A proposal for our church leadership
Start an AV Club.
A structured way for our students to serve in the tech booth — real seats, adult mentors, and a ladder to grow on — that simultaneously staffs our production needs, deepens our youth ministry, and connects generations. This page is the whole proposal; it prints on one sheet.
What it is
An AV Club is a named group of students who serve on the church's production team — camera, lyrics, audio, livestream, recording — each owning one seat with one clear job, trained and mentored by our existing tech volunteers. Students are matched to seats by gifting (there's even a two-minute seat matcher), responsibility is sized to age and maturity, and the club meets monthly for training and recognition. The model is documented in depth at worshipmetrics.com/av-club.
What it produces
Students who stay
Lifeway Research found 66% of church-attending teens drop out as young adults — and about 70% say it wasn't a decision; the habit just broke. Students who hold a real serving role carry an identity that survives transition: a crew that notices their absence, a skill the next church needs.
A volunteer pipeline that refills itself
The tech booth stops depending on one exhausted expert. Students climb a seat ladder — tablet, lyrics, camera, stream, switcher — and older students train younger ones, so every graduation is covered by the class behind it.
Genuine intergenerational ministry
The booth pairs veterans and teenagers as real collaborators — same headset channel, same shared work, every week. It's the connection our mixer events try to manufacture, occurring naturally around something both generations care about.
Retention data: Lifeway Research, 2019 — research.lifeway.com. Fuller treatment of each outcome: the students who stay, the two-ministry pipeline, intergenerational ministry in the booth.
The safety question, answered
Students cannot sink a Sunday, by design. Modern production systems flag a dropped stream or stopped recording the instant it happens and offer a one-tap restart — to the student and the mentor alike; a mentor can watch a student's actual controls live — from the next chair or from home — and a student's choices appear in preview, visible to the mentor before anything reaches the congregation. Every service produces a 0–100 health report, so the debrief is a teaching timeline, not a blame session. The complete case, written for this exact conversation: Can students safely run a church livestream?
What it requires
One or two adult mentors (our current tech volunteers, plus any veteran willing to teach) and two or three named students to start.
One seat per student with one clear job, a monthly club gathering (training, review, pizza), and serving rotations scheduled a month ahead.
The WorshipMetrics platform: free to begin (local booth control, documentation, scheduling); the cloud mentoring layer — mentors seeing a student's live controls from anywhere — is $49/mo (Pro) or $99/mo with hosted live streaming (Max). Annual plans include two months free, and a member can sponsor it as a designated, tax-deductible gift through our normal church giving.
One semester. We report back with the students served, the Sundays covered, and the stream-health record — the platform scores every service, so the results are measurable, not anecdotal.
On the sponsorship note: members who want their giving to reach the next generation directly can fund the platform as a designated gift through our normal giving — details at worshipmetrics.com/gift.
The ask
Approve a one-semester pilot: two or three students, one seat each, mentored by our current team, with the club rhythm above. At semester's end we bring back the results — students serving, Sundays covered, and the measured health of every service — and decide together whether to grow it.
The students are already in our building. The seats are already in our booth. This proposal simply introduces them.