens on the sides of the stage showing the output of ProPresenter. It was fun.

I used the USB-DVI device that Renewed Vision sells to mirror the laptop display and used the internal graphics card (MiniDisplayPort) to run ProPresenter’s output. Here’s the setup process (assuming you’ve never run the USB-DVI before).

• Run all your video cables to their respective places (I’m going to assume you know how to set up a projector) but don’t plug the USB-DVI device into the computer until you…
• Insert the disc, install the drivers
• Now plug in the USB-DVI device
• Using Display Preferences verify all 3 displays operating at optimal resolution/color settings and totally functional
• Make sure mirroring is off
• Arrange the displays in the following order (from left to right, if you don’t do this now it will make it more difficult to find the correct output later): Laptop Display (primary with dock), USB-DVI Display, MiniDisplayPort Display
• OPTION + Click & Drag the Laptop Display onto the USB-DVI Display (this should mirror the Laptop/USB-DVI displays ONLY)
  NOTE: Depending on your laptop display/projector resolutions you might have to find a “best fit” – I adjusted mine to only 1080 lines instead of 1440 to match the projector (this gave me letterboxing on my laptop display but I was ok with it – unhide your dock if you’re having trouble with it)
• Open ProPresenter 4
• Your screen might go black here as ProPresenter isn’t sure what display to use as an output and mine defaulted to the mirrored display on two different machines – Use CMD+1 to hide ProPresenter’s output
• Go to ProPresenter Preferences and click on the Display tab
• Make sure “Scale to Fit Output Display” is checked
• OPTION + Click & Drag the black “OUT” box to the MiniDisplayPort Display that you previously arranged all the way to the right
• Scale the ProPresenter main window as needed to see your screen on the projector

That should do it. You should be able to see everything you do on the laptop and still be able to see the results of that on the side screens. For the number of people we had at the training it really couldn’t have been better. I would also highly recommend bringing in Stephen Proctor to train your team. It fueled some great discussions on making good decisions with content not just how to use the software – which is where every good team needs to go.

A few notes:
The USB-DVI frame rate is around 20fps – noticeably slower than the built-in video card. That’s why I chose to use the USB-DVI device as the mirror instead of the main out. If you switch those you’ll likely run into performance problems playing video through ProPresenter – and nobody likes performance problems.

Always make sure the outputs/displays are working properly before you open ProPresenter. Troubleshooting is a pain if you don’t know whether it’s a system or a software problem.

I wouldn’t suggest doing this setup for anything live (why would you?) as it’s stable but just tricky enough to make me nervous in a live setting, but in my 2hr training we had no problems whatsoever.

I’d just like to add that Renewed Vision went the extra mile to test this out before I ever ordered the equipment. I sent a tweet out to fellow CTDRT members asking if anyone had ever tried to do this and got an unsolicited call from Renewed Vision’s @chriswheat offering his assistance. I told him what I thought would work and he ran off to test it calling me back to confirm.

If you end up using this setup or need any help with it, tweet it to me at @brian_holt, I’d love to see how you do it.

I just bought my first house so I find myself watching HGTV a lot more than I ever have before. My personal favorite is Holmes on Homes. Each week Mike Holmes takes on a project that was done incorrectly (or left unfinished) and “makes it right.”

I was watching a few nights ago and I heard him say the following:

I don’t want to do this, but right now this is my house. As long as this is my house, I’m gonna do it right.

Man.
That’s quality and commitment.

Imagine what would happen if we, as leaders in the church, thought about our people that way.

The students in student ministry are ‘my kids’.
The visitors in the services are ‘my brothers and sisters’.
The children in children’s ministry are ‘my kids’.

There would be things I wouldn’t want to do for someone else’s kids…but that I’d do for mine. There would be an urgency for my brother to see Christ that might not be present for someone I’ve never met. But what if it was?