Yesterday on our morning service, I made a boo-boo….I will have to back up a little and give you some background to the story so that you can see how a mistake on a service takes a while to develop.
We concluded our Annual Music Department Promotion last Wednesday night with an Open House, inviting prospects to take a tour of our department facilities, complete with a great dessert spread primarily by Cecilia Davis, a member of our church. Because of this, we did not have time to go over the morning service with the Orchestra (which we normally do after I release the choir to go to Visitation).
Sunday morning, I hastily ran over the transitions with our pianist for the morning and thought that we had everything ready to go. We sang our first song, Blessed Be The Name Of The Lord (Strong Tower) and transitioned into the next song, The Solid Rock, without a hitch. However, at the end of the first chorus, it suddenly hit me that we had not worked out how to do that transition back into the next verse. Do we hold the last note for one beat? For two beats? Not at all?
Let me also say that I had planned on skipping verse 2 in the order of service and did not have it in power point. So, in the heat of the moment, and in trying to make sure that I gave a clear conducting view as to how to make the transition, I commenced to singing verse 2 from my folder (forgetting the order) rather than follow my power point monitor, which was showing verse 3. The congregation didn’t know what to do. Do they sing verse 3 that’s on the screens? Do they sing verse 2 that I’m singing? You can imagine the lack of unity.
I think most of the congregation surrendered and sang verse 2 with me, especially since that hymn is a familiar one. That’s not the end of the fun, however. At the end of verse 2, I made another mistake and decided (again, in the heat of the moment) that if I move on to verse 3 that the power point operator will jump back and catch it again. Wrong. He kept on moving through the slides to verse 4. So, here we go again! I don’t think the congregation stuck with me as much on this verse! At the end of my verse 3 (the power point’s verse 4), we stopped. Whew!
In my next entry, I’ll share some principles to follow in this situation and some others to follow to help avoid it.
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