Every Sunday, people walk into churches and experience what looks like a finished product.
The band starts. The lyrics appear. The microphones work. The lights move. The livestream goes live. The message gets heard. The room feels intentional.
At least, that’s the goal.
What most people never see is everything that happened behind Sunday to make those moments possible.
The rehearsal that ran late.
The volunteer who showed up early.
The audio issue that made absolutely no sense until someone found the one routing mistake buried three menus deep.
The camera that worked perfectly yesterday and suddenly decided Sunday morning was a good time to become difficult.
The equipment decisions.
The budgets.
The scheduling.
The planning.
The creative meetings.
The last-minute changes.
The systems that work.
The systems that definitely do not.
That’s the world this publication is about.
Because great Sundays don’t just happen.
Why Behind Sunday exists
Church production can be a strange space.
There is no shortage of information about microphones, consoles, cameras, lighting fixtures, software, computers, and whatever new piece of equipment somebody says will completely change your church.
But gear is only part of the equation.
The bigger questions are usually things like:
How do we make the equipment we already own work better?
How do we build a system our volunteers can actually understand?
When is an upgrade genuinely necessary?
How do we improve the livestream without spending money in the wrong places?
How do we organize production teams without burning people out?
How do audio, video, worship, creative, and communications work together instead of operating like completely separate departments?
And maybe most importantly:
How do we pursue excellence without allowing production to become the mission?
Those are the conversations I want to have here.
This isn’t theory from the sidelines
A lot of what you’ll read on Behind Sunday will come from real problems being worked through in a real church environment.
Sometimes that means figuring out better monitor routing.
Sometimes it means evaluating whether a console upgrade is actually worth the investment.
Sometimes it means rebuilding a broadcast workflow, reorganizing Planning Center, creating a better volunteer structure, troubleshooting Playback, redesigning lobby screens, or trying to figure out how many cameras we really need to record.
And sometimes it means realizing an idea that looked great on paper was not nearly as great once we tried it.
I want to share those parts too.
Not just the polished result.
The process.
The reasoning.
The mistakes.
The compromises.
The budget.
And what I would do differently next time.
Show the work
That is probably the simplest way to describe what I want Behind Sunday to become.
Show the work.
If we build a system, I want to show the diagram.
If we make a gear decision, I want to explain why.
If we create a budget, I want to show the numbers.
If we change a workflow, I want to explain what problem we were trying to solve.
If something fails, I want to talk about that too.
Because the most useful production conversations usually aren’t:
“Here’s the best console.”
They’re more like:
“Here was our church, our team, our budget, our problem, and here’s why this solution made sense for us.”
That context matters.
What we’ll talk about
Behind Sunday will cover a pretty wide range of church production and creative work, including:
Audio, consoles, Dante, IEMs, Waves, Playback, and broadcast mixing
Cameras, live streaming, switching, recording, and video systems
ProPresenter, LED walls, lobby displays, graphics, and creative direction
Worship technology and Sunday workflows
Planning Center, volunteer structures, scheduling, and training
Equipment purchases, upgrade plans, budgets, and system design
Things that worked
Things that didn’t
Things I would absolutely never do again
Some posts will be technical.
Some will be creative.
Some will be about leadership and systems.
Some may simply be the story of what went wrong on Sunday morning and what we learned from it.
But they’ll all come back to the same goal:
better systems, stronger teams, and better Sundays — while keeping the mission bigger than the technology.
Who this is for
Behind Sunday is for the production director with a real budget.
It’s for the creative pastor trying to connect several different departments.
It’s for the worship leader who somehow also became responsible for Playback.
It’s for the volunteer who touched the sound console once and is now apparently “the audio guy.”
It’s for the church trying to improve its online experience.
It’s for the team that wants to get better but doesn’t have a megachurch staff or an unlimited equipment budget.
If some part of your week is spent figuring out how to make Sunday work, this is for you.
We’re just getting started
I have a long list of things I want to break down here.
Real system designs.
Real budgets.
Routing diagrams.
Gear decisions.
Broadcast workflows.
Creative systems.
Volunteer structures.
And plenty of lessons learned the hard way.
For now, Behind Sunday is completely free while we build the community and figure out what is most useful to the people reading it.
So if you work in church production, worship, creative ministry, broadcast, or communications, I’d love for you to subscribe.
And even better, reply or leave a comment and tell me:
What part of church production or creative ministry are you responsible for, and what problem are you trying to solve right now?
There’s a good chance your answer becomes something we dig into here.
Thanks for being here at the beginning.
Carlos Sanchez
Behind Sunday
Behind the work. Elevating the mission.