Here it comes! 2022 is about to happen, and we need to be ready for it. First, we hope and pray that it will be more “normal” than 2021 and hopefully, things will return to the time before that Big Thing happened in 2020. And among all the other things we’ll need to do in preparation for this impending year is budgeting. Budgeting is not a popular topic. It’s fraught with worries over what will be available to us in terms of spending, anxiety over how it’s distributed and pangs of straight-up territoriality. But at the end of the day, it’s crucial to spend time and effort to get the budget right — our resources are precious, and we can’t waste them with blunders and mistakes. So how do we avoid budgeting pitfalls?
Look Ahead Before Crossing
At the top of the list here is planning. It is the single most important thing we can do. We must establish the strategy of the worship team for the entire course of the year, and then determine what expenditures must be made to execute that strategy. Due to the reflexive nature of budgeting and strategizing, the amount of money available to us will almost certainly have an influence on what the strategy will be. If we don’t have the budget for the million-dollar LaserPhonics system we want, we won’t be acquiring it, and there will be no LaserPhonics. This brings up one of the most interesting (and challenging) aspects of budgeting — the back-and-forth nature between needs and resources. We have to work within our constraints, but some budget items cannot bend (e.g. — we absolutely must have streaming technology if we plan to stream), so we need to sort out which items are not negotiable and which ones are.
An important thing to consider during this planning process is looking past next month. Let’s just say we’re planning for the entire calendar year. This will require us to look over the horizon a bit. Say we’re looking at purchasing a new front of house console for the main sanctuary. We know that we’ve needed 24 inputs historically, and our plan for the upcoming year will require a few more, so we’re thinking about a 32-input desk. But as new consoles are usually not an annual expenditure, we need to look a bit further down the road. How many inputs will we need in the year after next? Will 32 do the trick? Or should we perhaps future-proof a bit and move all the way up to 48 inputs? Are FCC bandwidth restrictions going to put some — or all — of our current wireless setup out of business during the upcoming year? If so, we need to budget for replacement technology — and it might make sense to acquire new tech that will get us a few more years down the road.
At the same time, we may discover opportunities to kick the can a bit further down the road. We may discover that our current wireless tech will get us through the next year, but will become obsolete the year after. We could hang on to that money a bit longer — or re-appropriate it to another item that is more pressing. Again, the idea is that by careful planning and projection based on factual knowledge, we can make the most of the available budget and not just indiscriminately throw money at problems. This mechanism also helps us to avoid being blindsided by struggles of which we should have already been aware of — and prepared for. Much money is wasted putting out fires that take us by surprise.
Over vs. Underspending
One obvious goal of budgeting is to avoid overspending… but we should also avoid underspending. What do I mean by this? I’ve fallen victim to scenarios like this: we save a few bucks by purchasing less expensive gear, only to discover that the cheaper gear doesn’t quite get the job done — or worse yet, fails outright due to low quality standards. The result is that we finally realize that we need the spendier, higher-quality version, so we go on to buy that, having already spent money on the original cheaper gear — creating more expenditures than necessary. The moral of this story is to research the gear a bit more deeply to make sure that the bargain really is a bargain before we proceed.
Many churches just started streaming live services for the first time during the pandemic, and some went whole-hog, with high-resolution multi-camera systems and discrete broadcast-quality mixes that look and sound marvelous. But on the other end of the spectrum are churches that just attach the pastor’s wife’s iPad to a tripod, aim it toward the platform, and hit the go button at the beginning of services. Whether we like it or not, the pandemic has forced us to move forward with streaming technology, and today, low-quality, “get it online quick” solutions are no longer sufficient. If your church is still doing the bare minimum by way of streaming, you probably need to budget some money for improvement in that domain. It’s no longer a luxury, but a requirement. On the flip side of that, and despite the popularity of streaming, many worshippers have returned to the sanctuary, so we can’t put all our eggs in the streaming basket either. We must make sure that the technology (and people) supporting in-person services are also sufficiently funded going forward.
The Human Factor
Thus far, our focus has been on hardware and technology, but there is another important component to consider — human assets. We need to ensure that we have the right people to operate and care for all this technology, and we need enough of them. We also need to make sure they know what they’re doing. In the case of churches that exclusively use paid, professional help, the process is pretty obvious — you interview and hire great people. But that means you have payroll overhead, and that’s something that must be budgeted. At first blush, it seems like using an all-volunteer staff solves the issue — no payroll line on the budget. But we want to put our best foot forward, and it’s very important that our volunteers don’t turn all our hardware into smoke machines, so we need to make sure our volunteers are well-trained, and that could potentially cost us a few dollars. But at the end of the day, they’re dollars well-spent.
Above and Beyond
All organizations are required to deal with budgets on a periodic basis, and each type of organization faces its own unique challenges. One that arises in the world of worship is covetousness. That almost sounds like a joke, but it really is not. It’s a real issue, and it’s worth thinking about during the budgeting process. There’s a lot of “monkey see/monkey do” in worship. Budgets can get out of control as a result of seeking to acquire all the same gear as Church X or Worship Movement Y. Worship guitarists spend a lot of money equipping their pedalboards with the same stomp boxes that their heroes use… seeking to get that Exact Same Tone. The right assemblage of equipment for “those guys” may or may not be the exact right assemblage of equipment for us. And not only does this unoriginal, follow-the-other-guys thinking result in a homogenous, cookie-cutter sound, it also does nothing to advance worship — it just recycles the same ideas and motifs. Best to focus exclusively on what we need without a moment’s thought as to what other churches are doing.
Budgeting is just about the least enjoyable task I can think of in relation to worship, but it is necessary, and it is important. And it’s worth taking time and working hard to ensure we do it right.
John McJunkin is the chief engineer and staff producer in the studio at Grand Canyon University.
