Bringing the back room to light

This past week we took on a fun little problem: How do you make the Volunteer serving in the back “Control Room” Feel more apart of the worship experience. As a lifetime production junkie I have always been a proponent to the “Worship through service” philosophy. It was modeled well from my parents and many of the mentors that I have has along the way. 

A big piece of this though is “Worship Through Service” not “Serve instead of worship.”  There are some key differences here. 

An issue that we kept running into was the volunteers serving in the back just didn’t feel the energy of the room. This would be reflected by the conversations that were going on during worship, the lack of energy felt in the live stream and the overall lack of desire to serve in those positions. 

To fix this we came up with two simple solutions. 1. We turn the lights in the control room down so that it doesn’t feel like and office. Bring the dark atmosphere that we have in the main room into the Control room. Make them feel like they are there. 2. We took  a few of our old cheap lighting fixtures and placed them behind out control room tvs and behind the chairs in the back of the room to provide and uplight that feels very similar to the main room. We then took those uprights and added them to our “House Light” lighting group for programming. 

By adding the lights to the “House Light” group we made it where when the house lights change in the main room, the color will change in the control room. (Blue song, blue room, red song, red room). This simple step carries the energy from the main room into the control room and really helps our volunteers feel like they are apart of what is happening (Because they really are!)