when it all goes wrong

Have you ever had a service where everything seemed to go wrong? I had one of those a couple weeks ago.

I was praying with my team before our first service, I saw the 2 minute countdown begin as I said "amen" and we headed out onto the stage. As I was tuning my guitar and preparing to welcome our congregation, my keys player runs over and says "hey man, the computer's dead. You need to stall!" There was 45 seconds left on the clock.

The computer he was talking about cued both the tracks and the keys. We just lost both because I forgot to plug it in. I've never forgotten to plug it in before!

Anyway, as he was working on getting it going, here's what I did:

I welcomed the congregation as usual. The countdown had ended. It was time to start. I had to. But it was a little different than most weeks. Usually I welcome during the intro of the first song. So I started strumming through chords on my guitar and welcomed the church. I said something like this:

"Welcome out! I'm excited you're here this morning. If you can't tell, we're going to do things a little bit different this morning. To be honest, that wasn't the plan - but we're having some technical problems on stage this morning. So let's pray, then we proceed to worship."

After I prayed, I went into the chorus of a song our church is very familiar with. And we worshiped.

After a couple of times through the chorus, my keys player cued me that the computer was up and running. From there, I faded out us out of the chorus and we started the song we planned.

I did 3 things in this situation I want you to take note of:

1.    I told my congregation about the issues - don't try to hide it if something major is wrong. Just tell people. They get it. And they won't feel like you're hiding something.

2.    Know the songs your church is familiar with - the ones they can jump right into no matter what. This is good to do anyway, but it's especially helpful in moments like I just described.

3.    Pray. When you're leading, always lead with prayer.

Always be ready for things to go wrong. Always have a song in your back pocket you can go into if you need to. Always have a plan. If you always have a plan, you'll never have to wing it. And you'll always be able to lead effectively. Physical challenges should never ruin a worship service! We can worship without tracks. And we did.

Disclaimer: I try not to always use myself as the good example in a story. Believe me, it's taken me years of bad services and not having a back-up plan to get to where I am now. 

Would you do something differently? Tell us about that!