The Ultimate Church Production Checklist, Powered by Notion (v1)

This is where it started.

The checklist below was version 1 of what our church media system eventually became. It solved the first problem, which was that nobody knew what to do before a service. It didn't solve the bigger one, which is that every volunteer still came to me for anything the checklist didn't cover.

That took a few more years and a lot more rebuilding. If you want the current version, that's the Church Notion System. It's the same idea grown all the way up: one Notion hub with every role, every step, and every piece of context your volunteers need, built so they stop defaulting to you.

The original write-up is below. The free template still works if you want somewhere to start.

What we use at our church for a checklist and team resources

Our media team grew a lot in a short window, and suddenly every team member had a pile of tasks to get through before and during each service. Things were falling through the cracks. So we built a system to stay on top of every moving piece.

We also wanted one place team members could go for resources tied to the specific job they were doing. There are a lot of ways to approach that. This is what we landed on.

We use Notion. It's a project management and note-taking app, and if you haven't tried it, it's worth a look. I'd been using it every day for four or five months when I made this. I used to live in Evernote and never went back.

What Notion gives you over a Word doc is flexibility.

The pros of using Notion

Easy to update

You can adjust a checklist on the fly. It works like a living document instead of a file. Anyone with edit access goes in, changes a task, and it's done. No reprinting, no re-exporting, no emailing a new version to the team.

Easy to share

It's simple to create, organize, and hand off to everyone on the team. Videos I want the team to see get embedded right where they're relevant. I can build dropdowns, headers, and a hierarchy of pages so no single page is cluttered.

That last part matters more than it sounds. Your volunteer isn't wading through information meant for somebody else's job to find their own.

To share it, hit share at the top right, share to web, set your sharing settings, copy the link, send it.

Watch the video above for the full breakdown

If you want to use this in your own Notion account, I've made the template available.

Click here to get the free template.

Where this went

The checklist got us partway. Volunteers had a list, which is better than no list.

But a checklist only tells somebody what to do. It doesn't tell them how, and it doesn't tell them what to do when Sunday goes sideways. So they still called me. That's the problem the Church Notion System was built to solve.

The fix is what we call dual-level SOPs. Two reading depths on the same page. The volunteer who's done it fifty times scans the checklist. The one doing it for the first time expands the same steps and gets the full walkthrough plus a tutorial video, right there, without hunting through a playlist or texting you.

See how the full system works.

Related reading

• Set Your Church Media Volunteers Up for Success (v2 of the template)
• 4 Tips for Training Church Media Volunteers
• Organize Your Media Files: 3 Tips for Keeping Your Digital Files Organized

Talk soon,

Zach