A worship pastor emailed me a while back. He leads both the worship and production teams every single Sunday, and he was the only one who knew how to do everything.
When they had a kid, he wanted real time off, without checking Slack every hour.
He ended up taking a 4-week sabbatical. In his words, everything "ran relatively smooth."
He built a resource library in Notion, using some of my resources. His team could find answers there without texting him.
Over time, his team stopped pulling him aside for every little thing. They were becoming self-sufficient.
We like to stay in the middle of everything because no one else cares like we do.
But if your team needs you for every answer, what you have is people waiting on you.
I grew up in Columbus, and half my family went to Ohio State, so I'm a fan. Ahead of the Ohio State vs. Texas game in September 2026, the thing I kept thinking about was the two head coaches.
Ohio State's head coach, Ryan Day, is an offense guy. For years he called every play himself. Then a few seasons back, he decided he couldn't keep doing that and also do everything else a head coach has to do.
So he stopped calling plays. He hired an offensive coordinator who could call them for him and stepped back to run the whole team. Ohio State went on to win the national championship.
It was never a question of whether Day could call plays. He could. The question was whether he could call every play and still lead the whole team well.
Texas head coach Steve Sarkisian is also an offense guy, and at the time he was still calling his own plays. Plenty of Texas fans wished he'd hand it off so he could watch the whole field instead of being buried in the call sheet on every snap. Nobody was saying he was bad at it.
If you lead the team, that's almost never your only job on Sunday. You're running sound. Or leading worship. And you're also the guy everyone flags down when something breaks.
You're the head coach, and you're also trying to call every play for every position. That's how you end up leaving your post five times in one service.
Day's fix works on Sunday too. When every role has the steps, the training, and the answers in one place, people call their own plays in their lane without pulling you out of yours.
The goal is to give your team the answers so they can run on their own. You're the head coach. Your team are the coordinators. The playbook is what lets them take it from there.
The worship pastor in this story built a resource library in Notion so his team could find answers without texting him. Over time they stopped pulling him aside for every little thing, and during his 4-week sabbatical everything "ran relatively smooth."
Every role needs its steps, its training, and its answers in one place. That way each volunteer can handle their own lane without coming to the leader.
Most media leaders are also running sound or leading worship, so every question pulls them away. When each role has its own steps and answers written down, people can solve problems in their lane without flagging you down.
The Church Notion System puts every media role, every step and every training video in one Notion hub your team can open on Sunday.
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