Take Calculated Risks

“What is our church missing out on because we’re afraid to take (calculated) risks?”

By default, many people don’t care to take risks. Maybe the environment in which they work doesn’t make space for taking risks, and perhaps taking the risk carries too much risk of getting your hand slapped for failing. I’m wired to take risks in my job. In my opinion, progress requires some level of risk. You can’t expect to move things forward without occasionally putting yourself and your team in uncomfortable situations. In production, though, failures from taking risks can be quite public and awkward for the people who experience them. When that happens, you can find yourself hiding under a metaphorical rock and erring on the side of keeping things as they are. If you start to do that, you don’t just hold up the progress of your own team but also all of the other teams that rely on you, like the Worship Team, Student Team, and Teaching Pastor. And when that happens, you slow down progress and growth for your church.

One of my bosses has a saying.

“Take calculated risks.”

This statement is refreshing and liberating. He suggests taking a risk, calculating what could go wrong, and implementing measures to pivot if it does. This gives my team the permission to “play” (and possibly make mistakes) while protecting the team and the weekend service from total failure. I’ll give one example of how we did this.

A few years ago, we did a baptism weekend. If you’re unfamiliar with this, we had an invitation in the message and time set aside at the end of service to allow anyone to come up, accept Jesus, and get baptized. Our team came up with the idea to attempt to livestream all the baptisms happening at our five campuses and stream them to all of our campuses. Some of the details we had to think through were having our worship leader at our broadcast campus leading worship at all campuses while the local bands at the other campuses played along with him in the same key so that every campus had the experience of live worship in the room. We also had to have a camera at each campus to capture the baptisms happening locally and then send the camera feeds back to our broadcast campus. Our video director then used those feeds as sources to be used in our program cut, which was then sent back to all of our campuses in “real time” (that’s a lot, I know). We had never tried anything of this caliber before, so we went crazy about coming up with backup scenarios. We essentially programmed three different service flows in the event one thing (or everything) failed; we had countless backups for all campuses. We communicated the procedures upon failure to all of our teams like crazy. While we were nervous, our team and leaders understood that we did everything possible to mitigate service interruptions. And do you know what happened?

It didn’t fail.

That risk paid off, and our whole church experienced something they had never gotten to experience. They were able to celebrate baptisms happening across the entire church, not just the campus they attend. It was an incredibly unifying moment for our multisite church. In the preparation and execution of that service, our team had a pulse on what the church needed (to celebrate baptisms as one church with five locations rather than five different churches), and we took a calculated risk to pull it off. Was it perfect? No—there were little things that didn’t go according to Plan A, but because we had backup plans in place, we were able to quickly pivot and execute a distraction-free service. Only our team was aware of the issues that arose. The feedback our staff received from that weekend was overwhelmingly positive and it reinforced that we need to keep trying to find ways to bring our campuses together more often, even if it’s over video.

It’s been a few years since that first baptism weekend, and almost every one has been done this way since then. It’s become a part of our church! The experience of seeing lives being changed at every campus, not just your own, really helps connect everyone to the life change that’s happening! It’s crazy to think what our church could have lost out on if we didn’t take that risk as a team. I think we should be asking ourselves the following question frequently: What is our church missing out on because our team is afraid to take (calculated) risks?

Church production can be complicated. We get a lot of feedback and opinions. Our financial and time resources may be limited… But if you’re able to keep a pulse on your church, it can be a rewarding experience to support your church’s mission and growth through the implementation of technology. If you are seeking to make an impact in your church in a healthy and effective way, make it a priority to understand your church's needs. What will impact the people who walk through your doors each weekend? Once you figure that out, your decisions will have a more significant impact on your community.

I hope this series has been helpful to you! Writing it was for me!