Matthew Starner

Today was one of those days.

It began as any normal Sunday. We meet in a movie cinema, so every week we haul our equipment and set up everything. When I went out to hook up the trailer, I couldn’t get it to hook up to my truck. I spent nearly 15 minutes fiddling with it before it finally worked. Then as we were setting up, we had problems with some of the stage lighting not working properly. Our brand new digital drums died before we started our warm up, and the computer was refusing to play the video clip we needed for the message.

This was just not a good day.

So when we’re in the midst of things crashing and burning around us, what can we do? As is said so often in showbiz: “The show must go on.” The worship service has to happen. So take a second to stop and think through all the problems around you. What can we do without? What can be replaced? What do we need to really try to fix?

In our case, we sent someone to pick up our acoustic drums. We don’t bring them anymore because of the new digital ones, but they would have to stand in for a week. We got a couple people working on the lights and they worked out the kinks, and we decided to cut the video short. Fortunately for us, all this happened when we were an hour from starting the service, so there was plenty of time to troubleshoot and work things through in an orderly manner. But this has certainly got me thinking about what would happen if this took place just minutes from lift off, or worse yet – during the service.

Are your people all trained to know what to do in a equipment or technology related “emergency”? Take some time with your teams and be sure they are. It’s the difference between a glitch becoming a catastrophe or a discrete problem.

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And just so you know, even though the day started out rough, the service still went great – proof that even though the problems around us seem so great, it won’t stop God!