ChurchHacks.com

Not much can happen in a worship service without the people in the sound booth making it happen. Sound engineers have, in most cases, complete control over delivering the stuff from the platform to the peeps in the pews. Unless you’ve dabbling in a new avant-garde form of worship and preaching using techniques from the silent movie era, you rely heavily on your amplification system. There are very few elements in your worship service that take place without being routed through your sound system. If you’ve ever participated in a church service where the power went out mid-service, you’ll know what I’m talking about.

The “sound guys”, as we often refer to them, are important to the success of a worship gathering. In many ways, they can either make the service operate smoothly or crash with one slip of the finger. Following is a list of tips and ideas to help the sound engineers in their ministry of enhancing and supporting the worship experience and ensuring the delivery of biblical teaching.

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In order to communicate the plans to implement differentiated worship, Jamie Overholser, Pastor of Worship at Parker Hill Community Church, wrote a parable to help explain how different people groups prefer and enjoy different worship styles. Following is that parable, reproduced by permission. I’ll leave the application of this parable about worship in the church to your imagination and the comment section at the end of this post.

Thanks, Jamie!

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As I look back at my formative years, I see music and musical influences appearing as early as I can recall. I remember my brother’s Bee Gee’s drum set, the stack of Barry Manilow vinyls my mom had, and my other brother’s Iron Maiden and Kiss albums. In fact, I claimed the Kiss Destroyer album as my own because I developed an affection for it, the only way a four-year-old can. Crocodile Rock, The Warrior, Mr. Roboto, and Photograph were some of my favorite songs. Popular music was an integral part of my life much like a kidney or my epidermis. Because of my religious upbringing, I was prohibited from listening to much of the music that I liked, although, that hardly prevented me from continuing to buy cassettes and listening to the radio. By the way, dad, that Def Leppard cassette was not part of a research project for English class. I’m sure you already knew that.

Associated with my “devil music” prohibition was getting a steady dose of the classics at church on Sunday. By classics, I mean hymns. Though they compared very little to my taste in music, I tolerated them to a point of mild enjoyment. The songs were about God, people enjoyed singing them, and I was sure God enjoyed it so that was good enough for me.

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