refine is a good word


if only we were as aware before the service as we were at the end, maybe this week's world communion sunday service would have felt like less of a trainwreck. from chris' knowing admission that translating an entire worship service "takes time" to feedback i've received from the very few people i've talked to about the service, consensus seems to be that the way the whole thing went down sunday morning was a little like forcing a a square peg through a round hole. it'll probably go, but something's going to end up broken. the common breaking point sunday morning seemed to be the congregation's patience. you could feel the restlessness like it was leaning against you. i could see eyes rolling. i could feel my own doing the same. my sister-in-law and brother-in-law looked liked they were being held against their will. all that being said, it was almost admirable, the way the congregation waited the proceeding out as to not offend anyone by getting out while the getting was good. first, let's take a look at what went wrong...

1) so, in all of the preparation for this mash-up of a service, not one person wondered aloud, "so, if we translate every part of the service, we'll be here twice as long, right?" i mean, no one? it didn't cross anyone's mind??? that seemed to be the case. as chris, more or less, apologized for the length and thanked us for our patience, he, more or less, admitted that this was the case. and that...that is poor planning. that is the lack of awareness that i speak about. that is the type of mistake that i told julie that we couldn't afford to make. that is what makes us laughable at times. and not ha-ha laughable but "i would rather laugh than cry" laughable. just sad. so, we ran late. just under an hour late, which in the grand scheme of all of our lives is not that much time. the painful part was not being alerted to the possibility of it beforehand. but that was out of the question, because our worship leaders didn't realize it until it was already happening. and that's too bad.

2) when putting together worship services that were out of the ordinary while i served on a couple different church staffs, we tended to practice them. a lot. we didn't practice a lot just to put people out or have an alternative to a regular sunday night program or to waste time. everyone needed to be on the same page. when common ground in huntsville joined forces for a home and home worship event with another huntsville church plant, it was a great idea for our worship teams to play and lead worship together, but had we decided that we could have just gotten together on sunday morning, pull something out of our ass and do our thing, it would have sounded like crap. this past sunday, figuratively, sounded like crap a lot of the time. not the individual elements necessarily (although, wow, could we get just one more verse of that offertory?), but the fact that our translator was never sure what he was supposed to translate, the offertory team used most of the offertory time to set up and then they sang or the technical difficulties that delayed the start of the service and were present throughout. practice doesn't always make perfect, but it does help make a person feel like the worship leaders were given their part before the morning of the service.

3) i have never spoken to a group with the help of a translator, and sarah tells me that it can be quite awkward and unnerving, so i will give julie the benefit of that doubt, but wow. i wasn't sure if she was so loud and animated for the sake of our guests or because she was nervous. to me, though, the entire experience was like listening to twenty minutes of a crying caroline having a conversation with nails on a chalkboard.

4) i don't know if i mentioned this, but the service was really, really long.

what went right?

1) frank. that's it. that's the list. our translator extraordinaire. frank stole the show and hopefully gave everyone something posititve to remember the experience by. it did me. he was at the beck and call of both of our pastors and handled every one of their requests beautifully. he was humble. charming. and very respectful of his place in the service. good job, frank.

like i mentioned earlier, this is not to say that the individual elements of the service were all bad. the hispanic music team did a fine job with the offertory. to quote my brother-in-law, the connection of the two parables was "soft", but the message was fine and relevant to the day as a whole. communion was had and was good, even if the memory of my "body" falling on the ground before i ate it paled in comparison to jack's "blood" being ripped from him so that a couple folks could drink directly from the cup. mmmmmm....backwash. this is to say that something championed as a wonderful day of togetherness and overcoming obstacles should have been more intentional about being put together so there would be fewer obstacles to overcome.

i mentioned in sunday school prior to the service that i have been struggling with feeling a connectedness to our hispanic "ministry", and i don't know if that changed sunday. it's not like it was that congregation's fault that we weren't prepared. and i do think i now have a man-crush on frank. but if we are to make a difference in this community, whether it's with hispanics or blacks or whites or purples that are not currently connected to us, we have to be better than we were sunday during worship. we have to be more thoughtful. more polished. and more aware that our room for error decreases with every misstep.

we have to be aware enough to not set ourselves up for failure and announce that we will be expecting 500(!?!?!...really???) people to our building the sunday before halloween (after taking two years off, the random figure we came up with to set our bar was 500?) . we have to refine before we screw up and not after.

sunday, in theory, was a good day. and in practice, there were positives to build on. there could have been more, though.