One of those days

Well, today was the day I always heard about. It's the day when everything that could have gone wrong in church planting did. I started off the day tired already. It was a late night, getting back late from a long drive from Virginia. One of the Sunday morning rituals for me is to move the van out of the driveway to make room for the truck that comes in and pulls our trailer out of the garage. And so it began - a dead car battery. We were able to get it jumped pretty quickly, so disaster averted. Once we got to the school, things continued to go south. We had sound issues, a broken guitar that led to a weird mic situation and feedback. Then it was the computer's turn to go haywire. For some reason all of a sudden the display on my computer went crazy. Every slide for every song and every announcement suddenly went crazy and resized itself, including changing the size of the font. With a mad scramble we managed to fix it. But then about 5 minutes before we started I realized that one of our songs was wrong. We were playing "Nothing but the blood" - but not the old version, but the newer Matt Redman version. In other words, wrong lyrics, wrong order. We scrambled to type it in as fast as possible.

It was a wild morning. And I suppose we should have expected it. It was the first time we celebrated communion as a church. It turned out to be a very powerful morning. A morning that I will never forget. We experienced something this morning that I haven't seen yet. Despite all of the things that went wrong - the presence of God was powerful. As Alastair Vance tweeted - "Egg on your face, devil."

As we were cleaning up, one of our key leaders said "It's over! Nothing can go wrong." We had a good laugh. And then we noticed that this week's message failed to record. Geez.

Posted in: Church planting,Communion,Durham,Story Church