Secret Weapon

“Though one may be overpowered, two can defend themselves. A cord of three strands is not quickly broken.” (Ecclesiastes 4:12 NIV)

Tech arts, such as video lighting and production, and ministry may be an unlikely career combination, but such are the tracks I see on the path when I look back over my shoulder. I was blessed to get a good start. My high school years were dramatically influenced by my involvement in a thriving youth ministry during the Jesus Movement of the 1970s. Our weekly outreach nights featured live music, cool lighting, special effects, drama, and slide shows, all augmenting the message. 

Students were encouraged to get involved in leadership on the ministry team or on the tech team. I ended up on the ministry team but also helped the tech team. Skills and relationships from both roles prepared me well for my unique career path ahead, in and outside of the Church. After high school, it was full steam ahead into ministry, and yet the parallel tech arts calling continued. On a youth pastor’s salary, I needed extra income to make ends meet, so I freelanced as a lighting and special effects technician for live events. 

After ten years I left youth work and shifted full-time into the world of event and video production: at Disney for five years, then more than a decade of commercial and film work all over Southern California. A move to Amarillo, Texas, brought me back to working in the Church. For the next fifteen years, I served as the director of production services for a megachurch while still freelancing as a video lighting tech on the side. 

All during this journey, I watched as many of my Christian tech colleagues struggled with the challenges and temptations inherent in these two environments. Both can be hard on your spiritual life. 

The secular environment can be a lonely place when no one on the crew shares your values and your desire to stay faithful to your spouse, your conscience, or your God. However, the church environment can also present challenges. The Body of Christ may be all around you; you’re hearing the Word and are exposed to worship; but are you benefiting personally? Concentrating on the job and correctly hitting the light cues during a service is not conducive to engaging in worship, I’ve found. But church members, observing you attending (working) every service, can assume you are spiritually healthy, when in reality you are as empty as any crew person out on a secular film set. This is especially true if your relationships with your coworkers at church are as shallow as in the world. 

Looking back, I see now why my friends on the old youth-group tech team also struggled more spiritually than those on the ministry team. They received much less relational care from the leadership than did the ministry team members. I had not noticed then, but the pattern is clear to me now. 

The pattern can be even more difficult in the secular realm. Working on long feature films, twelve-hour days, six days a week, away from home, often isolated without even a shallow Christian friend on the crew is a recipe for disaster. The temptation to tumble down the rat hole of some kind of rush can become strong. Turning to something like drugs, sex, drinking, etc., to feel connected and alive becomes very real. 

Any vocational calling that isolates you from spiritually meaningful relationships and experiences can cause you to fall off the wagon. Yet I had the fortitude to survive and even thrive during my career in these environments. How did I stay faithful, when I was on the road, on the film set, or backstage as loneliness, boredom, and hunger of many kinds became the knee-deep mud I was trudging through? What was the secret weapon? 

It was the pursuit of intentional fellowship. I purposely pursued the fellowship of others who shared my vocational calling, creative passions, and faith. 

In the late 1990s, I began recruiting fellow Christian lighting, video, and audio coworkers to join me in volunteering to serve the nonprofit C.S. Lewis Foundation with their events. We would use our tech skills to enhance the quality of the foundation’s live events, capturing their content, and helping them leverage that content to fulfill their mission. While serving together we grew strong supportive relationships that extended way beyond the few times a year we worked together. The men and women who met through these events stayed in contact and recruited each other to work on their crews outside the Foundation events—a real network of Christian tech arts people was developing. 

Until recently, this fellowship had no real structure or name. Then, a small group of us got together and formed an official 501(c)(3) nonprofit called The Guild Fellowship. It is now working to expand its fellowship-building impact to other isolated Christian tech arts people. We are blessing the foundation and groups like The Cultivating Project, impacting the lives of their event attendees, but more than that, strengthening the faith and fortitude of all members through intentional fellowship. 

It took hard work and much prayer, though. As the art industries expanded in the modern age, the evangelical church chose to disengage. It withdrew and even spoke against the messages conveyed by the arts as they became more secular and the moral impact of the content they produced became more negative. This withdrawal left the content creation to those who did not know God. This pulling away not only impacted the leadership and content creators, but it also left those Christians who still worked in that environment more isolated and vulnerable. 

 In recent decades, this trend has begun to change. There is a new generation of Christian creative content producers boldly moving back into event production, filmmaking, theater, writing, and other visual arts. They are reclaiming a place in the world of creative expression. This is not just happening at the producer level; the same thing is happening at the rank-and-file tech arts crew level as well. 

Unfortunately, churches again can be slow to offer much support. That is why entities like Cultivating and The Guild Fellowship are taking up the challenge and ministering to Christian artists and tech arts people.

Once healthy Christian fellowship is in place, amazing things can happen. Multiple times Christian coworkers have, without prompting, confessed to me strong failings—from the married lighting technician who had a one-night stand with the makeup artist, to the sound man wrestling with guilt from a homosexual encounter to the theater crew member who shared with me how he struggled with visiting massage parlors when he was out on the road. These types of confessions became restoration moments. And they are among some of the many fortitude-building experiences that happen when Christian fellowship happens on the job.

Christian tech arts people are not the only ones who experience the challenges of isolation in the secular environment or even in the Church. The fortitude that comes from intentional fellowship can be a powerful secret weapon for all of us, in every profession and every creative endeavor. 

“Cotswold Cottage with Crabapples,” is courtesy of Lancia E. Smith and is used with her glad permission for Cultivating.

Kirk Manton

Kirk Lloyd Manton is a layman poet. His career path has led him through alternating seasons working inside and outside the church: youth pastor, film lighting freelancer, church production director, film studio COO, and now, communications project manager – back in a church.

Kirk has a bachelor’s degree in religious studies from The Union Institute. His writing was ignited while serving the technical needs of the presenters at C.S. Lewis Foundation events. For twenty years those friendships have inspired and nurtured Kirk’s writing. He continues to recruit and lead volunteer Christian event technicians for his Guild Fellowship.

He has published two books: a poetry/devotional book, The Grace of Rain, and a photo/poetry book, Listening Like Breathing (2018 Texas Authors Association’s Book of the Year for Poetry).

Kirk and his wife Rachelle now live near Akron, Ohio to be near the grand-babies.