We had a heck of a time talking with Toby and touring the facility over at Church Gear. In the middle of the episode we’ll take a pause and do a tour, if you’d like to see that tour head over to our YouTube channel.
Transcript
Welcome to the Church Collective Podcast. In this episode, myself and Chris had the opportunity to go over to meet the guys at Church Gear. We talked with Toby did a tour of their warehouse, and this podcast actually got cut short with a tornado warning. So there is just going to be a whole lot of great stuff in this episode.
Be sure to check it out in the middle of it. Chris gets too excited and wants to go look at their warehouse, so we’re gonna cut the podcast in the middle. But if you’re watching this on YouTube, head over to YouTube and you can watch the video of the tour. So many things going. Here we
go. We partner with churches all over the country.
We on the front and backside as far as assisting them with certified church owned is our fancy way of saying, a church owned it gear. And so we’ll come and partner with large churches and we’ll buy their old production equipment that they’re phasing out of that they’re not using anymore.
And then we bring it all back to our. operation here, which you guys are sitting inside of in Franklin, Tennessee. Test through everything and then resell it online. And really, our heart, our passion is to get it into the hands of small churches that don’t have the budgets of the large mega churches.
And so help them find great gear that they can afford. How did you get started with that? You want the the real start was, I started flipping gear in 2004. I was trying to be, the next great worship artist. And I was like I should probably pay the bills too. And so I found a really good deal on a pair of speakers in LA and I was living in San Diego in the ti in at the time.
And so I I won the speakers on eBay and I drove up to la I picked ’em up, I brought ’em back home, and then I put ’em back up on eBay for twice as. and they sold and I thought to. . Oh, that was the easiest money I’ve ever made. Wow. And I was like, I wonder if I could do that again. . So I did it again, and then I did it again and again.
And I quickly realized, oh, this is what’s gonna actually pay the bills while I pursue music. And then, I just, I got good at it over the years and growing up in the church, my dad was a music director, and then I was a worship pastor at churches. And then my band would travel to churches like you would see.
all the time. There’d be closet storage spaces, churches off it called the graveyard . And then, slowly but surely two passions of mine came together and met. And I was like, oh maybe I should start a business around this idea. And here
we are. When did you start fixing gear?
We don’t really fix it, we flip it.
Oh, okay.
I was thinking you were like refurbishing it. Like
now we, I mean we do have a full tech team, but. Ideally, we get a camera or a digital mixer or whatever it is from church A, bring it back to our tech shop. Our techs go through every bit of it. They test every function and whatnot. And in a perfect world, it’s working great.
Got it. And we give our, stamp of approval if it’s got issues. It’s how much time do we have? Can we source parts? And if not, then we’ll usually just put it up as a parts thing. Makes
sense. Yeah.
Does the like your idea is you want to get it to smaller churches.
Does, is the discount kind of in the fact that it’s used gear or are you guys like heavily subsidizing
it in any way? No. The discount is that it’s used. There are a lot of things that come out of large churches that a small church doesn’t need a 30 K projector or an SSL console. So if we buy those, and we do buy those large format things from some churches and those will go to touring houses or production companies or other large churches. But for the smaller church that might not even know what they need, they can call us up and say, Hey. And we had a perfect example church in East Nashville just recently called us up and said it, it was, the pastor called us up and said, so on Sunday morning I’m preaching and people in the back are literally stopping me and saying, we can’t hear you.
And so he thought to himself I should probably do something to fix that. And they took up an offering and they came up with about $2,000 and he, I don’t know how he got our number, but he called up our sales guy and said, Hey, we did a, an offering this week and we need speakers. And , we were able to hook ’em up with a pair of speakers and an amp and our guy even took ’em and set ’em up for ’em and brand new, this would’ve been like $4,000.
But because it was used, because used prices are just cheaper. Yeah. It, I think it was like 1600 bucks for the whole thing. Wow. And a pair of speakers, if they’re well taken care of, if they’re used at a church indoors, they’re gonna last another 20 years. , do you guys offer installation too, or, we almost never offer installation.
In this case it was like a church here in town and my guy’s okay, I can set up a pair of speakers, . Like we do that. Yeah. But there’s so many great integrators out there that’s what they do. That’s what they’re great at. And so we’ll try and partner with them. If a church says, we need a system or we need gear, do you know somebody who can install it?
We’ll say, oh, here are our friends. disintegration company or this installer in the city. So we’re still trying to build up that network of guys that do right by churches. . Yeah. Cuz that’s all that can be the question as well. , how’d you get
here in Tennessee? From California?
In 2006, my wife and I looked at the state of real estate in California and thought to ourselves, we’re never buying a house here,
And we my family had migrated to the Dallas area, so we went out and visited Dallas and it just was not our vibe. So we drove down to Austin and thought to. , oh, here’s our vibe. So we moved to Austin in 2006 and I continued to pursue the worship thing, put a band together and would do summer camps and youth events and church services.
All the while flipping gear on the side to pay the bills. . And then in 2012 t Tribeca University here in Nashville recruited me to be an artist in residence for a worship program. They were starting at that time. The whole idea kind fizzled out, but we were already here and lo and behold, I was still.
Buying and reselling gear. , I was like we really Nashville and Franklin area, and let’s just stay and I’ll just make a go at this gear thing. So when did it go
from you’re just flipping from your house to like you had an actual
location in we moved to a house. We had a two car garage and that’s what I was doing it out of.
And in January in Nashville, like it can be cold , I’d be packing guitar cabs out in the driveway and have to clear snow out of the way so I could pack these things. We realized okay, this. Getting a little bigger than a two car garage. So we bought a house with a basement and I thought this is awesome.
So for four or five years I was just operating out of a basement and it was great. And it was all the room I needed to, and really I was doing a lot of instruments. Guitar amps, keyboards, drum sets, recording equipment. But I wasn’t really it wasn’t partnered with churches yet. It was just me buying and selling gear.
And then in 2019 late 2019, early 2020 is of when the concept of church gear came to life. When, we started or I started marketing it and then churches thought oh, this is interesting. We have all this gear and you’re willing to come and get it and pay us and take it away. And so after doing that for a few months, I started looking around the basement and I could see the riding on the wall, even though I couldn’t see the walls anymore cuz there was so much gear.
And my wife and I started thinking like, okay, we need. Find another space. So we did a little real estate search and we found a property in Franklin with a kind of a warehouse barn. And we ended up buying that and thought, this is great. This is all the space we’ll ever need. Hired a couple guys and within six months we’re like, oh,
So we were there another nine months, and then we moved into this location. Just really been operating in here about two months, two and a half months. Oh, wow. And I’m like, there’s 18 of us now in the company and I’m just looking around like Uhoh . We’ve been here two and a half months and I, we gotta get more pallet racks.
We gotta get a forklift. We gotta go high because there is so much gear. Wow. There. Just say, I saw
the warehouse and it looked pretty full . Yeah. Chesapeake in the door there. Yeah.
My operations guy’s pulling his hair out right now. . ,
man I wish I would’ve seen The Warehouse first, cuz now that’s all I can think of.
I know. Do we need, just need to pause the recording. I think we do shopping. Is that cool?
Sure. Yeah. Really? For real? Yeah. Okay. Okay. I
can’t pause. I literally can’t
even,
so this is the part that you’re gonna wanna go over to YouTube and check out the video if you wanna see the whole tour. After we did the tour, we jumped right back into the podcast.
We
just took the tour and you said you need a forklift now. And I, now I see why you need a forklift, . . Wow. I think the thing that really shocked me was the matchless Yes. The matchless head. Can you talk about where that
came from? We just did a pickup from the Village church in Dallas area Matt Chandler’s church, and I think they were phasing out of lot of their like, High level instruments, especially guitar amps.
I’m, I didn’t see the situation, but I think they went to Kemper or something else. And so they had all these nice guitar amps and just didn’t need ’em anymore. And then a lot of recording gear because again, I think they’re just going plugins for broadcast and so it was hilarious when all that stuff.
Arrived in the truck. All of our tech guys were just like, what? What? didn’t tell ’em it was coming. Yeah. So they had your same reaction, Chris, where, and I told them like, do you want your paycheck this month or do you just want church gear credit now? I was gonna say, are they calling dibs on stuff?
Yeah. It’s hilarious when I’ll see invoices come through as paid and it’ll be one of our tech guys and it’ll have their name on the invoice. I’m like, oh, yep, bogs just bought another piece. Wow.
what’s like the most interesting piece that ever came? .
That’s tricky. It depends do you want the celebrity, do you want like Stephen Fur’s, Mike or do you want the most unique item?
Both ? Both. See, if I was gonna do I’d go back to my pre church gear days, just cuz I had a couple of those moments. Like I bought gear from Taylor Swift, not her personally obviously, but her people like some of her touring. Yeah, so that was fun. My wife’s grandpa when he passed away left a 1900 0 0 Martin guitar.
Wow. But it’s, it’s really fun to Did you keep it? I did not. You flipped it? . Wow. It was a family decision and, it was my wife’s family, oh. I did the effort of reselling it. Some gentleman in California actually was very excited to add it to his collection. Wow. But it’s really fun to go to these churches that like, I’ve listened to a thousand Matt Chandler sermons, and so then to get to partner with Village Church or get to partner with Elevation Church or Saddleback, whatever it is it’s just super fun to, especially, I always laugh at myself because I would’ve died to be able to lead worship.
Saddle pack or elevation, yet they, why would they need me? And now all of a sudden, like I started this company that’s meeting church’s needs. And so these churches are like, oh man, this is amazing. And it was hilarious. One day when one, one tech director was like, man, you’re like a rockstar. He’s coming in here and buying all our gear
And I’m like, oh, the irony. . Yeah, .
That’s
crazy. I just I’m, I’d love to hear, we know some of these guys that like Saddleback and Elevation and stuff and it’s neat how accessible a lot of these people are. But it does seem for a lot of the people listening here, it feels like that’s like a completely different world that’s walled off.
Like how did you just even begin to network with these people? ,
Honestly, everybody is two degrees of separation. , if you’re, for example, if you’re buddies with Lee Fields, then you know, everybody . But if you do write by one church, Then they have tech director friends that they’re going to then tell.
And so we get a lot of referrals from church tech directors that tell their buddies like, oh dude, like why do you have all this gear sitting here? Why haven’t you call it church gear? Like it’s Yeah, the easiest thing in the world. So we constantly remind ourselves it is such a relational thing with the church and if.
Treating the church as well and taking care of them, they’re just gonna keep coming back cuz it’s such a great solution for them.
Yeah. What I’d love to hear maybe some encouragement or some guidance. It seems like you were okay with the tension of being a worship leader and then paying the bills, and I’m sure that probably resonates with a lot of people who are working at a church and trying to figure out how to like, pay the bills.
But what kind of encouragement you have for that young person that’s trying to figure it all out? They want to serve. Not making
enough money. . Yeah, I would, my first advice would be don’t be. anything, but also be open to a whole lot of stuff. So they’re, especially in Nashville, people think oh, I can move to Nashville and I can be a session musician and I can make a lot of money.
I’m like not really. Cuz all those session musicians moved to Nashville and they were like dishwashers, right? Or servers in a, or baristas or whatever. But some of the smartest guys I know that do some of those things also. A whole lot of other stuff. They’ll teach guitar lessons, they’ll write charts, they will, make Ableton arrangements.
You guys just met Chris, our shipping lead and he does arranging and he does tracks and he does guest saxophone playing and touring and session work. But he also works for us full-time. So it’s very much have that entrepreneurial mindset. How can I pay the bills? Like with lots of different things and you still get to do music and slowly but surely, like work towards that more ideal role.
Yeah. Are you still like leading worship? No. So when when the Travecca thing fizzled out, it was like God had just moved me on. He said that time in your life is done. You’re just, your desires are now gonna change. And it was so weird because I never thought the desire to lead worship, the desire for music and songwriting and art artistry would escape me.
But it was just gone. And now it’s really fun for me to get to serve worship and tech people at churches. Yeah.
That’s a neat neat how the Lord knits that. and also probably terrifying for some of the worship leaders listening . Yeah. What do you mean the calling Just .
Like it’s just gonna fall away at some point.
I remember having conversations with my wife and we’re, I was talking about a friend of mine who said he said something along the lines of, if this ne next record doesn’t do something big, like I’m done. Yeah. And I said to my wife I’m never gonna be done. Like, why would I be done? I’ll just keep making more records.
I’ll keep writing more songs, I’ll keep leading worship. And it was really freeing. . It’s like the desire, like the itch was scratched for me. It’s oh, that season of my life felt complete. It felt like I had done what I had set out to do, and now just like my desire shifted, I’m like, oh, okay. What’s next? And you’re still serving the church? Yeah. This is really cool. Yeah. And I get to sit next to my wife in church now. Hey. Yes. So that’s
an important thing, . Yeah, that’s fine. It’s often lost. I’ve got like a similar, I’ve been teaching at the Belonging Co for a year now, and I’m still waiting for that moment where it.
I miss the worship leadership and I just, I haven’t felt it yet, so I guess I’d resonate with that for sure. My phone’s going off in my pocket. .
Do you ever you’re in worship, you’re sitting there, but then you’re like, oh, look at that projection. You’re is, are you like,
like squirrel, , I’m just laughing cuz that’s a hundred percent true.
Oh yeah. I was always, the musician, the artist. So I would show up to church and the hardest thing for me was to not. the performance. And the Transitions. It’s if they failed, if the band failed on a transition, I was like, ah, come on guys. Like you gotta get that pad on the Nord going between songs or whatever.
But now it’s, yes, it’s exactly that. Like looking up oh they’ve got a nexo rig hanging up there and I wonder what they’re running in front of house. And those thoughts never occurred to me before. What’s your home church right now? Church of the City is where? Franklin or? Yep.
Franklin. Yeah, I’ve been there a couple times and shockingly they, I don’t think they need me to lead worship there. got a little bit of talent there. It’s like Ryan at the belonging go. Sure. Yeah.
They don’t need many of us . I know they’ve gotten so many people. trying to find opportunity for even the students to get up there.
It’s just, yeah, it’s just a wealth of musicians. How long have
you been at Church of the City?
We moved over there about eight months ago. Okay. So we were at fellowship Bible in Brentwood for nine years and absolutely loved it. It was just our kids were going into the youth group and we live in, down in Franklin.
Fellowship is up in Brentwood. So we always, my wife and I always said like one good reason for us to change churches would be if our kids are not connected and we need to go somewhere for them to get connected. My parents did that for me we did that for them and it’s God, I really feel like God has blessed that for us, and it’s just been a great transition to Church of the City.
Have you been to the. The Spring Hill
campus we have actually shot video for church gear. Did like a little commercial and we used Church of the City, spring Hill as our location. But I’ve never been to a Sunday service there.
Okay. Yeah, it’s like right down the street from me. Yeah. I’ve been to the Franklin Service.
, but I’ve never been to the Spring Hill one.
We one of our recent hires, he moved here from Liberty University. He was one of their tech leads there, and he moved here two months ago in the middle of the summer and he just put a thing up on Facebook Hey, any other former Liberty friends, want to come help me move.
And the tech director from Church of the City, spring Hill just showed up and we. What are you doing here? He’s oh, I saw like you guys needed help on Facebook. And so I came to help. We’re like, wow, dude. This is like the coolest guy we’ve ever met. Wow. What?
We, we did lunch a couple weeks ago and we were talking about.
The difficulty of churches to actually hire like tech people. , largely for salaries. What’s your take interacting with all of these tech places? It seems like churches, especially since Covid, everybody’s turned into just not only audio, but just full on video studio. Yeah. What’s your take on the industry of doing production at
the church?
COVID was a perfect storm, so to speak, in that everything shut down for a moment and a lot of church techs started to think and like touring guys were really shut down for a while. So a lot of them just left. And our real estate agents now are sell insurance. They’re just like normal jobs and a lot of them were also serving in a church.
And so I think. Tech industry, the production industry lost a lot of their people in that moment. Yeah. But at the same time, churches had to pivot and so all of a sudden there are less techs and now churches need them more and need them to do more things. Churches unknowingly, burnt out their people during covid and like church tech, church production teams were just decimated.
We’ve been to so many churches where we’ll ask them like, what’s your team like? How, what’s the makeup? And they said there’s three of us. There used to be nine of us, pre Covid V, but now there’s three. And we also have to do more because we have online campus and streaming now, and all these high level video expectations.
So it. , it’s been a rough transition. And then definitely pay scale has not caught up. So churches need to recognize, like if we want a high level of production, we’re gonna have to hire great people and pay them well to actually keep them around cuz it’s a big job. Yeah.
All right. Say I’m gonna ask you questions based on, I’m a church that has say 200 members.
Small church. You give like first recommendation that comes to your head to like speakers, what would you recommend?
You’re 200 people, like maybe just a, a small array, like two speakers per side and I am speaking out of turn cuz I’m not one of our techs. Like I’m a former worship guy, so I’m just, I’m saying things and probably our texts here at Church Gear will be like no.
Stop like giving ’em wrong information. But I give the disclaimer that if you want good information, , reach out to sales@churchgear.com. But yeah, a couple speakers per side and probably a couple small subs. And it really depends on what are they doing? Are they Oregon and choir? Are they. Have a modern worship band.
Yeah. If they got a band you want some subs on each side and you don’t need a ton for 200 people. What board would you recommend? Everybody just says start with an X 32. Yeah. Or an M 32. That’s great. It’s very user friendly. If you want to, step up to something just a little bit better, like an Alan and Heath SQ series, like those are a nice upgrade and they aren’t crazy expensive.
Of course everything is weighed against. Can you get it right now? with supply chains. Yeah. Yeah.
Okay. Say that church like didn’t have any live streaming. And then, COVID hits and they want, obviously everybody’s trying to get into live streaming. Sure. What would you recommend just to get into it?
Again, my video gal probably cringe, but I would assume like black magic is a great first step. And we have tons of great used black magic stuff. Like a lot of churches, when they made that switch during Covid went black magic. It was affordable, it did everything they needed, and now they’re upgrading to.
Whatever the next thing is, they’re going, high level 4k, whatever it is. And so we have a lot of awesome black magic stuff that was used for a year and a half. Yeah. Just cuz churches were making this transition. So I think just a few simple things is a great starting point. Couple cameras, nothing crazy.
What kind of cameras would. Tell ’em to go towards the video cameras. . What are we filming with a Sony? I recognize Sony. We get Sony cameras through Yeah. Sony camera. Yeah.
Yeah. I it’s funny, the last just covid just pushed every church into,
Amber
the storm morning.
Yeah. Is that your wife looking for you, Ryan?
No. I think it was my video tech breaking in and being like, stop saying names.
Did it. That’ll be great.
I just feel like Covid just forced like every church and at least in America to just. , like either decide whether they’re gonna move into the digital realm Yeah.
Or not, yeah.
I know we were talking with somebody high up in the assembly of God like church planting network, I think it’s called the Church Multiplication Network. And he was saying that all of their church plants are like in person and online. They just, they don’t launch anything that’s not also online.
did you
see like this big shift during covid of what people were
looking for? Not really because we launched I launched the website in March of 2020. Oh, okay. So church care really started with Covid. . Got it. So we were learning at the same time, or I was, cuz it was really just me for a few months, like trying to figure out like, whoa, everything’s changing with this church, with these churches, and.
What’s gonna happen?
Do you feel like that timing was like, perfect timing or it was like, man, what did I, why did I start this
now? It was strangely, great timing. So there was a, a quick moment where church decks didn’t have much to do, and I’m talking like three weeks . So they’re thinking like, oh yeah, I can go through the, go through the closets and make a list of all this gear that we’ve got sitting around.
And then all of a sudden it was, oh we’ve gotta retool, we’ve got a live stream and , what’s available that we can afford. And so if I had any video gear at the time, it was like it was gone. Yeah. And then the supply chain issues happened. So all of a sudden churches couldn’t buy new gear and all everything we have is in stock.
Yeah. It’s, everything’s a hundred percent unique items. So it’s here in the warehouse if we have it available. And that helped us as well. So it is like God’s perfect moment of, yeah. Of launching this thing. Wow.
That’s weird that some people, were like, shut down. But other people, it was like, that was their moment.
Yeah. To really, move forward. Wow.
Thinking about covid, like really, I know, I’m
just trying to think. Get you like where goosebumps like. It was an interesting time. Obviously we all have masks on right now, right? Because Exactly. That’s the safe
thing. Do, SM seven B is pretty much a mask. That’s a big .
Did you, guess the thought I had too did you have the inventory to match or did it get overwhelming right out the gate?
Everybody just wanted video stuff and you happened to just be able to have a lot of it,
or, yeah. What kind of common waves? There was video stuff and then a few months later, When churches, and I know for some churches in California, they’re thinking a few months later, right? No. But when churches started to open back up and there was this kind of Downtime where there were no services in.
And so if churches had the budget and they were working on a project, they were like, oh, let’s do this project while we’re not actually disturbing Sunday services. Yeah. And so they would start to do, larger system upgrades at that time. They would do their audio systems or they would, replace their cameras.
So then we’d start to see, . Usually they’d be working with an integrator and they’d be doing just large system installs. And so we get a lot of that gear as it’s coming out. But they would still, even some of our integrator partners will call us up and say, Hey, we can’t get this Sure wireless unit for 18 months.
Do you guys have one? Can you keep an eye out? And so we’d help source some of those things that they just couldn’t get new.
You
good? Huh? What? Good? No, you’re good. No good . I was gonna go more towards the pastoral. If you got more gear stuff, I’ll save it. No good. That one. Okay. To go back into the, like the pay. So a lot of churches are having a hard time getting someone on staff. , there’s a lot of people we know that are listening to this, that are struggling to convince their pastor, and a lot of times they’re asking for a 50% raise, which would be, comparable.
What advice do you have, for the tech first and then maybe what would you tell the pastor?
Yeah. There’s definitely hard conversations that need to have need to happen. And there’s education that needs to happen. Pastors need to realize that any of their production people, especially with, because the production world lost so many people, any of those people can go out on the road and make a hundred grand.
Like it’s just not hard at all. So if you want to keep your people, then you’ve gotta give them something comparable. We all know that touring is hard work. Yeah. And it’s hard on a family. It’s great to find a. to call home in a church and but also be able to provide for a family.
But we see so many churches, like mega churches, 5,000 plus, and their production director, like their lead guy is 24 years old. Yeah. Because that’s all they’re paying. Yeah. And then in three years he gets offered something at another company, a manufacturer, an integrator, and he’s thinking oh, you guys don’t have Christmas and Easter services , that I want to kill myself during and you pay better.
Yeah, I’m gonna go ahead and do that. So what value is it to keep people, Business owner, I quickly realized there is such value in finding great people and then just reducing turnover as much as possible. Yeah. So tell a pastor, if you want to pay a 24 year old, 42 grand a year to be your church’s production director.
That’s fine. That is an option. But if you want them to stick around and learn and grow and make your production great for a long time where you’re not laying awake at night wondering is Sunday service gonna actually come together? Then you know you gotta start. Looking at comparable salaries and thinking like this is different than it was five years ago.
And the salary should reflect
that. Yeah. Is there a humble way for a tech to try to convince their pastor to give them that much of a raise?
They could certainly go with other offers and say, yeah, hey, I just, very respectfully I know this is a church and this is a ministry, but I.
I work really hard and I’m a skilled laborer. I am good at what I do. I have these other options that are in this price range. Can we talk about getting closer to that? I’d love to stay here, but I also just need to provide for my family. Yeah.
I’m getting so many like interesting interruptions. Amber alerts. I know. Alarms like, it’s like the world burning down around us. Us, right? That’s weird.
We’re on a podcast. We’re just like, don’t interrupt . We’ll find out when we come out. The third
slash podcast . I saw, I think it was Lee Fields that had made a post about what you’re talking about where people are leaving churches to go on tour.
. And he was saying before you think about the tour life, like he, he wrote like 10 reasons to not leave your church. Yeah. Did you see that?
I’ve seen several posts from him, like similar, but I don’t think I saw that one specifically. Yeah. I think
it was him. I’m pretty sure it was him. But I’ve seen that, that conversation so many times post covid.
like in are you familiar with the I think it’s church texts and the Facebook, the really big Facebook group church? Yeah. Like church sound and media text. . Yeah. That one. . Like I see that conversation all the time. Yeah. And I feel bad cuz like you were just talking about production guys getting 42,000 and I know there’s plenty of guys out there making 18,000 and having a, another job and, It’s crazy and I feel so bad for them that they have to, they’re forced to make a decision to leave their home church, to go do something
else. Yeah. I’m sure there’s some young techs out there being like, somebody’s making 42,000 .
I can think right off the top of my head, like five people I knew they were thinking that when you said that, I was thinking for them like,
yeah, cuz there’s a cycle, like you said, the 24 year old, but there’s also a cycle of churches using the 19 year old.
One new one every year and then that one moves on and you catch another one part-time in quotations for those that aren’t watching but part-time and it’s not really part-time , like it’s everything they got for.
Not much. Yeah. I see a lot of churches, smaller churches. I’ve seen it firsthand where they’re really just sucking every last ounce out of people and, it’s you’ve grown up here do your share.
And it’s Hey, this isn’t exactly being a greeter, , you’re doing a lot of. , being at funerals and weddings and all of the other things that happen during a week,
yeah. So some of these techs are working 80, 90 hours a week. And they’re getting paid for 40 hour work weeks.
Yeah. And it’s it’s just not sustainable. People are gonna burn out. It’s great to, we all know those stories of churches that just use their people and just ring them out dry. They just burn out in nine months. But then there are other churches like we we went to North Point recently and got a tour of their production set up and it was awesome to hear their production department talk about how wonderful the pastoral leadership is in just encouraging family work balance and taking care of them and making sure they’re not used and abused and they’ve been there, like I think the three guys we.
talking to, they were there like 18 years, 15 years, and 14 years. So such longevity and there’s so much value and purpose in that for those guys to get to serve the church that long. Yeah.
Especially like a single church. Like it makes such a difference for the culture. Especially if you’re production guys new every year, then that can be wild for even just the way the room sounds anyway.
Apparently it’s tornado sirens are going off. Is that what it is? Yeah. Was that what the alert was? Are we recording in a tornado? Oh, apparently.
Oh yeah. We’re in a tornado warning right now. Okay. That’s the big one. Fascinating. It’s been an honor serving with the gentleman, . I
don’t know if we’re all gonna fit under the table.
This is my table, so yeah, I’m going first. You’re
a rose. We’re Jack
Yeah, I guess I can cut it at some point here if that thing’s obnoxious. I’ll cut it before that goes wild. Pretty exciting. It is. I thought it was a ambulance, but then it kept going.
Imagine how many views we would get if the, the whole ceiling. Just like the
last Church Collective podcast.
That’d be amazing. . As long as we all live to tell, right? Yeah. . Thank
you so much for being a part of this podcast. I am happy to say that tornado warning, we are all okay. We made it super fun living in Tennessee. Love it. So make sure to check out the next episode of the Church Collective Podcast and connect with us everywhere on social media.
Send us a dm. We would love to chat.