Grace Under Pressure
What do you do when the video feed goes out, the pastor’s mic goes dead, a parishioner is having a heart attack and your hair is on fire? Panic, right? Panic is a natural response to an emergency; we have been bred to fight or run away from danger.
I would like to take you back in time a few years ago (ahem, just a few) to when I was a young lad in the Navy on a submarine. One Friday morning we were out on patrol - going nowhere at full tilt when they woke everyone to “field day” the ship. This was a usual Friday morning event where all crew cleaned some part of the boat (submarines are boats by the way).
Young Terry and another sailor were busy cleaning their assigned area while talking to the sonar officer. He was a senior enlisted chief petty officer before going through officer training school, so he had been around the Navy for quite a while already. We were killing time toward the end of the clean-up when a bone chilling announcement came over the PA, “Flooding in the engine room!” Flooding is always bad when you are under the water in a big steel tube and can’t get out; more so when it is at either end of the tube because the extra weight will pull the sub off trim (picture a seesaw with one really big kid against a smaller kid, and it is easier to sink and harder to control.) It is the worst kind of bad when the flooding is in the engine room because that is where the ship gets the power to push itself to the surface. Take that ability away and you lose a critical component of recovering the sub to the surface.
In an instant the sonar officer vanished. I’m not sure his feet touched the stairs out of the room as he ran to help. Young Terry doesn’t panic. He’s been training for this so frequently it almost has him thinking this is normal operations and there is no need to worry because he knows what to do. Young Terry also realizes that he is on the schedule as a first responder and he is supposed to respond to the crisis too. So, he takes off running up the stairs and back through the sub to the middle level where a disturbing thing happens - the sub goes up at the front, and also, down by the back! Young Terry is horrified if that means the back is full of water and we are now being pulled backward into the abyss. What to do? Go back to near certain death or run the other way to…what? You can’t open a door and step out. Maybe panic and have a good scream? Young Terry decides what the heck; go out fighting and continues onto the engine room. [Let’s leave him there for right now, he will be okay (spoiler, he survives)].
In the control room the Captain and crew heard the flooding report and immediately went into action to control it. The first actions were to speed up, keep the sub level and get shallow to make the water pressure outside as low as possible. When the captain heard the flooding was minor, he could now angle the front of the sub up to make it get shallow faster, like an airplane taking off. This gravitational pull is what my younger self was feeling, not the sub sinking to a watery grave but a triumphant rise to salvation! Training won and panic lost, really throughout the whole crew. Everyone heard the emergency and reacted properly.
Why do we panic? What good is it? Panic can be good, it gives us a big dose of adrenaline to fight a bear, try to outrun a lion, or lift a car off an accident victim. In the wrong place and wrong time, it doesn’t help at all; it actually gets in the way. There is no point in a big shot of “go fast juice” when you are supposed to stay in a chair and focus. All it does is make us antsy and distracted.
I believe panic comes from one of two things; a known fear or threat like a bear or a speeding car coming at us, or an unknown threat. The unknown threat is something we aren’t expecting, haven’t been trained to handle and don’t know how to properly react to it. Take for example a loud bang, is it something falling, a gunshot, a gas explosion? Can we ignore it or should we run? Or call 911? We don’t know, we are ignorant of the cause and that lack of knowledge can lead to fear of the unknown. Ignorance can lead to fear and fear to panic unless something intervenes.
Let’s go back to Young Terry and his crewmates in the sub. They could have panicked, (especially the guys in back with the salt water spraying out of the pipe). Picture yourself right now a few hundred feet underwater and a pipe starts leaking. A leak in a half inch pipe at one hundred feet is the same as a garden hose on full stream, it doubles every hundred feet and submarines have some pipes that are two feet in diameter. Pretty easy to let fear take control. But they were all trained, they were trained for every emergency the Navy could think of. Training counteracts ignorance and fear. Having some idea of what to do right away gives you focus that won’t let the fear in. A submarine crew is encouraged to study everything, literally everything about the sub and will delight themselves by being the only guy who knows a bit of arcane and esoteric information that no one else knows. Sub guys would be great on Jeopardy, except they might not be willing to give up the answers.
Grace under pressure for us on production is similar to the submarine. There are a lot of highly technical and complex systems and processes that all work together intricately under a skilled team. We have a run-through before each service to practice sample camera shots, cues, and button presses we need before we go live. We prepare this way to find a potential weak link or potential process failure. We have a chance to ask questions so that we aren’t in the dark about an important event during the service. And of course, we have Grace. We are all working as a team in the service of a God who knows our faults and loves us anyway. We can beat ourselves up but really nothing that happens during a service will be as bad as we imagine. Churches have survived wars and plagues, so how bad is this current problem you are facing compared to that? God has patiently worked his plan in his children all through history and he is with you, with us, always.
The worst thing we can do is to lose control and start shouting at people. Losing control from a big shot of adrenaline will not help you in the least. Your body wants to run away from this crisis, and fast, but what you really need is calm and controlled focus. Your team-mates will appreciate your calm handling of the problem and follow your lead. The Event Safety Alliance says that in a crisis 10 percent of people handle it properly, 10 percent freak-out and 80 percent freeze and will see who they should follow. It can be up to you, which 10 percent path you follow, that determines where the other 80 percent of the team go. If you freak, they may all freak. If you stay calm, they will be happy to freeze, not change anything critical and wait for someone to fix the issue.
My advice is to learn as much as you can, find the owner’s manuals of whatever you use each Sunday and use the training material PC3 has made. Use this web site and listen to the Port City Production podcast (hit that “subscribe” button!) Ask questions, subscribe to other podcasts and watch YouTube videos from other church techs, there are millions of interesting things out there. Chances are that they have a nugget of knowledge that will come back to help you later, and they have also been through a LOT of crises during their services and will have some advice on how they handled it. You can come in during band rehearsal and camera training nights to practice. Come in on one of your off Sundays and shadow another position to see what other people do. Try to plan for emergencies, “what will I do if X happens?” Can you over-prepare? Maybe. When Denise and I first started hosting Starting Point groups I brought a 20 slide PowerPoint presentation to use to share my personal story with the group. Maybe not such a great idea. . . Anyway, have fun! You are a member of a great group of people doing a great job; helping people find Jesus. Finally, remember that “We is greater than me” Come with an open heart and mind, every service is a chance to learn and grow. We are all important to the mission on Sunday but relax and let God be in control. That way when an unforeseen problem hits in the middle of the service you can take a deep breath and follow your training securely in the knowledge that God is in control and someone, somewhere will figure out how to fix it. Maybe even you.
Terry Kuhn