Three ways to leverage time in service planning.
ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED MARCH 30, 2019
Every church has a service planning process. Does yours work for you?
While everyone plans, not all planning is equal. I’ve found that giving my teams and leaders more time to plan and prepare is a great way to increase quality, regardless of the church size, staff size, or budget. Time is a resource we all have in equal measure!
Here are 3 ideas for leveraging the resource of time in your ministry planning:
Spread out the work over time
If you are in the habit of planning your upcoming services a week or two in advance, you are probably missing out on a good way to control your own personal workflow, and the work of your team members. When you give yourself minimal time to prepare music, video, lyric slides, message content and more, you not only max your own schedule but you create a situation in which quality suffers because the focus shifts to simply getting things done in time. Try doubling your planning time- plan a service 3-4 weeks in advance or more. You don’t need to have all the details worked out. Tighten up as you go. With double the time, you have a chance to be more creative, bring more people and resources to the table, and spread work out in your schedule so it doesn’t get overwhelming.
Give your teams more time
Asking a videographer to produce a testimony video in a few days or a few weeks is a big change with big advantages. Video editing is time intensive. Giving your videographer a week to edit instead of a couple days will lead to a higher quality result. It will also give you time for a series of versions and edits as you tweak the video to your liking. Bands and vocalists will appreciate extra time with the music. Try giving them charts and mp3s weeks in advance. They are most likely volunteers…they have jobs, families and other duties in addition to their ministry on your team. Give them the gift of choosing the best time to rehearse their parts, where it fits into their schedule. They will thank you for the extra time and so will their families!
Increase your flexibility with more time
You might think that advance planning makes your services less creative and more rigid. This is a common misperception. When you plan a service with only a few days notice, there is actually very little time for changes or flexibility, because you are working hard just to get everything done before the countdown ends and the service begins. If you plan further out and work on everything that can be done earlier, the workload is spread out over many weeks. As the service time approaches, making a change or tweak here or there is easy because the bulk of the work is already done. Extra ideas or service elements can be added. This kind of flexibility is only available in only 2 other ways- if your church happens to be large enough to pay for the extra time or add enough staff positions to handle the work last minute, or one person giving all of their effort and time. But pushing back your planning timeline accomplishes the same thing, without the extra budget and staff, and without burnout.
Have you discovered any time related service planning advantages? Let’s have a conversation about it, comment below!