Worship Confessional: 03.27.11

It took a couple of days for me to recover from Sunday enough to write about it.

Sunday was… what’s the word… CHALLENGING. It was a small staffed week at Paseo because it was the end of Spring Break. Just me and my guitar for music and just Greg for sermon. However, just because we had less people on the platform didn’t mean that the attendance was less. Nope. Still had full houses both gatherings.

Let’s start at the beginning:

Brian and I get there at 8ish (like usual) to set up. I wasn’t here last Sunday because we were in Phoenix, so when I started to look for some of our sound gear to start setting up, it was like a wild goose chase. We had a lot of people step in to help last week, but because they don’t necessarily run the technical side of things on a regular basis, gear had been placed in different locations.

What should have taken me 30 minutes to set up and get going, ended up taking me 1.5 hours… right up to the start-up of service. Greg was great. When he showed up, he ran around looking for stuff with me, found most of it, let us start a few minutes late and still delivered a flawless message.

We actually started the first song without a working vocal mic for me. So, I just led acoustically. Justin (one of our worship team members) finally stepped up to the board while I was up and remedied the situation (it’s tough being being behind the sound board AND on the platform at the same time, haha!). However bad we started out, we seemed to find our footing by the middle of the second song. And by “we”, I mean “me”.

I had never been so glad for a very short set. Our Sunday Setlist was only 3 songs because we had planned a Prayer Walk over Downtown El Paso for Paseo attenders that morning (you can do that with church plants):

1.  Desert Song – Brooke Fraser
2.  Grace Like Rain – Todd Agnew
3.  Hosanna – Brooke Fraser

Once we took care of technical difficulties (I do believe Satan lives in sound equipment), you would think we’d have no more distractions. Yeah. No such luck today.

One of our attenders, Becky, is a schizophrenic gal that works in the adult entertainment industry. I’m not sure if she came to church high on the wrong meds or what, but she decided she was going to stand up for most of the service adjusting her pants… in the wrong direction. Greg got an eyefull… but he just kept on going. Our sweet gal also decided to stay for both gatherings. During worship, she also enjoyed the music so much she decided to lead the rhythm section that I didn’t schedule. She clapped, LOUDLY, on 1, 3, 2.5, 3.75 and 4.25. This week also happened to be a week I didn’t use in-ear monitors.

I can’t remember if I giggled or not because I was just so worn down during the services, but I WILL tell you I prayed… A LOT!

However… even with ALL the distractions, I still feel the gatherings went extremely well. We had Nate & Andy share their story:

CLICK HERE to access the podcast from this week. It was a short sermon, but a great one in my opinion.

With that said, I’m ok if we don’t have this kind of a weekend ever again. I know Greg and I are still recovering from Sunday. It honestly zapped us. Please pray for us… for rest and recovery. For those of you who have had similar days at work, you know exactly what I’m asking prayer over.

Now, your turn. What’s your craziest ministry/work-day-gone-bad story?
GO!