Darcy Watkins – August 3, 2024
In many parts of the world, there are floating holidays that extend a weekend into a long weekend. These will typically be something like the second Monday in a particular month, or it could be a Friday after so many full moons in the year. If such long weekends are during times of nice weather, they tend to become opportunity for people to take off for a weekend get-away. For example, in Canada, long weekends from late May through early October tend to result in higher-than-average incidents of unavailability. So, the subject is how does this affect worship scheduling?
Much will depend on how you schedule. Do you schedule individuals from a pool of available participants? Do you schedule according to some form of designated slots or teams (e.g. to coordinate with other things that they volunteer for)? Do you organize teams as worship bands and schedule the bands as entities? Maybe it is a hybrid mixture of these. What absence threshold do bands use to drop out as a whole team? Do you schedule according to round-robin rotation? Do you use a weekend of month scheme (1st weekend team, 2nd weekend team, etc)? Does the scheduling scheme result in some teams, slots or people having a higher than usual number of long weekends (hence they are more likely to cancel than the average)?
How do you handle availability? Some scheduling and planning software provide a facility for people to block-out weekends in advance of scheduling. Do you shuffle them into other spots and hence, others into these less desired spots? Or do they sometimes (or always) skip a turn?
What about cancellations? Do you have a sense of what constitutes adequate notice of cancellation versus what is considered a short-notice cancellation? How do you handle cancellations? Do you try to arrange a swap, or do they just skip a turn? How do you fill in vacancies? Do you allow team people to arrange their own swaps? I think it is not unreasonable to try to accommodate occasional cancellations, but they may have to skip a turn if no one swaps. I also think it is not unreasonable for a short notice cancellation to always result in that person skipping a turn.
There is also the converse. You are hosting a special event for which everyone wants to be a part of it, so you are leaving some out of it. This can get into the matter of the balance of fairness with proficiency, faithfulness and the specific needs of the occasion. This is one of those potentially brutal things we try to deny even exists within our worship team. On one hand, there should be no sense of entitlement. On the other hand, we want to be practical and support growth of individuals as well as the whole church. There are some occasions where you plain just want to have “the best” up. This could be for a technical reason such as an event being recorded or telecast live, or for some other reason such as ability to flow spontaneously during extended prayer times.
Then there is the matter of how many are available for each role. For example, you could be short on drummers or electric guitarists, but have an overabundance of acoustic guitarists and/or keyboardists. Roles with shortages could result in some affected services doing without. Roles with overabundances may result in cancellations always resulting in forfeitures regardless of notice.
Without claiming to have all (or even any) of the answers, here are things I have tried out over the years.
- I have used, scheduling of individuals from a “random” pool, scheduling of predictable “slots” in coordination with other department scheduling and I have scheduled worship band entities. (The bands even had names).
- I have tried negotiating ahead with worship leaders to spread the long weekend load of the year amongst them. Some still cancelled.
- I have tried excluding some long weekends from normal scheduling and then made them available for worship leaders (or bands) to “bid” on for extra opportunities.
- I have used long weekends as opportunities for less experienced “rising stars” to lead worship during a Sunday service.
- I have used arrange-your-own-swap or forfeit (skip a turn) as a policy.
- I have used ad hoc “contingency” teams to fill in vacancies. Sometimes this can be more fun.
- I have used smaller teams (e.g. an “acoustic” set or a solo musician worship leader).
- I have tried using predictive scheduling based on knowing the people involved, to reduce likelihood of cancellations (some complained that it wasn’t fair).
- I have also swapped and done long weekends myself.
Like I mentioned earlier, I don’t claim to have the answers. And, yeah, I have made mistakes and ticked people off, but at least I wasn’t afraid to try things out (and learn in the process). It can be a balancing act of mission considerations versus people considerations. Despite the mission, it is important to remember we are dealing with people, not machines. Communicate a policy and make sure that everyone understands what they commit to. Communicate your expectations in terms of availability and cancelations (especially short notice cancelations).No system can be 100% fair or immune to availability shortages from time to time. And remember in some cases, a person’s availability or unavailability is not their choice. They are cancelling due to a decision someone else in their family made (or it could be work related).