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Sunday Only Lives in One Head... and That's a Problem! · The Healthy Church Staff Podcast

• 0:08
  SPEAKER_00: It's 7 12 a.m.
• 0:10
  SPEAKER_00: on Sunday morning and your phone button is the kids director and say not push through it today.
• 0:19
  SPEAKER_00: And bottom line is not coming in today.
• 0:22
  SPEAKER_00: And you're standing in the kitchen staring at the text, and people slowly hit you.
• 0:28
  SPEAKER_00: Nobody else can post when preschool even dismisses.
• 0:31
  SPEAKER_00: Nobody else knows which door the ushers unlock first.
• 0:35
  SPEAKER_00: Nobody else even knows the order of the live stream checklist or what we do when the wireless mic dies halfway through the sermon.
• 0:43
  SPEAKER_00: Sunday only lives in one head, and that head isn't walking through the doors today, whether it's the children's pastor or the IT director or your sound guy or gal.
• 0:54
  SPEAKER_00: If this sounds familiar, we're going to talk about it today here on the Healthy Church Staff Podcast.
• 0:59
  SPEAKER_00: Hi there, my name's Todd Rhodes, one of the co-founders at Chemistrystaffing.com.
• 1:03
  SPEAKER_00: You're listening to the Healthy Church Staff Podcast.
• 1:06
  SPEAKER_00: It's Monday.
• 1:06
  SPEAKER_00: Hope you're having a great day so far.
• 1:08
  SPEAKER_00: Now, I don't want to make this episode another episode about hey, you got to make sure everybody's got all the passwords, okay?
• 1:15
  SPEAKER_00: We talked about this, I think, last week, about the one staffer who holds every login.
• 1:20
  SPEAKER_00: Today's episode is a little bit different.
• 1:22
  SPEAKER_00: This is about process, not passwords, okay?
• 1:24
  SPEAKER_00: It's the invisible run sheet that every church has that almost no church or anybody in a church has ever written down.
• 1:33
  SPEAKER_00: I'm talking about all the small stuff that makes every Sunday work.
• 1:37
  SPEAKER_00: Who cues the band after the announcements?
• 1:39
  SPEAKER_00: When the k when do the kids leave the sanctuary?
• 1:42
  SPEAKER_00: Who meets the baptism family at the side door?
• 1:45
  SPEAKER_00: Things like which volunteer opens the overflow room if a tenant spikes?
• 1:49
  SPEAKER_00: What's the trigger for that?
• 1:50
  SPEAKER_00: What order does the live stream get fired up?
• 1:54
  SPEAKER_00: When do you say what do you say when the slides freeze?
• 1:57
  SPEAKER_00: None of that is in your employee handbook.
• 2:00
  SPEAKER_00: None of it is in a shared Google Doc.
• 2:03
  SPEAKER_00: It lives in one person, and maybe that's your worship leader, maybe it's your associate pastor, maybe it's your admin, maybe it's your kids director, maybe it's everything's in your head.
• 2:14
  SPEAKER_00: Everybody else just follows the lead until they can, until somebody gets sick, and until somebody's not there anymore.
• 2:23
  SPEAKER_00: And you know exactly when that cost shows up.
• 2:26
  SPEAKER_00: It shows up the morning that they're not there, that they're gone.
• 2:30
  SPEAKER_00: It's just you and me here talking here, okay?
• 2:32
  SPEAKER_00: Let's be honest, we've all seen this movie.
• 2:35
  SPEAKER_00: It's the person who always knows calls in sick, or they take a week of vacation, or they resign and give you two weeks' notice.
• 2:42
  SPEAKER_00: And and somehow in all of that time, Sunday still never gets written down.
• 2:48
  SPEAKER_00: So now the service kind of turns into a scavenger hunt.
• 2:51
  SPEAKER_00: The ushers are guessing, the tech team's improvising.
• 2:54
  SPEAKER_00: A volunteer walks up to you in the hallway and asks, Hey, when do the kids come out?
• 2:58
  SPEAKER_00: And you, the leader, give them a shrug that you hope looks like you're giving a little bit of calm to the situation.
• 3:06
  SPEAKER_00: But here's the thing that's not an understaffing problem.
• 3:11
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, don't think for a minute, if things are going on like this, you need more staff.
• 3:15
  SPEAKER_00: It's not that you need more staff, and it's not that you don't care, it's that the process never got out of any person's brain.
• 3:24
  SPEAKER_00: So, how do good leaders end up in this situation?
• 3:28
  SPEAKER_00: And if you've ever been here, you know the pinch that you're in, and you know how it can throw off everything about your Sunday morning or about your week.
• 3:37
  SPEAKER_00: I don't think this happens to careless leaders, I think it happens to trusting leaders.
• 3:42
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, you hired somebody who just gets Sunday.
• 3:46
  SPEAKER_00: They showed up early, they fixed the problems before you ever even saw them.
• 3:50
  SPEAKER_00: Matter of fact, you didn't even know there was a problem.
• 3:52
  SPEAKER_00: And at some point you stopped asking how in the world they did it because everything worked, they covered everything every single week, every single week it worked, and your trust it felt like wisdom.
• 4:04
  SPEAKER_00: It felt, man, I got somebody that's really competent that's doing this.
• 4:08
  SPEAKER_00: And honestly, in a lot of ways, it was it was wisdom, but it's also fragile wisdom because when all the know-how lives in one person in in one person's head, your whole church is borrowing it's calm from that person's presence.
• 4:25
  SPEAKER_00: Take away that person for one Sunday, or they resign and they're not ever coming back, and you find out real quick what you never built.
• 4:34
  SPEAKER_00: Now, listen, I'm not asking you to turn Sunday into a three-ring writer.
• 4:39
  SPEAKER_00: Nobody wants that, and nobody honestly is ever gonna read it until somebody doesn't show up on a Sunday.
• 4:45
  SPEAKER_00: I'm not asking you to do that, though.
• 4:46
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm not telling you to micromanage every volunteer on your team, that would be a catastrophe as well.
• 4:52
  SPEAKER_00: Your motive here was good.
• 4:54
  SPEAKER_00: You trusted a capable person, you need to keep doing that.
• 4:57
  SPEAKER_00: Keep trusting that person, but don't let Sunday stay locked up in one person's skull.
• 5:03
  SPEAKER_00: Have them write it down and then walk by, walk one other person through it.
• 5:08
  SPEAKER_00: That's it.
• 5:08
  SPEAKER_00: That's it.
• 5:09
  SPEAKER_00: We're not asking to no three-wing binders, no no everybody needs to know everything.
• 5:15
  SPEAKER_00: Not a four-page opera, 40-page operations manual, just one page, a run sheet, cues, timing, doors, whatever needs to be known so that when we do have something that goes sideways or somebody that doesn't show up, we have a plan.
• 5:30
  SPEAKER_00: And for every moment in the service, who owns it when plan A isn't in the building because they're sick.
• 5:36
  SPEAKER_00: Let me take this one step further.
• 5:38
  SPEAKER_00: I want to make this really concrete for you so you you really get how this kind of goes from an idea down to what you're actually doing on a week-to-week basis.
• 5:47
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, picture your associate pastor sitting down with one sheet of paper and writing out the Sunday flow.
• 5:53
  SPEAKER_00: The doors, the kids, the worship, the announcements, the communion, the tech, the closing, everything.
• 5:58
  SPEAKER_00: And then underneath that, the what ifs.
• 6:00
  SPEAKER_00: What happens if the mic dies?
• 6:02
  SPEAKER_00: What happens if the live stream goes down?
• 6:04
  SPEAKER_00: Who gets to decide if we cut a song because we're running too long?
• 6:09
  SPEAKER_00: Those kind of things.
• 6:10
  SPEAKER_00: And then, and this is the important part, they don't just email it to somebody, they walk a second person through it.
• 6:16
  SPEAKER_00: Not a lecture, it's just a walkthrough.
• 6:18
  SPEAKER_00: Here's what I do next time I'm out, you try doing this.
• 6:21
  SPEAKER_00: And all of a sudden, Sunday doesn't evaporate when one person gets sick.
• 6:25
  SPEAKER_00: It transfers, it transfers to the person that now knows a little bit about the ins and outs of what actually happens on any given.
• 6:32
  SPEAKER_00: And here's the punch.
• 6:33
  SPEAKER_00: And I really want you to hear this one.
• 6:35
  SPEAKER_00: If your church can't run a normal Sunday without one specific human being, you don't have a system, you've got a volunteer or a staff hero.
• 6:44
  SPEAKER_00: And believe it or not, we've talked about it all the time here on the podcast.
• 6:48
  SPEAKER_00: Heroes burn out, heroes leave, heroes get the flu on Easter weekend.
• 6:55
  SPEAKER_00: And when that happens, your congregation will feel the scramble, even if nobody ever says a word about from the stage.
• 7:02
  SPEAKER_00: The leaders who really love their people are the ones who get Sunday out of the head of one individual before the crisis forces them to get it out of the head of one individual.
• 7:13
  SPEAKER_00: So here's the bottom line for today.
• 7:15
  SPEAKER_00: If Sunday only lives in one head, you don't have a system, you have a single point of failure, a single point of failure that just has a name badge.
• 7:24
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, so here's my challenge to you this week.
• 7:26
  SPEAKER_00: Sit down, write a one-page Sunday run sheet, put cues on there, who does what, when the kids dismiss, which doors open when, the live stream checklist, and do and what to do when the mic dies, for example, and then pick one person and walk through it with them.
• 7:43
  SPEAKER_00: Don't just email it to them, walk them through.
• 7:46
  SPEAKER_00: This makes a great staff exercise.
• 7:48
  SPEAKER_00: Have everybody on your staff do it because everybody on your staff, all your key volunteers, have things in their head that are only in their head.
• 7:57
  SPEAKER_00: And if you can't name who that second person would be today, that's your real problem.
• 8:01
  SPEAKER_00: And that's probably where you start because this stuff is absolutely fixable.
• 8:06
  SPEAKER_00: You're not a bad leader because nobody's written it down yet.
• 8:09
  SPEAKER_00: You're a good leader if you write it down this week, though.
• 8:11
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, if this one hits home, I'd love for you to share it with another leader who's carrying Sunday around in their head all by themselves.
• 8:19
  SPEAKER_00: And trust me, well, thank you.
• 8:22
  SPEAKER_00: That's it for today's podcast.
• 8:24
  SPEAKER_00: I hope you'll reach out to me.
• 8:25
  SPEAKER_00: Any questions, anything you'd like to hear me discuss or pick apart here on the podcast, reach out to me.
• 8:32
  SPEAKER_00: My email address is podcast at chemistry staffing.com.
• 8:35
  SPEAKER_00: All right, that's it for today.
• 8:37
  SPEAKER_00: We'll be right back here tomorrow on the Help You Church Staff Podcast of the June.