Worship Leader - September, 2006

SPEAKING By Kent Morris

Web-Enabled Worship

And there’s the library I used for research and papers.” Reminiscing during a drive through Chattanooga’s downtown area, I proudly highlighted a college landmark to my two boys. “But, Dad, why would you hang out there so much?” My younger son’s query took me aback. “Well, to look up topics and find answers for upcoming tests,” I stated flatly. “But, Dad, why didn’t you just Google it from your room?” His follow-up defines his world—one where the Internet has always existed and the answer to any question is just a keystroke away. The new world order lays bare its secrets to anyone with a DSL line. Resources have emigrated from the hallowed halls of academia to the bedroom down the hall.

At Our Fingertips

In The World Is Flat, Thomas Friedman explains how our post-industrial wired community relays each bump and jolt instantly throughout the system. News happens in realtime and isolation is denied to everyone. However, immediate transmittal should not be used solely for negative impact. Technology can be used to provide worship with split-second correlation. For example, I was recently in Singapore mixing for Paul Baloche at a worship conference held in the national stadium. As Paul laid out the mechanics of leading worship, he emphasized the need to keep instruments in tune. Paul’s son David, an avid technologist and keen listener, quickly Googled out a photo of a Boss TU series tuner and sent it to the video screens flanking Paul. Immediately,

language and culture barriers evaporated with a single pixilated image. A few minutes later, as drummer Carl Albrecht explained the beauty and usefulness of a metronome, David captured an image of the very unit Carl was holding and placed it onscreen along with several Web sites dedicated to the art of worship drumming. A thousand words more would have added nothing to Carl’s demonstration. Attendees from seventeen nations had already grasped the essentials of the message seconds after the visual was shown.

Limitless
Options

Continuous

high speed Internet access frees the visual element from its resident image inventory in the same way Google frees students from the limits of their town library. In the near future, a church tech booth without access may as well be without a mixing console. For now, though, the value of a download-enabled booth is its “plus” status. In other words, Web access is not yet mission critical; that is, the service functions well if the connection is lost. However, when the Internet is functional, it jumps the gap between the messenger and the receiver. As Mark Roberts has pointed out in his column on several occasions, when technology that is essential for our communication outcome fails, the purpose of sharing the Word is hampered. And this is when technology does more harm than good. For instance, a person forced to speak in public may

assemble an elaborate PowerPoint slide-show to bolster his or her performance. However, when the projector goes down, their presentation moves from boring to useless as they struggle in vain to coax the projector into illumination. Web-enabled worship should not look like a Borg assimilation; it should be a value-added servant until all the bugs are worked out.

Clear the Clutter

The Enabling Trail begins at the trailhead with the ditching of hardware devices. For the generation raised on Walkmans and Discmans, the thought of a cassette-less and CD-less environment is difficult to comprehend. Cleaning out a closet recently, I unearthed a Sony Discman. My eight year old fingered its surface, examined its lone CD and exclaimed to his brother, “It must be a really old iPod. Look, it only holds, like, ten songs.” Life is now simply lines of code. It takes up a lot less room that way.