When the screen at the front of worship works, people rarely notice. They sing the songs, they look at the pictures and their brains are relaxed. If the image, however, is incorrect, their neck muscles almost always overwhelm them. They tighten, swivel their head and often stair menacingly into the balcony.
I can tell you that the tech team in the balcony is stressed enough. The delicate dance they do each week to get us through a worship service is punctuated by tension. Before the service starts they are juggling numerous balls. The lighting in the room. The sound in the room. The image on the screen. Another group of people are tending to the TV ministry: perched at the cameras, managing the sound, putting words on the feed, and selecting the right camera angle to show. Everyone wants to do a good job. No one wants the neck swivel coming their way.
Last Sunday, in the early service, the computer obediently sent the words to the screen and we sang the songs of Christmas with joy. I preached through my sermon and the clicker responded to the pressure in my fingers and the slides changed behind me and in the balcony. In the second service, as we began to sing we could tell it was going to be trouble. The words did not appear. Neck’s swiveled.
If you could have been in the balcony this is what you would have seen. The main computer stopped working. The beach ball of death just spun. The only choice was to shut the computer down and try to reboot, but this would take too much time. Instead, they decided to grab a computer which we use in the TV ministry and which also has the programs we use to control the LED screens. They relocated that computer, started the projection program and loaded my sermon from the server. They unhooked the struggling computer and wired in the substitute computer.
By the time I got to my sermon, it was ready. I pushed the button on my clicker and nothing seemed to happen and then the back screen changed. OK I thought to myself, it's working, but very slowly. I need to push the button a second or two before I need it to change. I struggled in my sermon delivery, it was distracting. I did not understand till later what was happening. I was controlling the screen on the stage, which is behind me and I cannot see. Logan was controlling the screen in the balcony. The substitute computer was only set up to control the front screen. He was waiting for me to advance the slide and then he was pushing the button to control the back screen which was being controlled by the rebooted but unreliable primary computer. It was chaos. The team in the balcony did not show it. They were calm and deliberate. They focused on solving the problems with the tools that they had. I’m so proud of them. Most people would have withered under the pressure. Our team did the opposite, they flourished.
We got through Sunday morning and then had to face Sunday night. The Gloria concert was intertwined with images selected for the screen to help tell the musical story. Lots of time had gone into developing beautiful and compelling videos to accentuate the choir and the orchestra. The tech team started to work immediately. They solved the two screen problem of the substitute computer, they copied and reloaded the Gloria program. After an hour of work the computers were ready for the performance. The team stepped away for about 30 minutes for lunch and then were back at their posts. They had started the morning at 7:00 AM, they finished the day after 8 PM.
We made an appointment with the computer genius in Dallas who told us that the computer’s brain was broken. Repairs are being made. It should be up and running by Christmas morning.
When things go wrong, and they will, here is a plan of action. One, take a deep breath and don’t let the chaos of that moment invade your soul, keep on worshipping. If you don’t know the words, hum along with the tune. If you can’t hum, smile. Two, relax your neck muscles and instead of swiveling backwards, tilt your head down and say a prayer for the people in the tech booth. It's a high wire, high stress place to serve. If something is not working, they are struggling to get it corrected. Pray for their spirits to have peace. Pray for the minds to have wisdom to know what to do. Three, tell the team thanks on Sundays when stuff goes mostly right. Don’t wait till it's perfect. Encourage, encourage, encourage.