A Week in the Life of Michael Tjandra

Published: June 02, 2010 WORSHIP

My name is Michael Tjandra. I am a volunteer at a local church called The Rocks in Cannington, Perth, Western Australia. We are a growing international church that has a congregation of 500.

We have three services every Sunday when I serve as a production team leader for the sound, multimedia and lighting systems. My tasks include creating roster/schedules for my team, overseeing the programme week-by-week, creating yearly budgets, planning yearly programmes and evaluating my team performance with my worship pastor.

I work full-time every day during the week and also at weekends, sometimes. This is an exciting challenge to manage my time for family, church, and work. Sometimes I do not think that 24-hours, seven days a week is long enough to catch up with everything.

Monday:

This is the most relaxed day for me, as we do not have any church activities. I get to work for about 10 hours, spend time with my family and do my errands. Lately we have just bought a recording system, so I do some mixing of church recordings that we had from our Christmas celebration, if I still have time at night.

Tuesday:

We have a good work roster that is made on a monthly basis – thanks to our worship pastor for such system. It assists my weekly responsibilities but I do double check the roster for each Sunday on Tuesday, and make sure that everyone is aware what they are scheduled for the coming Sunday. And I finish off my night doing a bit of mixing.

Wednesday:

We have a song chart every month that consists of 15 songs, and every worship leader chooses the songs for Sunday service from this chart. In order to renew our database, we have a New Song Night on Wednesdays – this is when we learn new songs, and it is compulsory for every musician and vocalist to attend. It also means that they need a sound engineer to mix and learn the song. This is a casual night for us, so it also gives us time to chat and catch up.

Thursday:

We practice every Thursday for our Sunday service. This is compulsory for everyone serving on the coming Sunday. I use this occasion to double-check all of the equipment and make sure that it is running well. We also have a live night on the forth Thursday every month, where we have a praise and worship, and receive encouragement from our pastor. This is basically a gathering night for us in order to refresh spiritually, instead of doing technical training every week.

Friday:

We have a youth service every Friday, they are very active kids and so we must provide the best music, sound and entertainment so that they feel that church is a better place than going clubbing. We provide all kinds of entertainment before service such as PlayStation 3, Nintendo Wii, basketball and table tennis, so they can hang out and find the excitement to attend every week. We also have a different concept/theme every week, and we use multimedia in order to keep them in focus with the service.

Saturday:

We have our prayer meeting every Saturday morning, and are continuing to dub our Christmas musical recording. We don’t really have many other things to do on Saturdays so we have a chance to re-check everything for our Sunday service. It also allows time to spend with our own families, which is as important as our ministry.

Sunday:

Finally, the big day comes. We usually come to church at 7am to attend a briefing, soundcheck and run through the service. We start our first international service at 9:15am. That usually runs shorter than our second service at 11am. By doing it this way, we provide options for our congregation who would prefer a shorter service. We finish our second service at about 1pm, and begin our third service, which is in Indonesian, at 4pm. We have a different team of musicians, vocalists, and production for the Indonesian service. They come in at 1:30pm to soundcheck and practice before the service starts. Usually it finishes at 6pm.

On some occasions, I spend my whole day on Sunday at church, arriving at church at 7am and departing at 6:30pm. That is a long day for me, but I feel grateful for the chance to minister our God.

My church is a growing church and we may not have the best system overall, bur I hope my experience can help other churches to grow, and I also hope that I can get more input and advice in order to develop my team and my church at the same time.