Picture a Sunday morning on Long Island. Three people called out sick, there's a snowstorm outside, and everyone's freaking out. The person running camera has never done it before.
One of the coordinators in my Church Notion System Accelerator told me about that morning. She asked, "Can I just hand this new person a page and say, 'Read this before service starts?'"
I said yes. That's the goal. With a slim team, bad weather and a new volunteer, the difference between "we survived" and "we canceled" is whether you wrote anything down.
Pick the one role that would hurt the most if three people bailed on the same Sunday. That's your fragile role, and it's the first one to write down.
For a lot of churches it's the role that belongs to one linchpin volunteer. Everyone else knows the role exists. Only one person knows the steps.
Another leader in the Accelerator had a volunteer who handles the live stream. That volunteer would often call Saturday night and say, "Guess what? I'm not gonna be there tomorrow. You gotta run it."
After a couple rounds of that, he told the volunteer: "Next time you come in I'm just gonna hold my phone next to you. I wanna understand what you're doing. That'll help me take notes."
So he stood next to them and recorded what they did. Then he turned that recording into steps someone else could follow.
Stop trying to remember the whole role from A to Z in your head. Capture what already works while it's happening, then turn it into a checklist someone else can run. If you did nothing else this month but stand next to your linchpin volunteer and hit record, you'd be ahead of most churches.
Record a 5 to 10 minute voice memo talking through what you do before, during and after service for that role. To turn that memo into a usable checklist with AI, follow the steps in turn a voice memo into a volunteer checklist for any media role.
Inside the Accelerator, each church is building three things:
We add tutorials and Notion templates on top of that. At the core, the work is writing down what a solid Sunday looks like, and make it stupid clear, so a normal human can pull it up and not sink the service.
Start by documenting what's already working.
I built the Church Notion System because I needed it. I'm not at my church full-time. I only have a few hours a week for media and production, and most Sundays I'm on stage playing guitar with the worship team. All our Sunday workflows and training resources live in one place, inside Notion.
And I let it drift.
We'd update a workflow or swap out gear in the booth. I'd get things running fast because that's all the time I had, and I told myself I'd document it later. Later never happened.
Then a volunteer would ask me a question mid-service, and I couldn't point them to the page, because the new step wasn't in there. So I stepped back in to answer it myself, sometimes with a guitar still on my shoulder.
Having the pages built wasn't enough. I had to set it up so it survives my bad habits. I'm still not great at documenting on the fly, so I put a few simple rules in place. The main one: when something changes, I record a quick video, and an AI prompt handles the write-up.
Most weeks there's nothing new to document at all. Volunteers check the page, and they don't flag me down for the small stuff.
Stand next to that volunteer with your phone and record what they do, then turn the recording into steps someone else can follow. If you're the one who knows the role, record a 5 to 10 minute voice memo covering what you do before, during and after service.
The one that would hurt the most if three people bailed on the same Sunday.
When a workflow or piece of gear changes, record a quick video right away and let an AI prompt handle the write-up, so the new step is on the page before a volunteer asks about it mid-service.
No. You need to write down what a solid Sunday already looks like, clearly enough that a new volunteer can read it before service starts.
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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