Church Tech Arts

Below are some sample service documents we use at Crosswinds to keep our heads on straight. Hopefully you’ll find them useful. Feel free to modify them as you like. I’ve borrowed many of the concepts from other sources and changed them to fit our needs.

UR Speaker Support Form
This form was created in Acrobat Professional. This is the exact form that we use at Upper Room, though if you are handy with Acrobat Pro, you can easily modify it for your church. I have no issues with anyone use this form, but be aware if you send it out to your speakers and they try to use the submit button, it will be e-mailed to my boss and I. So you’ll want to change that.

Weekend Review
This page was cribbed from Willow Creek. It includes a summary of the order of service, a list of who is doing what, from the tech crew to worship to drama and a schedule of events for Saturday and Surnday. We also have a far more detailed Excel spreadsheet that we use in planning and for the technical director of the service, but this one is more readable and gives more program related information.

Aviom Labels
I created this file in Freehand MX (though it could be edited in Illustrator as well). These are modified each week to suit the band that is leading worship (we have 5), printed out, sliced up and placed on the personal mixers. By knowing exactly what they are adjusting, the musicians have a much easier time getting a good personal mix.

Aviom Labels Part Deux
This form was taken from Aviom’s website, and uses the more readily available Excel. It’s monochrome right now, but with a little splash of color, it would be very nice indeed.

Stage Plot
This was also done in Freehand. The drawing is done to scale so that when we move the piano around, we know exactly how much room it takes up. We use a lot of 4′x4′ and 2′x4′ platforms (the gray boxes), and it’s much easier to move them on the computer than on stage. This diagram is an immense help to the setup team, as they know exactly what is supposed to go where, and how things get plugged in. It also includes an Aviom “cheat sheet” to help the FOH tech trouble shoot issues with the personal mixers.

Patch Chart
I created this in Excel, and it allows me to lay out the entire board a week in advance and spot any issues. It includes a detailed breakdown of every channel, mic, mini-snake, artist, monitor channel and notes that the setup crew, FOH engineer or musician would need. It’s evolved significantly since my first draft, and is now a huge help for troubleshooting cross patches and other mixups.

Worship Team Line Up Interactive PDF
This is an interactive, fill in the blanks PDF that I’ve given to our worship leaders. They fill it in for each week that they lead and e-mail it to me. This way, I have a one stop shopping point for getting the info I need to create my stage plots and patch charts without having to sift through 3 weeks of e-mails.