Burnout: Watch Out! You’re Not Immune!

You’re the only staff or volunteer person who shows up week in and week out. Every rehearsal, every service, every event, every Easter, every Christmas – you’re the one making the tech happen. Oh, sure others help out occasionally, but if you’re not there, things go wrong. You have to be there, right?

Or maybe you’re in a church where the demands and expectations from the leadership are unrealistic. You have some gear, so they think you have all the gear you need. You have a few volunteers, so what’s the problem? They change things on you last minute, but that’s why you’re the expert – you’re supposed to know how to fix things and make it work, right?

And quite possibly the aggravation of working with people who don’t understand what you do, what it takes to do things well while walking on eggshells around ego-centric musicians or leaders has you stressed out. Suck it up, right?

WRONG, on all three counts!

    Dave Wilcox asked a great question recently about burnout:

    “I have heard tech folks at churches use the term burnout frequently. How would you define burnout? What are its symptoms? What are its remedies, both for the ‘burnt out’ individual and for the church that ‘burns out’ people?”

Wow, is that a terrific set of questions or what?! I’m going to answer his question in the hopes of helping out the folks in the trenches of technical ministry. Maybe something I’ll say here will give you the freedom you so desperately need.

What is ‘Burnout’?
Dictionary.com defines burnout like this:

    “Physical or emotional exhaustion, especially as a result of long-term stress or dissipation.”

I’d add to that spiritual exhaustion, because I think that it’s the main reason that media personnel experience burnout.

Understanding Burnout
Spiritual Exhaustion
The technical ministry is often one filled with people who don’t want to attend a Sunday school, small group meeting or Bible study. Many of these folks would rather click a mouse, spin a knob or push a button than talk with people about God’s Word. “Hey, no one asks me to quote Bible verses when I’m mixing sound,” say people I’ve talked to before.

The technical ministry is perhaps the one ministry where it’s easy to hide from spiritual discussions. Yet this is robbing us of personal growth, a closer relationship with the God who loves you and a stronger sense of mission and purpose for the tech team. We can no longer afford to ask our volunteers to serve unless we serve them with spiritual food, too! Any tech leader should read this, memorize it and print it out:

    The technical ministry is not about the tech. It’s about the people behind the tech.

Emotional Exhaustion
Volunteers are often set up to fail, and fail spectacularly. Churches – even large ones – rarely provide adequate or consistent training for their staff and volunteers. Instead, it’s simply assumed that we’ll somehow get better without knowing exactly how to get from where we are to where we need to be. This puts a real toll on media technicians who feel the pressure to make everything work flawlessly week in and week out but who do not have the proper training, planning or practice to produce effective results.

The result? People get tired of sitting in the booth when the audience turns around because of feedback. They get tired of being told by a frustrated music minister that there’s not enough monitor volume even though the monitors are creating more volume in the room than the PA system. They are emotionally spent when the pastor makes a snide remark about the problems with the technical team on a Sunday morning during service.

The stress of having to perform without the right tools, the right training and the right amount of preparation wipe out volunteers who are under appreciated and not shown the love they need.

Physical Exhaustion
If you’re serving more than twice a month in a volunteer capacity, you’re serving too often. We need a break. We need to experience corporate worship. We need to unplug from the matrix of tech volunteering and focus on the message, not the medium.

“But we don’t have enough technical volunteers, so I have to be here,” some try to explain.

You have not because you ask not. Every person in your church has a sphere of influence. That is your starting point: asking those who you know are not serving regularly (or at all). And I’m not just talking about pew-sitters, either. We all have unchurched friends who share some of our same interests. We can invite them to come and observe the tech operations and see if it piques their interest. In addition to growing your ranks, you also get people involved in church, as attendance outside of volunteering should be required for every member of the tech team.

By Anthony Coppedge (http://www.anthonycoppedge.com/)

Anthony is a respected consultant who has committed himself to the church marketplace.  Sought after by today’s fast-growing churches, Anthony brings a wealth of knowledge, experience and practical know-how to the table.  By focusing on helping churches develop Media & Communications technologies and team-building strategies with clear upgrade paths, Anthony helps churches to be good stewards of their resources and personnel.  He can be reached at  [email protected].