We had a chance to talk with the founder and amazing guy that runs FILO, First in Last Out. Do you find that you need encouragement in the midst of worship and production ministry? This is the episode for you!
Notable Quotes
But for us as technical artists in the local church, it sort of defines who we are. We show up before the. Anybody else turn the lights on and we turn the lights off and we’re the last out the door. Yeah. Just the name comes from the idea of yeah we tend to be the first in and the last out.
And really the, for us as an organization the goal is to Help bring that community together. I spent a lot of years wishing I had a community to connect with, and so people that understood me and, wore black just like me and sat in the back of the room. Yeah. And, we could be in a room and kind of laugh at all the same jokes about, gaff tape versus duct tape or, whatever the, yeah. Whatever the exact thing was. So community is a big part for us. And then, Skill development. Just getting better at what we do. There’s churches out there that have done pretty much everything that we can learn from, and that’s really how I got better as a technical artist.
Like a lot of tech people. I started, in high school, and this is gonna date my age, but when the film projector was getting all warbly in the back, of the classroom, I would go back there and fix it. Yeah, started just doing audio at my church mostly because my. One of my good friends, we were sitting in the booth together and he was doing all the work which was all the work was one microphone and a tape deck to record . He didn’t show up one day and I’m like I got, I watched him do it, so I think I can do this.
This is the eighties now we’re talking. And so there was no, there was really, you could probably count on one hand how many churches had a production team or Right. Somebody who was being paid on staff to do, technical stuff. So I had no concept that, oh, maybe I could do this as a career. , I loved it. I just this is what I want to do.
Was listening to Amy Grant’s lead Me on album. There you go. Produced by Brown Bannister. And I have to say brown Bannister changed my life. Yeah, just the sound, the production value, the, and the the song. All right. Came on. So it was a huge choir, the song builds to this, giant choir and I was like, this sounds amazing. And. I need to figure out how to do this.
Hey, can you gimme the phone number to Saddleback? Yeah. And Willow Creek Church and just called that number. I’m like, Hey, do you have a tech person I could talk to? And just trying to make a connection with somebody who was further down the road than me that could gimme some insight. And yeah, those relationships were so meaningful to me because number one, they would actually pick up the phone when I called. And they didn’t necessarily have all the answers, but they had They would even say, yeah, I haven’t figured that out, or, we don’t know how to handle that, or whatever. Which was all that. Even that by itself was helpful to me. Oh, I’m not crazy. It’s like a problem everywhere, not just here.
Start working here at Willow Creek, which, in those days, the early two thousands, there’s a, there was a sense that, oh, they got it all figured out and things are perfect over there. Yeah. Getting here being like, oh, wow. They have the exact same challenges I had at the church in Detroit. Yeah. Maybe they’re more of them because it’s bigger, but they’re the same challenges and so that really. Led me to start thinking differently about okay, if I need this and Willow Creek needs this, then it’s probably a good chance that every tech person, has these similar challenges.
Which on some level technology has become so complicated. It’s not something you can there are so many, so few opportunities to grow into something. Yeah. Because it’s already big and complicated. But I would say , every person that I work with now in this, maybe an overstatement learned by doing, and maybe they went to school on the way, but there was already a foundation of. , I was just a kid and I jumped in helping, at V B S behind the console and just learned as I went. Yeah. And to me, I think in a similar way to a musician, there’s a part of it that, yeah, you can go to school for it, but. To get into school, you’ve already gotta have some sort of aptitude. Yeah. That came from somewhere. And that somewhere is from practicing and [00:04:00] experiences and I think in a way production work is more of a trade than it is whatever the opposite of that is
It’s one of the paradoxes of the local church is that we want from a production standpoint, we want consistency and excellence and, but we also need to develop a team and create space for people to learn and grow and make mistakes and but, Healthy church environment that I can think of. They’re growing their people up from within by giving them opportunities to learn how to mix audio, to learn how to do lights. And yeah, it’s just a challenge to figure out how do you do both things, right? Yeah. Because they feel mutually exclusive in some ways.
I would say the big questions have really nothing to do with technology. They have all to do with. Self leadership. Yeah. Relationship with whoever your counterpart is. A worship pastor. A senior pastor. Trust between kind of the platform team and the back of ho, the front of house team. Yeah. [00:05:00] Those to me and honestly, the if I look back on my journey, that was always my biggest question. How do I, how do we do this better? How do we get along better? How do we trust each other more? And I was always surprised that nobody else was talking about it. Yeah. I go to a conference or whatever, I’m like, oh, we’re talking about numbers and gear and, model numbers, but how do you I just don’t understand my worship leader, so like, how do I do that better?
Especially cuz we’re wired up so differently, or have the potential to be wired up differently and yeah. It feels, because we’re so different and it feels like we’re always butting heads, but. Coming at a, a challenge from different perspectives. And so it feels like butting heads, but it’s really just I’m looking at this from a different perspective than you are. And yeah. Yeah. How do we learn to trust that better?
I think put making space for relationship outside of the task at hand. Yeah. Cuz I think the, right now so much of our relationship is built around a stressful three or four hour period on a Sunday. Yeah. And there’s no time for anything else versus. Let’s go have coffee and Right. How many kids do you have? And , yeah. Those types of things are, that’s what builds trust, not just working harder on Sunday.
The book is called I Love Jesus, but I hate Christmas . And it’s really yeah, just says what it what a tech person feels in the local church. So it’s it’s a lot of work and so how do we survive it, yeah. And. And I I hate the kind of cliche, like instead of just thrive, surviving how do we thrive? But that’s really the idea. It’s like, how do I live a more effective life myself so that I can do this thing that, yeah. That that guys designed me for. And so yeah, the writing it it was a for any of you listening who have written anything, that it’s excruciating to have to write all the things down. I just felt like these similar to me coming to Willow Creek and realizing, wow, these things that I’m struggling with and that that I’m learning apply here as much as they do anywhere else. And yeah, I just thought, you know what? I’m gonna write all this stuff down and if it’s was really good for me to solidify what I think about what I.
The thing about Christmas and the process of getting ready for Christmas and all that stuff, it’s like a pressure cooker. And so what ends up happening is all the things we do really well, every other day of the year, every other weekend, we, they’re even be, they’re magnified and even better, like on that event, the things we don’t invest in those things also are magnified at Christmas and Easter. So if you have a tough relationship with your counterpart, guess what? It’s gonna be even harder at Christmas. If you have trouble with boundaries with your time, on, the third week in March, you’re gonna have trouble with boundaries at Christmas time, which means you’re never gonna go home.
One of the secrets to having a better Christmas experience is to start on January 1st with like building processes and boundaries in all of our lives on how we do work together. Yeah. So that Christmas and Easter are better. I think the other part of it too is, and I used to I used to think that this was a church [00:08:00] thing, but it turns out it’s just the doing something new and. is hard work. And especially if you’re tr if it’s new, it means you really have no idea how long it’s gonna take, how much money it’s gonna cost. You’re just educated, guessing your way through it. Yeah. And that’s hard, right? And so if we wanna be about doing something new and creative and beautiful and wonderful for our people, it’s gonna, that comes with a little bit of unknown and stretching.
I had a pastor once tell me that you. those moments that people will go home remembering that is hopefully attached to the good news of the gospel. Yeah. That’s what we pay rent for. That’s why we’re on staff. That’s why we built a building so that we’re creating moments that people are connecting with God. And if that means you have ziplining, the senior pastor in from the balcony is part of that, then yeah. Let’s go for it. .
I think we, the church as a whole probably figured out that the tech person matters more than we thought. Very important . I think also though the craziness of Covid and what it meant for tech people, I think I think the thing I would love to leave behind is you as a person are worth it. You’re, you matter. Because of who you are, not because of what you do.
It’s okay to not work 80 hours a week or, whatever the craziness that you’re doing. And even I just think for me, I’ll just speak for me as a tech person. I don’t wanna let anybody down. . I also like saving the day every now and then yeah. So those two things make it really hard to, keep control of your life but you can’t keep it up. You can’t sustain it. You you need a break. Yeah. , and I think on many levels, I think it’s up to each of us. It’s not arch, it’s not all on the organizations. Because I felt like my church was asking me to work, seven days a week at a one point in my life. And the senior pastor’s no, nobody’s asking you to work that hard. That’s on you and you need to, if you need a, if you need two days off or whatever You need to figure it out.
Nobody knows what I’m doing anyway. Like the senior pastor doesn’t really know what’s involved. The worship leader doesn’t involve know what’s involved. I know. Yeah. And because it’s a mystery to everyone, like they’re wondering, is this even a full-time job? Or what do you do every day? You know the we get those kinds of questions I think. When you say to somebody, your boss, who doesn’t totally get what you do, Hey I’m working too hard, or this is, too many hours or whatever, they just don’t know what that means.
For me was I spent a season of time where I kept track of every hour. that I was, what am I doing? Yeah. And maybe it was even in 15 minute increments, it took me three hours to do this and two hours to do that and just started keeping track of what does 40 or 50 hours look like. Yeah. So that I could tell my boss, Hey, this is what I’m spending time on. Like actually not just an idea. Yeah. So let’s talk about what if this is important and what isn’t. . And then the beauty of it was when somebody would ask for something extra, I could then show them this list. Okay, here’s what I’m already doing this. What do you want me to not do to add that thing? Or maybe okay, for this week we just need to add it and not subtract but I. , instead of me taking the responsibility at every moment to figure out what’s the most important it for me to spend my time on, it was really a game changer for me to say, help me decide how you want me to do this.
Biblically we should all make disciples, but sometimes we’re hired to just do our role, very technical so maybe speak to that a little bit.
Yeah, I think there on one hand I totally get that if you have somebody that’s mixing front of house every week, that you’re gonna get a consistent mix every week it’s gonna sound the same. I think that that’s valuable. Is it the most valuable? I would say for a lot of really great engineers that I know at a certain point, you can only get so be so much better. Yeah. Like at a certain point you could spend hours to get like 1% more out of the system or whatever. Yeah. And for me at that point it becomes like, what if you spent those hours like developing. . Sure. Pouring into someone letting somebody sit with you at front of house.
I think there’s a gentleman, Andrew Stark, who used to be the audio, the head of audio for Hillsong, , this is going back a few years, and he realized that the perfect mix is not enough for me. And developing people became his passion. How can I pass on all this knowledge I have to someone else? And so he just started doing it without anybody asking him to and just had people with him at front of house. Yeah. And it got to the point where maybe everyone on the platform thought Andrew was mixing, but it turns out it was, this was a volunteer every week and Andrew was just standing back there. So the people look back in the booth and oh, there’s a little bit of feedback, but Andrew’s back there, it’ll be fine. Yeah. So he created an environment where people could be developed solely over time.
Dave Ferguson, who leads the exponential movement. Yeah. There’s a pastor here in Chicago, he talks about this idea of excellence. And development. Instead of them being mutually exclusive, they’re like pedals on a bicycle. That to move our the church forward, we need to be excellent. So we push on that pedal and we need to develop, we push on that pedal. We can’t push on ’em. At the same time, we won’t go anywhere. Yeah. But that we’re spending time just pushing on each value. And yeah. I think, yeah, for me Yeah. Development is the key and we have to create a culture that, that mistakes or maybe more specifically first time mistakes are part of the deal.