The VCBC A/V Committee
Written by Brian Lee
The COVID-19 pandemic has forced our ministries to adapt and innovate as we continue to meet the needs of our community. Among our existing teams, the A/V Committee has been the one that underwent the most adaptations and experimentations to overcome various challenges as they strive to deliver a quality worship service experience to our congregations.
Even prior to the pandemic, the A/V committee is a crucial backbone ministry that worked diligently and quietly as it blended into the background as things functioned smoothly as intended. Even in my previous experiences serving in some A/V capacities, this pressure filled experience thickened if the audio did not work as intended or if a slide did not get shown properly. This is even magnified when sets of eyes turned backwards into the A/V Booth out of curiosity. It is definitely both an art and a science to keep the entire audio visual ministry operations running smoothly on a weekly basis.
The work of the A/V Team does not simply start and end in the 70-90 minutes that we worship together, whether in person or online during the pandemic. Even earlier in each week, the A/V team accompanies the worship team during their weekly worship practice (usually on Thursday evenings) to set up the various mics, instrument input/outputs, and other technical needs. Even during the pandemic when our service were hosted online and offsite, the A/V team’s burden was not necessarily lightened. The audio team provided support to the various worship teams in their offsite/home recording experiences. Alongside them, the visual team compiled the raw recordings with the lyric subtitles that we see on the Sunday morning. (Sometimes, this seemingly small addition can take a few hours to complete)
Especially in the constant movement between restrictions and reopening, our A/V had to be extra flexible as we underwent multiple switches from off-site separate track recording to on-site team recordings and vice versa. We appreciate the dedication that the A/V team invested to reconfigure our setup for these ever changing recording needs and their creativity in finding new options and solutions to improve and streamline the entire process.
As we enter into yet another new phase of our reopening plan, the A/V team will face new obstacles in preparing our congregation into a eventual hybrid model. As things will take some time to adapt and get used to, we ask for your patience as we are learning and adapting together. We want to express our appreciation to the small team of brothers and sisters from A/V who have offered extra time sacrifices to ensure that the rest of the community had a good and ever improving virtual environment to engage in worship. In the mean time, the team is also looking for others who can bolster their ranks as new A/V needs emerge in this new hybrid model. If you are interested and willing to learn and experiment with us, please don’t hesitate to contact Simon (av@vcbc.bc.ca) for more details on how you may help!