3 Easy Steps to Begin With Lighting at Your Church:

Knowing how to get started with lighting at your church can be difficult. Here's what you need to know:

Step 1: Get Your Lights in the Right Place

Whether you have existing lighting or not, it's important to get your lights in the proper place.

At it's core, basic lighting allows us to see the people on stage clearly. Whether this is the pastor or the band, it's important to be able to see them so that they can communicate their message fully.

When I work with churches, I often see that churches own plenty of lights - they're just not optimized for a great lighting design.

By simply moving some of your lighting around, you can make your setup more effective and efficient.

Here's how to make it happen:

Step 2: Get Your Design Right

Once you get the right lights in the right place, it's time to dive into design. But don't worry - you don't have to be an "artsy" person in order to design really amazing looking lighting.

By simply understanding some basic design principles, you can quickly take a lighting rig from "blah" to "awesome"!

Resources:

Step 3: Get Your Programming Right

Now we've got a good idea of where to put our lights, and what we want to do with them. But, when it's time to program, we need to make sure our programming is VERY user friendly for volunteers.

It's a tough balance, programming the console for the most flexible service vs. ease of use for volunteers.

When you're first getting started, it's probably a good idea to start simple, and then begin programming more complex cues and cuelists as you get deeper into lighting.

Make sure your volunteers can keep up with the changes you make - it's essential to having consistent lighting week-to-week!

Step 4: Wire It Up Correctly

We're now in the home stretch: the "how". (Wait...there's a 4th step?)

If you haven't already had DMX or power problems, you will within time! Anytime you work with lighting, you're going to have issues from time to time.

If you work with audio as well (like many church people), you probably understand this, and understand that proper troubleshooting and proper setup can make all the difference in the world.

Check out the resources below to learn how you can wire up all of your lighting and make it work together: