Let’s Talk Standard Operating Procedures for Church Teams
If you’re a member or leader of a church production team, worship team, kids ministry, the cafe, or really wherever… it’s important to have standard operating procedures (SOPs) in place. SOPs help to ensure that your team is working smoothly and efficiently. They also free your team leaders up from answering a million questions during set-up and service, while providing consistent standards of quality regardless of who is serving.
Having standard operating procedures is important for any organization and churches can especially thrive from using them. This is because SOPs allow church teams to set up faster, maintain consistency, handle team member transitions well, and equip leaders to focus more on the health of their team and ministry. We all know that any issues during a service can have a major impact on the people who are visiting or attending. Having SOPs in place can help stop those issues from happening.
Key Elements of Church SOPs
The following are some of the key elements that should be included in your church audio, video, and lighting team’s standard operating procedures, your security team’s standard operating procedures, and really on any team within your church:
- Setup and Testing: Before each service, your teams should run through a checklist to ensure that everything is properly set up and tested. This includes checking for proper audio levels in your live stream setup, making sure all lighting is working properly, and ensuring that all equipment is in good working order.
- Communication: Communication is key to the success of any church volunteer team. It’s important to have a system in place for communicating between team members, such as an app for voice calls or texts, or even some sort of hardware-based headset intercom system.
- Troubleshooting: Having a system in place for troubleshooting any issues that arise during service is also important. This should include the ability to contact a team leader if needed, as well as having a plan in place to switch over to a backup system if necessary.
- Documentation: Documentation is essential for any church volunteer or staff team. This includes keeping track of any changes or updates made to the system, as well as documenting any problems that arise during a service.
By having standard operating procedures in place for your church teams, you can ensure that your services are run at a high level. This will help to create a better overall experience for your congregation.
Practical SOPs for Churches
Now your question may be, “Okay, where do I go to find SOPs, or if I make my own, where should I host them?” That’s where MxU comes into play! MxU’s existing library of expert-made content can be your team’s go-to knowledge base any day of the week. For example, your team can open MxU, quickly search with a few keywords like “ProPresenter Screens” and instantly get a result that shows them how to work with their screen outputs in ProPresenter.
Taking SOPs a step further, you could–and probably should–record your own videos based on the needs of your specific church. Have a specific way that you turn on and off your audio system? Record a quick video on your phone showing your team how to turn it on and off. Keep getting asked a specific question like “How do I apply the church presets to the photos I edited?” Record a quick video on your phone showing your team how to apply a preset to a photo in Lightroom.
With MxU, you can upload your Custom Videos right from your phone and give your videos a quick title and description. Once published, you can even assign them to specific team members to track their watch progress! Now, any time and any day, your team members can search right within MxU, see your Custom Videos (or our expert-made training content), and you can finally stop being asked the same questions over and over.
Custom Videos in MxU are the perfect personalized solution for your church volunteer team’s standard operating procedures.
Ready to start building a healthy team by creating SOPs? Check out the different ways MxU can help you to accomplish that plus have the opportunity to sign up here: