Immersion Worship

It’s Creative Chaos day over at Los’s blog.

My entry this week is more of synopsis of a different type of creativity; the ‘let’s mmake do with that we’ve got’ type.

Last Sunday was Mother’s Day. The facility that we normally hold our services holds a Mother’s Day brunch; it’s the only day of the year that we can’t have a Sunday morning service there. Last year we did Saturday night there, but this year we decided to find another location nearby and hold a Sunday morning service. The location was just a couple of miles away, easy to find, and could accommodate us well.

When we got there, it was a slightly different matter. As is often the case in these types of scenarios, not all bases had been covered during the planning process. We discovered a distinct lack of power outlets, no loading bay, a ceiling too low for our projector screen and speaker stacks, and various other issues meaning we had to get creative with out setup.

I’ve always known that my team were awesome, but they really showed it on Sunday:

1. With no loading bay, it was a case of rolling everything in through the front door. With a trailer full of Road Ready cases, rolling apparatus, and staging, everyone chipped in to offload the trailer and get it all in place through the front door.

2. Our sound system usually runs on a dedicated ground, 240v circuit of clean power. Our sound team stripped the system down to the bare essentials and ran the entire thing off of two 120v outlets; board, processing rack, antennae, speakers.

3. With the projection screen so low, our video team brought the projector to front row, sat it on a small plastic table we found in some back room, ran a long VGA cable, and had the video sat towards the front, stage left.

4. The low ceiling meant we couldn’t stack our speakers as normal. So we did away with the subs and used the full range capability of the mains (we sacrificed some of the low-end doing this, but it wasn’t bad). Rather than put them on their usual stands, we just rolled in the now-empty Road Ready cases that the speakers are transported in, and stood the speakers on top of them. Perfect height.

5. With no kitchen facility to speak of, the hospitality team scrambled to get industrial amounts of coffee from the nearest Starbucks, and set everything up in the main hall, to the side of the seating, stage right. There was a brief moment of confusion when we didn’t know which coffee container had decaf in, but some quick coffee education from my wife on the taste differences between caf and decaf, it was quickly and accurately determined.

So with the band stripped down to an ‘unplugged’ type set (two acoustic guitars, one vocal), it had a real coffee-house vibe going on, and ended up being a really great morning with an absolutely killer message from Scott.

That’s this week’s Creative Chaos.