Ever notice how production people don’t completely fit in anywhere? In a creative brainstorming meeting, we are the ones trying to figure out how to make something happen. In an operations meeting, we are thinking creatively about how to get something done.
On our team, we have been talking quite a bit about the operation side and the ministry side of our church. Typically there is a line drawn down the middle, showing the two sides of what makes our church run. For many people, it seems easy to classify the accounting department as being on the operations side, and the youth pastor on the ministry side; the person cleaning the facility after an event on the operations side, and the worship pastor on the ministry side.
When it comes to production, we have a foot in both camps. We are intimately tied to the ministry that is happening all over our church, but we are also figuring out more practical operational-type things also. In a single meeting, we are brainstorming new ways of making an element in the service better through the technical arts, while we are also trying to figure out how to fit all our inputs into the channels we have.
In a creative meeting, there is a whole side of me that is thinking about how to plug in 4 giant inflatable moonwalks for a middle school event and which circuits I am going to plug them into so that I don’t blow a fuse, all the while someone is asking me if a worship setlist will work or not.
This can lend itself to me feeling like I should just be sawn in half so that the part of me that needs to deal with the operational side can focus on it, and the creative side of me can just sit in the moment.
The reality is that God created me to live with a foot in two worlds; to understand two different perspectives in any given situation; to think differently from anyone else at the table. Instead of wishing that more people thought like me, I should relish the thought that I am the only one with my perspective and that the way I think is vital to my church functioning properly.
If you are a technical artist in the local church, you know what I am talking about.
How can you fully embrace what feels like a split personality? What can you do to function more fully as who God made you to be?
