consultants in churches

Many of my friends keep telling me that I need to get into consulting. The thing is that I actually have a mild hatred for consultants. Hatred is too strong but can't think of the correct word at the moment.

You see, here is a guy that probably knows his stuff. He comes in takes measurements and touches things and in a magical 4 hours or less proclaims victory over your sound problems. Many times he hasn't been in a service, doesn't have the faintest idea of what you do.

We were building a new main auditorium. I go out and get bids. I tell everyone, "Look, we aren't the normal church. We run at near concert volume at times. Make sure you put this idea into your design." We go through everyone and finally pick our vendor. I reminded the vendor several times during the process about our volume requirements. Every time its a response of "This PA will do what you want to do." I suppose I should have put on paper somewhere but we are all gentlemen here.

PA is installed and it sounds great. It will get loud, not quite as loud as I think it should but I think that given the normal circumstances we will be fine. We come around to our big national conference season. Yeah, this church hosted a national pastors conference, a national worship leaders conference, a national children's workers conference and a national youth leaders conference every year. Usually in the same month and usually at least 2 of them in the same week. Maybe I will go into that more someday.

The powers that be decide that we should be louder for the special events (which I never quite understood since people were coming to us to see what makes us so successful - shouldn't we just show them what we normally do?) The PA vendor has a booth at several of these events. I have the owner of the vendor tell me (get this we are 6 plus months after the install), "I have never seen a church run this loud. We have done installs at some black churches and they don't run this loud."

Did they think I was lying? Back to consultants. . .

So the few consulting gigs that I have done, I have insisted that it be in such a way that I come in and look over the rig and do the normal tweaks. But I want to talk with the music minister and the tech guys separately. I want to have a music practice where I can adjust things while the musicians and singers are on stage. The tech guys can look over my shoulder and see what at "soiundcheck" is all about. I then will stay overnight and be there for a normal service to do the minor tweaks once the room fills in, all the time getting some feedback from the tech guy as to how loud I am compared to normal, etc. My goal is to not have the situation of the music minister telling the tech guys to not touch anything, but for the tech guys to feel that they had some input plus can see how I got them to that point of happiness.

But most churches don't want that. They want the magic wand because that is what the consultants have done in the past. The last time I was "consultantized", the youth band leader brought this guy from New York in to tweak the sound. I was expecting a normal consultant but got a guy that mixes stuff. He pretty much sat there during the rehearsal and made like a couple 3 dB cuts in a couple instruments which was more of a taste thing than an actual technical reason. But the band leader thought that he was amazing and gave me that "don't touch anything" speech, only to have me change things the very next week.

So I don't know. i think there is a place for consultants but I think that they need to be involved in what you are up to, not some "miracle" pill.

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