Today I closed my Hotmail account. It felt quite liberating, actually.

I do all my e-stuff through Google, it’s just easier for how my brain is wired to navigate and it’s only going to get better when Google Wave comes later this year. But the reason I closed my hotmail account was because I don’t do much with it. Do I use it? Yeah, but do I get value out of it? Erm, no. So the question becomes, why keep it around? And “just because” isn’t a good enough reason anymore. Information without application is just noise.

I want to throw out a challenge to you guys to find something to stop doing something in your area of ministry that is not adding real value. If it’s just taking up time, taking up space, taking up budget or other resources, and you don’t think it’s helping you guys do ministry, get rid of it.

Really, do you see yourself in this video if you run sound, lights, lead worship, etc.?

HT: Mistakemaker.com

Sunridge Church in Temecula has an internal site called SunridgeFamily.org and there we connect our church people through a tool called 360Hubs. Give our site a click: www.sunridgeworship.org!

Any feedback?

As a member of the typical worship team, singers often rely on the gear presented to them by the situation. I have served in church plants in school cafeterias and in new worship houses that seat over 2,000. Either way, the issue of gear for any musician is important. One thing I have learned: If something sounds cheap, it probably is.

I own a fairly decent guitar that cost me about $600. It sounds pretty decent. But, when I played a friend’s $3,000 Taylor I loathed picking up my own guitar again. Most instrumentalists invest in good gear to present their best. A typical electric guitarist might easily spend up to $10,000 for his gear: amp, pedals, guitars. A pro trumpet can cost about $3,000.

How about those of us who sing? Do we invest in gear, too? I think we should. Here is a list of gear I would recommend for each singer on my team. Now, vocal mics can be shared and wireless in-ear receivers and transmitters can as well. You do want to have your own ear buds, however:

• Shure UR2/KSM9 wireless system. I have demoed this microphone and think it is amazing. I would love four to five of these for our regular Sunday worship. They cost with microphone, and receiver a whopping $1,800 a piece. My audio expert, Jeremy, tells me the double magnets mean it can cancel a lot of feedback and that they sound great.
• Sennheiser EW 300 IEM G2 is a cost-effective choice for monitoring in-ear. Being able to monitor anywhere on the stage is one plus, and the fact of removing large monitor speakers and their cabling cleans up the stage look, too! This unit, which actually has one earbud with it will cost you about $950. (If you are in a school cafeteria, having this might SAVE the mix.)
• Shure SCL5 are dual driver earbuds. You can pay a bit more to get custom molds to your ear from your audiologist (maybe about $150 more in cost). Imagine hearing the full range of music, minus very low subs and being able to have the volume be to your liking! You could stand right near the drummer or a guitar amp and have no problem with the volume. This is one way to save your ears, too. The price for this baby is around $400.

The total cost if only four vocalists purchase there own and nothing is shared would be $3,150. That is about what an average instrumentalist would buy on your team no matter what they play. If you have 8 singers share the mics and cost, each person would have to cough up about $1,500. And, perhaps even a bit less.

If I were to prioritize, I would first get the in-ear monitors times four and add the vocal mics later. Also, there are options for earbuds as low as $100 that can work great, too. So, as a plan “B” it would cost about $575 per person on a  vocal team of 8 people to do this.

I am interested to know what other worship leaders, audio guys, vocalists and instrumentalists think about singers and gear. Let’s discuss.

Thing is, though, worship leading is mostly a black and white job. You (presumably) schedule the musicians, pick the song selection, the song order, manage conflicts and the run the rehearsal, which is the same thing, really.

What does the sound guy do? Well, ehm… he makes things sound good. And if you were to categorize his job description in that manner, yes, you could say, “bah” to him being a worship leader.

On balance then because what the sound guy has to do is get in everyone’s mind and play a psychological game of chess. Think of it this way, why is it that Lord I Lift Your Name On High has become a musical oxbow lake? Why is it no longer at the top of the Top 30 Christian music charts? It’s because that song doesn’t move people anymore. In the same way, sound mixers, the way I was trained and the way I train people, is to mix according to audience reaction. You have to mix in a way that leads people away from the point where the merely listen to music as a consumer and say, “the band sounded good today” or, “the band didn’t sound good today.” And leading them away from that you have to take them to a point where they are able to simply worship.

The sound guy is the make-or-break guy in the entire process. Psychologically, people will tolerate bad video over bad audio. You could have Chris Tomlin as a guest worship leader, but if you don’t have someone who knows how to lead the audience in the subtle art of sonics, he’ll just sound like some middle-aged worship leader that has Dwayne for a middle name. Sure it’ll have all the earmarks of, “ooh that’s Chris Tomlin.” But it won’t move people to worship anything more than the Chris Tomlin Experience.

“If all you do is focus on the tools of ministry (ensuring technical excellence, making sure people don’t think it’s too loud, repairing broken equipment) rather than why the ministry is there in the first place, you become like Martha in Luke 10. What is required is not the servant mentality but a leadership mentality.”

One of the worship leaders I have known was a man named Aaron. He wasn’t very talented, didn’t have a great voice, and let’s face it his musical styling was… different. But what he understood was that in order to be effective he needed someone who knew how to make him sound better than his talent level. He gave me the freedom and authority to do whatever I wanted, not as the sound guy, but he rather informally made me a worship leader. He worked with me to help lead people in worship and he was very successful for it.

You don’t have to have amazing musicians, though you should get good ones, or amazing songs although Lord I Lift Your Name On High is very dated. What you need is a really good sound mixer and to give him the technical and creative authority as a behind-the-scenes worship leader to maximize the effectiveness of your worship time.

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