Sunday Recap – July 3, 2011

We had a guest speaker today, a missionary to the Philippines, who gave a great message on “The Mission of God”. This post is part of the Sunday Setlist blog carnival at The Worship Community.

I’d like to say everything went great this morning, but we definitely had our mishaps today! The band and singers did a great job, but right from the beginning I felt like I was off the mark. First, I messed up the order of service when I started the service with our first song, instead of letting the other pastor start with the welcome, sending the other pastors scrambling to readjust the service order on the fly.  “God is With Us Now” and “Always” went fine, both great songs!

We have been experimenting with click tracks, and we had a couple that we were going to try today. Most of the click tracks/loops I’ve been using have come from Praise Charts, so the click/loop goes exactly with their arrangements, which works great since the majority of our lead sheets come from there. It has definitely been a learning experience! I guess we need days like this to help us learn from our mistakes.  During “The Power of the Cross”, I missed a couple of beats in the turnaround back to verse 2 (those dreadful 2/4 measures!), so we were off by two beats from the loop. I stopped the click in the middle of the song, but only after fumbling around trying to move the cursor with the trackpad on my laptop over to the right button. I discovered only after the service that pressing the space bar does the same thing. We finished the song fine, but I’ sure it was very distracting. In the next service I thought for sure we would conquer it – no problem! Well, during that same song in the next service, the battery died in my in-ear pack, so I lost the click and everything else! I had to whip out the earbuds, stop the click and play the rest with just the house sound.  To top it off, when I listened back to the recording of the live-stream, to my horror, I heard the click coming through the live stream! Whoops! Wow – what else could go wrong!  It’s really too bad, too, because that was the first time we’ve done that song here, and I was really looking forward to it. Both times today, there were issues.

So, a lot of mistakes today, but I sure learned a lot, and won’t repeat any of them (hopefully…)! As I told the team as we prayed for the second service, “We’ve had smoother…”, but also how good it is know that eve when we mess up, God can still use us! Who knows how God chose to use my bad day to bless someone else! You can catch it all on the video… ( I debated whether to even put it up or not, but, I gotta keep it real, right…) You can also see the Planning Center details for this service.

• “All The Earth Will Sing Your Praises” (Paul Baloche)
• “Indescribable” (Laura Story)
• “You Gave Your Life Away” (Paul Baloche and Kathryn Scott)
• “Jesus Messiah” (Chris Tomlin)

• “The Star Spangled Banner” (both verses)
• “America, The Beautiful”
• “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”
• “Hallelujah, What A Savior”
• “Lead Me To Calvary”