Pierre Robidoux
Laval, Que.
It was at the height of the pandemic that Pierre Robidoux began to ponder retirement. “I was working from home. I was 65. I thought, ‘Maybe it’s time to do something else.’ ”
A senior engineer with a major national broadcaster, Robidoux had spent 41 years of his life working in both the production and technical facets of broadcasting, and he started to wonder if maybe there were churches that could use help from someone with his expertise.
A few years earlier he had been invited to speak at a large conference in the U.S. aimed at people who do church video productions. The experience made him realize such training is lacking for churches north of the 49th parallel.
Robidoux says throughout his career he was continually giving and receiving on-the-job training. Even pastors take courses, read books, go on sabbaticals and retreats to sharpen their skills, he explains. But all too often the A/V crew learns just enough to get by. As a result Christian productions, he says, are “not always up to what they should be.”
He believes passionately church productions ought to be of excellent quality and that A/V teams should be aiming high. With that in mind he produced a series of short, accessible training videos intended to help churches improve the quality of their livestream productions.
The 15-session course can be completed in just over twoand-a-half hours on YouTube, and covers everything from the selection of the technical team to configuring equipment properly and setting up a micro-TV studio in a church.
To date, he has assisted a handful of churches in Ontario and Quebec, consulting on-site as well as via Zoom, email and telephone. But he dreams of the day when there are more professionally trained people working in church A/V, and there is an association of Canadian Christian A/V technicians.
“When you work you can become a specialist over the years and that becomes a part of your identity,” Robidoux says. “When you retire it’s gone. But you don’t have to just throw it all away. It can be helpful to others. You never know what the Lord can do with what you’ve learned.”