Week 14: When/What to Evaluate?

Congratulations! You are about to make history as the first graduating class of CWTU. Well, after this one last lesson. Today we’ll be talking about when and what to evaluate. (If you missed last week, you’ll want to check out Richard Webb’s 4 questions to ask when evaluating the big picture of your worship experience.)

With some big picture evaluation questions in mind, now let’s look at what evaluation might look like on a week to week basis.

In Trench Evals
If you have more than one service, take some time to touch base with your team and discuss any major glitches or ideas for improvement after the first service. At Orchard Valley, a church near Chicago, Scott Hodge (pastor), Mike Jones (worship leader), a key tech leader and key church leaders will meet and ruthlessly critique (with respect) the first run of the service in an effort to improve the experience for the crowd on Sunday. At Ginghamsburg, the preaching pastor and key music and tech staff and servants meet after their first service on Saturday to talk about how different elements worked and if things needed to be changed or cut for the Sunday morning services.

A few caveats for in trench evaluations:
Don’t major in the minors.
If the lighting volunteer missed one light cue, don’t bother talking about it, if she missed four of the six, then it’s a bigger deal.
Consider the flow.
Transitions can make or break a service but they are a hard thing to plan out just right and many times easier to analyze after an initial go around. What felt long? Disconnected? Awkward?
Don’t add confusion.
If you want to make changes, consider the impact to volunteers and others involved in the service. Will your changes really add to the service or just add unnecessary confusion?

Post Mortem Evals
After your services are over take some time early the next week to evaluate the weekend. If you don’t meet until later in the week, take notes during the service that you can look back on.

Like with the “In Trench” evals you don’t want to major in the minors and get caught up in all the little things that went wrong. Try to look for continuing patterns (i.e. this volunteer is always fumbling the song lyrics, this transition is awkward, the announcements are 10 minutes long week after week).

Of course there will be some major problems that only happen once but need to be discussed so they don’t happen again, that’s cool but don’t bog yourself down in the details.

You also want to make sure you do something about what you’re discussing. Don’t just talk for 20 minutes about how there isn’t enough diversity in your videos, figure out how you’re going to change that. Assign team members the task of following up with the problem, etc.

What am I missing? What else is important for the when and what in evaluating worship?

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