Setup

A media checklist for Easter and Christmas services

By Mambo Mutinda · Founder & CEO, TajiCast

Easter and Christmas are the Sundays that matter most — the biggest crowds of the year, the most visitors deciding what they think of your church, and the most moving parts on stage. They're also when media teams are under the most pressure. A little extra preparation is what keeps them feeling effortless. Here's a practical checklist.

Why the big services are different

A normal Sunday has a rhythm your team knows cold. The big services break that rhythm: extra songs, guest musicians, dramas or readings, a fuller stage, more people in the room, and a larger online audience watching. Every one of those is a new variable — and new variables are where things go wrong. Add the fact that many attendees are first-timers forming a first impression, and the stakes are real.

Two weeks out: plan

1. Build a detailed run sheetEvery element in order — songs, readings, videos, the sermon, transitions. See the service run sheet guide.
2. Gather every asset earlyLyrics, videos, slides, and any guest materials collected and loaded well ahead, not the night before.
3. Confirm the guestsGuest musicians or speakers — what do they need? Inputs, monitors, a soundcheck slot?
4. Plan the streamIf more people will watch online, check your bitrate, bandwidth, and platforms.

The week of: rehearse

The single biggest predictor of a smooth big service is a full tech rehearsal — not just a soundcheck, but running the whole service with every element in place.

1. Run it end to endWalk the entire service so every transition and cue is tested, not assumed.
2. Soundcheck the guestsUnfamiliar musicians are the most common surprise. Get them dialled in early.
3. Test the stream for realDo a private test stream and watch it on a phone — sound, picture, no dropped frames.
4. Check your backupsSpare cables, a backup of your media, a plan for if the main computer dies.

On the day: reduce the live load

The more your team has to do manually during a packed, high-energy service, the more can go wrong. So wherever you can, take jobs off people:

• Pre-load everything so there's no building slides on the fly.
• Assign clear roles so nobody's covering three jobs at once. See church media team roles.
• Automate what you can. Letting scripture appear automatically removes one frantic manual job at exactly the moment your booth is busiest — and a guest preacher going off-script won't leave the screen blank.

After: capture it

The big services are also your best content. The transcript and recording of an Easter or Christmas message are worth keeping and sharing — many people will look them up later.

The one-line version

Big services aren't about doing more heroic work on the day — they're about preparing enough beforehand, and removing enough manual load, that the day itself feels like a normal Sunday with a bigger crowd.