The first official weekend for Church Requel at Ontario Christian Fellowship is now behind us and I thought it would be a good idea to write down everything that happened yesterday while it was fresh in my mind. The crew showed up at 2PM to begin our setup -- and we needed every minute of it! I'm pretty sure that the only person who was stressed yesterday was me; everyone else seemed to be working in good cheer. Since it was our first official service at OCF there were many small choices that needed to be made - and needed to be made by me. So each one of our crew came to me at various times to ask if this was what I wanted, or that... or would it be better another way? I'm sure this is a function of "first time" and over time we'll get the setup as efficiently accomplished every week as we normally did over at Mid-Ohio.
I was greeted at 2PM by Dave, the full-time custodial minister at OCF, who lives right behind the church. He saw me pull up and came right over. It was pretty clear he was looking for me. He walked me through every single room we were going to use to make sure everything was the way we wanted it to be. He apologized over and over again that he was going to be out of town next weekend, but he had made sure that people would clean the church chapel area up for our usage that evening. The whole time I was thinking to myself, 'I'd better make sure we leave this place in pristine condition when we are finished.'
Steve Thoman was able to borrow a small platform that would serve as my preaching platform. Steve is planning on building some 4' x 4' modular platform pieces that we can use, but this borrowed platform worked very nicely in the meantime. The platform area is small in the chapel and will (barely) accommodate our band, so an additional space is needed. I preached from the floor when we were here over Easter, but the line of sight wasn't very good. Being a couple feet off the ground makes an amazing difference.
We weren't able to feature our whole band yesterday on "opening day." Our drummer had a family function, so we knew we wouldn't have percussion. An hour before we were scheduled to begin set up, Nate texted me that the other guitarist came home from Hawaii completely sick and wouldn't be able to come. So he was scrambling to find another guitarist. (Thanks Stephen for filling in at the last minute.) While we were in the midst of doing setup, I watched as Nate scrambled to write out the chord progressions... somehow that didn't fill my mind with confidence. But as usual, I was worried over nothing. As it turned out Nate, Trisha and Stephen did an amazing job.
Trisha was also struggling during rehearsal, fighting off a headache. I felt so sorry for her. She told me later that when service time came, she was fine. Nevertheless, I noticed that our sound guy, Bryan, took up an extra chair for her to the platform in case she needed it. So I know they were concerned for her.
Some of our equipment didn't show up in time for our first night at OCF. We have one lighting tree, which sufficed for us at Mid-Ohio. If we used only the one lighting tree at OCF, we'd have to set it up in the middle aisle. Can you say "U-G-L-Y"? So our plan was to buy another lighting tree and set one up on either side. But alas, the lighting equipment didn't arrive. So we had to decide whether or not to use the one lighting tree we had. Apparently Jonathan made the decision just not to go with it at all this weekend. When I learned of that decision, I asked Mark Shaw to go ahead and set it up in the aisle and "see what it looked like." He set it up, just like I asked. Have I mentioned that it was "U-G-L-Y"? I asked him to take it back down. I apologized to Mark, who only laughed good-heartedly. I made a mental note to write and thank Mark for his great attitude and to never, ever again second guess Jonathan or our tech team!
The other piece of equipment that we assumed (never ever assume anything) wouldn't be a big deal was a small, cheap conversion piece to take a VGA cable provided by OCF to the kind of video input we use. I don't even know what that is. All I know is that we didn't have it yesterday and couldn't get one in time. Much of what we do at CR is dependent on video so we had to go with what we had. (Again, I don't fully understand everything I'm writing here...) but the upshot was that the person running our CG, Haleigh, needed to sit upstairs in the balcony and not downstairs with the rest of our tech team. It was 92 degrees outside yesterday, and while the chapel was blessedly air conditioned, it had to be close to a hundred degrees up in the balcony. Haleigh had a great attitude and didn't complain once!
She did, however, call down to me during rehearsal and tell me that none of the words of the 4th song matched what Nate and company were singing. So Nate hurried up to the balcony 30 minutes before the service to edit our slides. (Have I mentioned that I was growing a tad anxious?) I thought to myself that Nate and I had gone over the song words during our Thursday meeting. But in an effort to be more efficient for our meeting, I had typed in the words before our meeting. Our normal custom is to have Nate type them in himself since he knows what words he wants to sing. Once again my personal involvement where it wasn't needed caused us some grief. From now on Nate will be typing in his own words on Thursdays.
We also had set up the communion table in the center aisle, but after looking at it, we decided that this would never do either - the aisle is just too narrow for people to walk around it. It would have been fine at the beginning as people were coming in, but would have been a traffic nightmare when people went to the communion table during the service. So we set up two tables in the front of the chapel. Even that created a bit of a traffic jam. Our future communion table plan is to set up two half-round table tops, which we will set atop the pews on either side of the aisle.
Meanwhile, Steve Thoman had ordered and assembled a new mobile bookstore that would enable us to sell not only our past sermon series, but also offer additional resources for the new and growing disciple of Christ. This 4-sided mobile store is going to be awesome. I had no idea from the photos just how much this would hold. It became obvious that we don't have much to offer right now in resources. So another mental note to go Christian book shopping this week. (Seems like I was making LOTS of mental notes to myself yesterday.)
When 6 o'clock came, we didn't have a lot of people show up at the start of service, but thankfully more came over the course of the next 15 minutes. OCF Pastor Kim Mauer came in right at the beginning and his face was filled with smiles - a great encouragement to me. As I sat in the pew, I thought to myself that this was really different than we were accustomed to, but that this "difference" was all good. We always worry about providing pens for everyone, but at OCF there's a pen in front of everyone in the pew back. Also (what a marvelous benefit) there are NIV Bibles in front of everyone - a tremendous advantage for a new church with many new Christians.
The service went beautifully. Remarkably Nate, Trisha and Stephen were fully engaged in worship. And so was I. Another wonderful benefit to the chapel is that we are not as close to the speakers as we were forced to be at Mid-Ohio. The consequence being that I was able to hear the voices around me so much better than before.
After our greeting time, Pastor Kim came up with me and was so welcoming to our congregation. He emphasized with all our folks, as he has done many times with me, that our relationship is much more of a partnership than only a business-landlord relationship. He told us all that he hoped we would soon outgrow our need for the chapel and would need to move over into their new auditorium space. Our people cheered and clapped.
Another sweet benefit of being in the OCF Chapel was that we could use dark grape juice for communion instead of the white grape juice we had to use (by contract) over at Mid-Ohio. When we came to the communion I mentioned this and I could see smiles spread throughout everyone's faces. Such a small thing!
After communion, we dismissed our elementary children to their classroom. We had four children who went to their class after communion. Afterward the elementary teachers asked if we could dismiss the children even earlier during the service - right after the worship songs - so they could have more time with the kids. Again a great attitude. Again, a note to self for next week!
The sermon went remarkably well. Anyone who has preached week-in and week-out will tell you that he or she grows accustomed to a place and grows comfortable with his or her delivery or words as a result. Clearly this was going to be a "first" for me. And I think I was a little nervous at first. But after a few minutes, I forgot about the place and immersed myself into the teaching.
I noticed as I was teaching that there were several new faces in the congregation. The attendance had doubled from the time we first opened at 6PM - that was good! There were 3 or 4 folks who came over from OCF to see what our service would be like. I met with some of them after the service and they were all very affirming. I wonder if any of them will come back next week?
One of our team members came up to me right after everyone had left. He handed me an Info Card he was sure I'd want to see. One of the people who was there last night came for the very first time and found us on the website the week before. She wrote on her Info Card that she had made a decision for Christ. If nothing else happened yesterday but that - we would have enough reason to rejoice!
We had everything put away by 8:15PM. The team then took 15 minutes to debrief and talk about our experience. They were all quite positive. My last note to self was to remind myself over and over again just how lucky I am to be surrounded by such a dedicated team of people. Most of them weren't ready for the evening to end, so we braved the torrential downpour outside to gather at Applebees for a late meal together. There was so much laughter and good feelings! It was just plain fun! It was the perfect ending to a long day filled with work, but immersed in joy.
