Here are a few things you might be wondering about that apply to both Worship and Production Teams. Let us know if you have any other questions!
We try to put the schedule out as far in advance as possible, to a maximum of 4 months at a time. Doing it this way creates 3 trimesters of scheduling in the life of our church, which overlap major events in our church calendar. The three trimesters are November to February (overlapping Christmas and New Years), March to June (overlapping Easter and Anniversary weekend), and July to October (overlapping summer holidays and Fall kickoff)
Unless you let us know otherwise, we try to schedule people serve around once every three to four weeks. We've found this to be a good balance between serving and rest, and is frequent enough that you don't forget how to do everything between serving opportunities. Some people prefer to serve more often, and some less.
We do the best we can to include you in the scheduling process by asking you to update your serving preferences and blockout dates in Planning Center Online before we put the next schedule together. When planning the schedule, we do our best to work around your preferences and blockouts. In some cases we need to flex things a little bit, and we appreciate your flexibility in that!
Generally speaking: no. There may be occasions where we have to shift things around to accommodate a change in availability, or to include a new volunteer. When that happens, all affected parties will be notified via email.
If you fail to include your blockouts in PCO before the schedule goes out, or if your availability changes after the schedule is sent out, we kindly ask that you try to arrange your own coverage by trading dates with other volunteers who serve in the same position you're scheduled for. Using the Church Center Chat is a great way to do this.
Finding your own replacement helps us out massively - like really, we can't stress how helpful it is. So thank you in advance for taking care of that! If you've already tried to find your own replacement for a week you're no longer available and haven't had any luck, let us know so we can help.
Well, it’s not because Josh is a morning person, we can tell you that!
The band starts with personal set up and prayer at 7:00am, and rehearsal at 7:15am. This is planned to give us ample time to run through all worship songs before doors open for the first service.
The production team starts at 6am so that everything provided by the church is set up for the band's arrival. This gives you a good idea of what the service will look like, and lets you prepare for it. It also leaves lots of time to troubleshoot, as problems do come up. We will officially wrap up practice no later than 8:30 on a sunday morning.
We want everyone to be confident and ready to go by 9am, and we also want to be conscious of your schedules outside of church, and arriving early in the morning is currently the best way we can do that. Remember, everyone who is serving will have access to refreshments: we hope that helps! And as always, we thank you for your dedication!