Check the Ego at the Door: Why Toxic Egos Don't Have a Place in the Church (or in Live Production)
Live production has a reputation, and it's not always an undeserved one. Walk into enough venues, festivals, or broadcast trucks and you'll eventually run into it: the mix engineer who won't take a note, the lighting designer who talks over everyone in the room, the "expert" who's more interested in being right than being useful. The industry sometimes rewards this — technical skill can buy someone a longer leash than it should.
Church production doesn't get a pass on this either. We've seen volunteer teams and paid staff alike where someone's technical ability became a kind of armor — a reason they stopped being teachable, stopped being correctable, stopped treating the people around them with humility. And in a church, that's not just a culture problem. It's a discipleship problem.
Skill Was Never Supposed to Be the Whole Qualification
It's easy to build a team around raw talent — who mixes the best, who has the sharpest eye for lighting, who can run the trickiest show without blinking. Talent matters. But talent without humility eventually costs a team more than it contributes.
A gifted volunteer or staff member who can't take correction becomes a bottleneck instead of an asset. Other people stop offering feedback because it's not worth the friction. Newer volunteers stop asking questions because they've learned the answer will make them feel small. The team gets quieter, not because things are going well, but because people have learned it's safer to stay silent. That's not a healthy team — it's a fragile one that looks fine until it isn't.
We All Have Something to Learn
This is true regardless of experience level. The most seasoned engineer in the room still has something to learn from the newest volunteer — a different perspective, a question that exposes an assumption nobody had questioned in years, a reminder of why the basics matter. The moment someone believes they've outgrown correction is the moment they've actually stopped growing.
This cuts both directions, too. Leadership isn't exempt from this standard just because they're leading. A Pastor, worship leader, or production director who can't be challenged or questioned by their own team has the same ego problem as a volunteer who won't take a note — it's just wearing a title.
Why This Matters More in a Church Than Anywhere Else
In a commercial production environment, a toxic ego is a professionalism problem. In a church, it's something more serious, because the tech team isn't just producing a service — they're modeling something. Volunteers are watching how people treat each other under pressure. Guests are picking up on the tone in the room, even from the other side of the stage. If the production culture is defined by ego, control, and an unwillingness to be corrected, that's not separate from the church's witness — it's part of it, whether anyone intended it to be.
A church can have excellent production and a toxic team behind it. That's not actually a win. Excellence that comes at the cost of humility isn't the kind of excellence a church should be aiming for.
What Checking the Ego Actually Looks Like
It's not about false humility or pretending skill doesn't matter. It looks like:
Taking a correction without getting defensive, even when you're confident you were right
Asking a newer volunteer what they noticed, and actually listening to the answer
Being willing to do the less glamorous role on the team when that's what's needed
Giving credit to the team instead of positioning yourself as the reason things went well
Being teachable in public, not just in private — letting people see you learn, not just arrive already knowing
None of this makes someone a worse engineer or a worse leader. If anything, it's usually the people who've checked their ego who end up growing the fastest — because they're the ones still asking questions, still open to being wrong, still treating every service as something they can learn from rather than something they've already mastered.
Building a Team Around This
If you're leading a tech team — volunteer or paid — this is worth being intentional about from the start. Technical skill is teachable. Humility, teachability, and a willingness to be corrected are harder to instill after the fact, and they matter more to the long-term health of the team than any single skill on the board or behind the camera.
The best production teams we've worked with aren't the ones with the most talented individual. They're the ones where everyone — from the newest volunteer to the person leading the whole ministry — actually believes they still have something to learn.