It's Sunday afternoon, or night, or Monday morning; and you are relaxing. The weekend services (or gatherings, or whatever you call them) are over, and you finally feel like you can breathe and sit down again without having a million things flying through your head.

Until ... oh yeah ... you realize that next Sunday is only six days away.

I remember this feeling.

To be honest, I sometimes still have it.

Sometimes it was made even worse by the fact that I was leading week to week with no long term plan or system for review and improvement.

Fortunately, I was blessed with a lead pastor who used to be a worship leader himself. He and I have been on an interesting journey as we, with God's help, have revitalized the worship ministry of a dying church.

Along that journey, we have always had a system for reviewing and planning our weekend services.

It has evolved, and each stage has had its pros and cons.

I have narrowed down all the changes we made to three (3) main levels, and I'd like to lay them out for you in three posts.

These will be very practical in nature, and I'm hoping you can easily find where your current system falls and then quickly implement some of the things listed here.

Worship Review Level 3:

We've finally made it. Level 3.

Thanks for sticking with me this long. If you are just getting involved in this brief series of posts, I encourage you to go read the first two posts which can be found here and here.

At level 1, we were letting everybody else tell us what we needed to change. I called it the firing squad because it's a time when lots of things need changing and you need as many eyes on the process as possible.

For level 2, we asked everybody involved in worship, production, or tech to let us know how things were going in four distinct areas: Environment, Sound/Lighting/Media, Music, and Message.

Level 3 will have some similarities to both. You are still meeting with (some of) the same people that you are meeting with for level 2 and you are going over the Level 1 format.

However, you will be asking fewer people for the big details.

Allow me to explain.

We found after about a year of asking every single person involved in the worship/tech/production teams to rate our overall performance in these four areas that we were getting input from uninformed and sometimes opinionated places.

What has been a big help since we've had to basically rebuild our tech teams from the ground up (after COVID) is that each team member is going to be the best at giving us feedback about what went wrong with their respective position.

I've waited to formally put this post out because it's taken us a while to really nail the newest process down.

The Introduction of the Production Manager

The primary reason Level 3 changed as drastically from Level 2 is that we needed our teams to have better checklists. Another reason was that I (the main worship leader and tech leader) was getting burned out with worrying about too much each weekend.

As I was training another worship leader, I didn't want her to have to worry about the same tech things I was worrying about. This meant that each tech position needed to have a great checklist that helped them do their job well.

It also meant someone else had to worry about everything running smoothly.

Enter the Production Manager.

This is a person who is very detail-oriented and isn't afraid to boss people around.

They have the biggest checklist of all, and they are responsible for making sure that everything related to what's happening on stage runs smoothly.

They are even in charge of rallying the tech volunteers around 6-7 minutes out from go time to pray before they report to their stations.

They are also responsible for collecting any tech checklists that have comments/issues written on them. These checklists are put in a folder and used during the Worship Review Meeting during the week.

Paring Down the Review Team

In addition to getting feedback from fewer places, we also invited fewer people to the meeting.

We eliminated the need for the lead pastor, unless he absolutely MUST be there because he has something to add or will be involved in fixing something.

We also don't have any volunteer tech team leads attend. Mostly because it never worked out with their schedules. But we also did it because it forced me (the tech lead) to meet with them after the big meeting to go over what we reviewed.

So the people now at the Worship Review Meeting are

• Operations Director
• Worship Pastor
• Production Manager for the weekend (if possible)

And that's it!

Since our culture is pretty established and we know what to expect from week to week, we found we don't have to get into the nitty-gritty details anymore.

We use the RIGHT/WRONG/MISSING/CONFUSING/STOP format again, and it serves its purpose quite well.

Conclusion

It's taken years, but we have finally gotten to a place where our weekends mostly run smoothly, and we know what we need to fix from week to week. Soon there will be a post written in conjunction with my lead pastor on Problems vs. Definciencies. That's a whole other ball game.