A brief overview of what takes place before services.

Youth on Friday saw me directing for the first time and I truly feel blessed and privileged to serve at this amazing church. People will be amazed at how much effort the volunteers and interns put in behind the scenes to make sure services run smoothly.

For instance a typical Sunday for most of the people, including me, here at the church starts at 5:30 am. Call time is at 6. This is when everybody gets together and they discuss the themes, scriptures, songs and a lot of technical stuff like lighting and the colours of the pixel tape and what graphics should show on the main screen.

This what the pixel tape looks like and most of the things you see on the stage is controlled by graphics.

---

After call time we start working and usually this means starting with graphics. Choosing and editing graphics for the different songs and making sure they are timed to perfection. This can be challenging because if the graphic is too fast or too slow it can impact the whole experience that people encounter during praise and worship.

Another big part of praise and worship are the lyrics. Setting up the lyrics for all the songs are easy but ensuring they come on at the right time is a tad more difficult. There are a lot of factors involved like delay and how the band decides to play the song. This is why meetings are so important.

There are clocks everywhere which indicate the stages and times we need to go through. This is also run via the AV room. After graphics are sorted out, for now, I move on to preparing scriptures and additional slides for the service. This is essentially the easiest part of the morning. The real stress period comes during praise and worship where I need to create a Prayer Request slide whilst still managing graphics.

Friday afternoon I had to make sure everything was correct and how we wanted it in the AV room. As director I never left the AV room from call time to the end of service because there was so much to do.

All of this is just on the day of service. Behind the scenes there is training on Wednesday nights and usually potential set lists are thrown around so lighting and graphics can start to think about what they want on Sundays. On Thursdays we have Team meetings and this is essentially a bonding night. There is still an element of work but most of the time is spent on bonding and forming a greater understanding amongst the teams.

---

---