“The sound team always attracted me, but it felt too complex and too much responsibility…”

Joe is a film student in Bournemouth and the production lead at Citygate Southbourne, where he’s spent the last few years growing from a nervous visuals volunteer into a confident audio engineer and problem-solver. What began as a simple desire to help on Sundays has grown into a passion for sound, live events, and team leadership—shaping not only his technical skills but his faith, confidence, and everyday life.

Joe, Southbourne Production Team Lead

I’m Joe, a film student in Bournemouth, and I lead the Citygate Southbourne production team. I moved around the country a little with my family before settling here when I joined the church four or so years ago. I started serving on visuals back when our Southbourne setup was much simpler! I had done so at previous churches and wanted to help make Sundays run smoothly here. The sound team had always attracted me from the start, but it seemed too complex at first, so I thought the responsibility would be too much. However, others saw an eagerness in me and soon taught me how to mix for worship during services, and I found it an enjoyable learning experience. My first Sunday running audio alone, I remember doubting everything, thinking; How do I know how loud is too loud? How do I tell whether people are immersed or distracted? What will I do if someone complains? Since then, I have learned that - though the questions and problems I face may multiply - there is rarely a need to stress about these things. From here, I learned more and more about sound in my spare time and discovered a great interest as well as a great confidence, two things that serving on the audio team has allowed me to pursue exponentially.

For the last few years, I have continued to grow my understanding of sound engineering as well as the production systems at both Citygate sites: the latter I consider a huge part of what makes the best problem solvers. Our biggest struggle in this team is the unpredictable, something inevitable when it comes to technology! We face new problems each week, everything from damaged cables to room acoustics issues to people holding microphones wrong (not naming any names), but we always go in with problem-solving hats on, and nobody is left to fix things alone. One of my most useful skills in this case has been my ability to adapt moment to moment and learn quickly enough to find solutions quickly, as is necessary in a live environment. Over time, this has led me to the role of a production lead at Southbourne, and given me incredible opportunities at Bournemouth, where I now work as an AV technician with the events team too.

Running audio, we effectively operate with and as part of the worship team, too. It is important to recognise this as we share the aim of creating immersive worship spaces for the Holy Spirit to enter, giving us all a degree of responsibility on Sunday mornings. This has enabled so much spiritual growth in my life, leading me to a place of peace in my life that I couldn’t have imagined four years ago. This has affected my other areas of life drastically, genuinely transforming my demeanour in a variety of ways. Another lesson I’m still learning from serving is how to lead a team, and this has allowed me to discover a new self-confidence that I previously lacked and a stronger threshold for stress that makes day-to-day life significantly easier at this time of huge change in my life. One of the biggest challenges of this role is the early mornings. Everyone will agree, but that tells you how rewarding it is for us, as we are willing to sacrifice sometimes our only lie-ins of the week for this team and the community that we have grown as the earliest starting serving teams each Sunday. 

For me, the most rewarding part of my journey has probably been helping set up the new Southbourne site over the summer. Working closely with the staff production team - Andy and Xander - almost 24/7, taught me so so much about every area of live audiovisual production to the point where I know the whole system like the back of my hand and can fix any issues super efficiently. This is the level of knowledge I want to get the whole team to, as sharing it with them will strengthen our crew and make everything operate much more smoothly. The most gruelling part of this for me was setting up the lighting, something that had me up on scaffolding 10 feet in the air every day (long after the others had given up on it), learning how it all worked until it was ready to go and usable for Sunday mornings. The satisfaction that comes from something like that is unbeatable, and I cannot recommend serving with production enough for that exact feeling: the same one that you’ll get as part of the team running Sunday mornings behind the scenes and learning how to operate the equipment we use. 

One last thing I’d like to share is something that I’ve found myself repeating to others and myself as my journey developed inside and outside of church, and that is a quote from the show Ted Lasso that perfectly encapsulates my new attitude: Be a goldfish. No matter what goes wrong, I know I have a wonderful God with me who should be the one focus in everything I do, so never let temporary feelings of shame or embarrassment drown him out. It’s been an honour to serve in his name.