Church leaders are increasingly relying on technology to deliver their weekend service experiences. Audio, video and lighting systems are now a standard part of many Sunday mornings in churches across the country. Most pastors aren’t naturally technically inclined but we heavily rely … that’s a recipe for anxiety! How can a pastor interact with the technical teams when things go wrong with these systems?

I have found the following four questions can be used by church leaders to help push towards technical solutions when we face them on Sunday. I know these seem very simplistic but remember Occam’s razor … the simplest explanation is usually the correct one. Time and time again all you need to do is find the answer to these four questions and you will be able to solve most of your technical issues.

• Is it plugged in? // Are all the connections firmly connected (on both ends)? Are they put into the right place? Are all the cables that need to plug in to make this thing work plugged in?
  
• Is it turned on? // Does it have more than one power switch? Is there a toggle switch to turn this particular piece to turn on?
• What changed since we last used it? // Often when things don’t work it’s because something changed since it was used last … find the change(s) and put it back to the previous state.
• Who do we need to communicate with? // If something isn’t working it’s going to have an impact beyond our team. Who do we need to update on the progress of this situation? Is there someone that we can get on the phone to help us troubleshoot this issue? Go into over-communication mode when things go wrong … don’t go silent!

Just yesterday I was visiting a campus and we had a lighting system only partially working … these four questions helped us find the problem in less than 5 minutes. One power switch was turned off (who knows why!) and when we turned it back on everything was fine! It really is that simple.