The Interstice

Here towards the end of ‘08 my church has issued financial Condition Orange alert to the staff and have gone on budget lockdown.  We’re not alone.  I ran tech for a church financial seminar last week and, while most of it was over my head, I glimpsed the netherworld of church finance.  Foreign terms like Maximum Liquidity and Prudent Reserve hung thick in the air.  Giving is down 5 to 7% across the board.  Sound guys deal with concepts like “threshold” and “overhead” and, if we’re philosophically inclined, we understand that most effects in life are not linear.  A 7% cut in overhead would drop below the threshold of comfort, confidence, and security for just about every organization.  The church Chief Finance Officer position should be featured on Discovery Channel’s Dirty Jobs show these days.

Tight times might do the American church a favor.  Let’s be honest.  Things have been easy for a lot of us and some of our budgets were bloated.  Maybe it’s time to trim the fat and then some.  We’ve been revisiting our foundations, exploring core values, and reaching for a list of God-honoring priorities to guide us in spending.

I’ve been pondering the word ‘catalytic’ lately.  For instance, it’s one thing to say that we value community but it’s another thing to define the elements that are catalytic (if not plainly necessary) to building community.  After perusing our Reveal Survey results I’ve seen that, as church staff, we’re not always aware of exactly what those catalytic things are.  It’s worth suspending our personal beliefs for a while and looking at things in a different light.  In trying to get the most bang for the buck during a financial Condition Orange alert I think we really risk missing what those catalytic elements are.  Some of them are expensive and easy to dismiss as luxury items.

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I was a pastor’s kid.  I grew up in the late 60’s and 70’s in a small Oregon town tethered between my dad’s Hispanic (somewhat charismatic) church, a small AOG church, and a Mennonite Christian school.  When I was a kid “Christian Rock” was an oxymoron and its originators suffered heavy fire from most of Western Christendom.  All I have to say about it now is this:  I’ve waited for this era of freedom in church music for a lifetime and I’m glad it’s here while I’m still here.  It didn’t happen overnight and a lot of good people took the brunt of the Church’s judgment and ostracism making way for the freedom we now enjoy.

As contemporary musical style and instruments crept into traditional services, most churches went through what I’d call either a mullet phase or a ransom note phase.  You still see this in some churches today.  A young worship leader salt-and-peppers some rockin’ tunes into a traditional set and you get “business in the front, party in the back.”  Or, another worship leader decides that if the goal is wider appeal then why not add a few more styles?  (Forget that we’re not good at any of them.)  “Something for everyone” is the stylistic equivalent of a ransom note constructed of clippings from various magazines.  These are growing pains I’d like to think most of us are over by 2008.

To be effective at anything you must define who you are and where you’re going, stick to it, and do it well.  Most of us believe this to be true for a church as well.

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If I mix with the skillz of men and angels but have no love, I have become a reverberating gong or a clashing cymbal.    -1 Corinthians 13:1 (sorta)

I honestly believe that the first time someone hooked up a microphone to a speaker at a public event someone was given the opportunity to be the first in history to say, “That’s too loud!  Turn it down.”

Volume level is an old, well-worn topic.  As an FOH engineer for a church I doubt I’ll ever get away from it.  I have many a thought on this and I’d like to split them up into a few posts.

For me the conversation about volume level for worship is more philosophical than it is nuts and bolts.  If you want to talk nuts and bolts then the only objective third party authority we all might agree on is OSHA and their safety standards.  30 minutes (the length of a worship set) of noise measured at 110dBA slow response is perfectly acceptable by OSHA but certainly not by my congregation.  Heck no.  Not even close.  Measured with slow response we might peak between 92dBA and 95dBA which would allow 4 to 6 hours of rockin’ worship.  (Who’s in?)  Arguing that the music causes hearing damage is just a smoke screen, an appeal to some objective truth about sound, in place of an honest admission, “I really don’t like it that loud.”

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At a Willow Creek Arts Conference breakout someone mentioned using an RTA during Q&A about sound system design.  One of the panelists said, “Well you really want to use an FFT Analyzer but…” and then just moved on.  I’m not as much of a gear head as I wish I were sometimes but I couldn’t help but wonder why I’d never heard of FFT ever before.

I got my hands on an FFT Analyzer last week and went to work on our 4 year old Nexo rig.  When I was done I had the cleanest sound I’ve ever heard come off the system; hands down the cleanest.  In my quest for the best sound for our church (an obsession really) I’ve put our system through a few incarnations in the great circle of audio life.  I’d describe the most recent as smooth yet sparkly but it wasn’t without its challenges, especially for spoken word.  The results mister FFT Analyzer gave me made my last EQ job, which I was perfectly happy with, sound… well… honestly?  A little amateurish.  Now it sounded like our system was wearing big boy pants.

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I’ve been thinking a lot about chemistry between people lately.  The topic came up when we had a get-together with some of our vocalists.  Keep in mind that our musicians and vocalists are volunteers.  They’re very good at what they do but few play out very often.  There’s always room for growth.  When I asked them what they find most difficult about singing on stage I expected answers like “not enough monitor level” or “too much bounce back from the house.”  In short, their main concern was being paired up with people they feel little or no chemistry with.

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… this blog is so new.

I’ll start posting some real stuff soon. There’s a little more about me on the About page if you’re curious. This post it just a place-holder for now.