There was a popping sound and suddenly the lights went out, the electric guitars went dead, the sound system shut down, and the emergency lights in the church building flashed on. It was about 7:55 am. Our worship team run-through happens at 8 am. The first of our two morning services starts at 9 am.
Mike, who was running the sound board, is an electrician. As he came walking down the aisle of the church, he said, “The whole building is out.” We quickly discovered that it wasn’t just our church building. There was some type of power outage affecting the area.
This was not very good timing. People would begin arriving for the 9 o’clock service in less than one hour. The most obvious and most pressing question became, “What are we going to do?”
Can a church that relies heavily on electronic sound equipment and instruments; and projection devices and computer technology, provide a worship service in a dark building with no electrical power?
Teresa had placed a call to Com Ed, our electric utility, and was told that they expected to have power restored by “somewhere around 10 o’clock.” Hmm, our first service begins at 9. This was not very good timing. Oh yeah, I mentioned that already, didn’t I?
So, we went and found lots of candles. We grabbed the acoustic guitars. We opened the skylight in our sanctuary—which we normally keep closed because the light from it washes out our projector screen.
Our church drum kit is electronic. I thought about seeing video of people playing overturned buckets out on the streets, as percussion instruments, so we grabbed a bunch of buckets of various sizes and Bob set those up.
By about 8:15 we were ready to try a run-through with our new make-shift set-up.
Guess what? It was fun. It was different. We were flying by the seat of our pants and we were loving it. Several early birds had already arrived as we finished our run-through and they said, “Hey, that was great. It sounded terrific. We love the un-plugged, acoustic feel. It’s really neat.”
When we gathered for prayer, as we usually do, just before the start of the service, Rose led us in a wonderful prayer. I could sense that God was going to do something terrific.
And He did.
In fact, we had such a blast in our candlelit 9 o’clock service that when the power came back on around 10:30, several of us from the worship team huddled up and decided we would go ahead and do a candlelight, un-plugged service at 11 o’clock, too. Why not? It was such a neat experience at 9, we figured we should give the 11 o’clock folks the experience, too.
After both services, numerous people came to me and said things like this:
“We should do that again. It was fantastic.”
“The Spirit in the service was so powerful.”
“I love the candle light, it creates a nice soothing atmosphere for a nap.” […Okay, there’s always one or two wise guys in every group.]
I said to several people today, “You know what? Christianity has been around for over 2,000 years. For the vast majority of that time there was no electricity and, yet, people managed to gather together to worship and praise God. We’ll figure out how to do this without electricity.”
And we did….well, with God’s help, we did.
Jesus said this phrase: "For where two or three have gathered together in My name, I am there in their midst." Matt.18:20. Today, we were reminded that we don’t need technology or electricity to have a rich and meaningful time of worship. We just need willing hearts and the presence of God.
It was a great day!
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