A/V
By Douglas J. Eboch
In the town of Normal, Pennsylvania, there’s a little church at the corner of Wilson and Elm. It was built sixty years ago and is a pretty traditional protestant church. The pastor, Henry O’Donnell, was built fifty-five years ago and is a pretty traditional protestant pastor. But one day Henry read an article about multi-media worship services and decided perhaps it was time both he and the church modernized.
He decided to start small: a screen and a projector in the sanctuary so they could project song lyrics and announcements. The church had bought him a laptop computer a couple years before which he could attach to the projector to provide the media. The church secretary, Tammy Billings, was reasonably good with computers and certainly capable of running the operation from the balcony at the back of the sanctuary which saw little use these days.
Pastor O’Donnell took his proposal to the Trustees committee which would have to approve spending several thousand dollars on the screen and projector. As usual, the committee was split in their opinions. Henrietta Miggins thought that if the church survived just fine without fancy multi-media when her parents were members, it would survive just fine without it today. Ralph Billings, Tammy’s husband, was a technophile and all for modernizing the service. Del Winslow opined that anything that might make O’Donnell’s sermons more interesting was worth a shot. In the end, the motion passed.
Pastor O’Donnell may have intended to start small, but once the equipment arrived he was like a kid with a new toy. He stayed up until the wee hours for several days planning an elaborate slideshow to illustrate his sermon for that week. He was preaching on the duty of Christians to actively help those in need, and as he tapped away at the laptop he had visions of the congregation moved to tears by the power of his presentation.
If Tammy Billings was intimidated by the elaborate show she would be running she showed no sign of it. Tammy believed in organization and preparation. As the pastor revised his sermon and added new images to the slideshow, Tammy simply printed out longer and longer cue lists and practiced until she was completely familiar with the program.
The first hint that things might not go quite as planned came an hour before service Sunday morning. As Pastor O’Donnell headed toward his office, his cell phone rang. It was Tammy Billings. She and Ralph had a flat tire. Ralph was in the process of changing the tire, but Tammy suggested Pastor O’Donnell better go ahead and get his laptop hooked up to the projector.
Pastor O’Donnell was certainly cable of handling that. He and Tammy had done a dress rehearsal Friday afternoon so he knew exactly how to set everything up. Then the phone rang again. “Ralph broke one of the lug nuts off,” Tammy said. “The auto club is coming. But we may miss the start of service.”
Pastor O’Donnell was getting a bit nervous, but he quickly came up with a back-up plan. His wife, Jennifer, could operate the computer until Tammy arrived. It was often the uncomfortable role of a pastor’s spouse to be called on in these kinds of emergencies. Jennifer was not a computer person and was reluctant to take on such a big responsibility. But when Henry showed her Tammy’s neatly arranged cue list she agreed. All that was required for the first half of the service was to bring up the lyrics to the hymns. The slideshow during his sermon was the complicated part and surely Tammy would be there by then.
Yet as the time for the sermon approached, Tammy had still not arrived. Jennifer scooted out of the sanctuary during the offering and dialed Tammy’s cell phone.
“There’s been a complication,” Tammy told her. “Ralph got in an argument with the tow truck man and…well, we’re waiting for a different one. You’re going to have to run the sermon media yourself.”
“I can’t!” Jennifer cried.
“You can,” Tammy told her. “After the hymn that comes before the sermon, turn off the projector and close the file with the lyrics. Open the slideshow entitled September Sermon. The entire text of the sermon is on the cue sheet. When Henry gets to the first red X turn on the projector. After that whenever you see a red X just hit any key to move to the next slide. Easy.”
It sounded easy. After the next hymn, Jennifer turned off the projector as instructed. She closed the file with the song lyrics. She clicked on “open” from the menus -- and realized she didn’t know where the September Sermon file was located. As the scripture was being read, she frantically searched through Henry’s folders. Henry’s filing scheme was not as intuitive as one might prefer.
She still had not located the file when her husband stepped into the pulpit. Jennifer eyed the printout of the sermon. Henry was fast approaching the point where she was to put up the first slide. She clicked through folder after folder. Finally, her eyes fell on a file named September Images. “That’s it!” she thought, and clicked on it.
Pastor O’Donnell was building to the big moment. “Can we Christians ignore the suffering of others? We often do because we avoid seeing it. But we must act when faced with tragedies like this.” Pastor O’Donnell gestured grandly at the screen.
As the file was opening, Jennifer turned on the projector. An image popped on the screen.
The congregation laughed. Not giggles or titters either, but deep guffaws. O’Donnell thought that was a strange reaction to a slide of people left homeless by Hurricane Katrina. He looked over at the screen.
The image projected there was of Pastor O’Donnell in cut-off shorts and a stained T-shirt standing outside a cabin. It was taken on the O’Donnell’s vacation the previous September. Pastor O’Donnell prided himself on being thrifty -- though Jennifer thought that was just a euphemism for “cheap” -- and had made the cut-offs from an old pair of jeans he had worn in college. However the good pastor had gained some weight since his college years and the shorts were extremely tight.
Pastor O’Donnell’s face turned bright red. “Next picture!” he shouted. Jennifer desperately hit buttons on the computer and the image switched to O’Donnell in the same outfit pushing a canoe into the water. The act of bending over had split his tight shorts and a white arc of underwear showed through the gap. Whatever button Jennifer pushed only advanced the slideshow to the next embarrassing image.
Jennifer and Henry O’Donnell’s teenage daughter Katie was guffawing along with everyone else. She had almost forgotten how silly her father looked that day. Then her laughter stopped abruptly as she remembered that was the same vacation she had tried to perm her own hair. Her mother had taken lots of pictures of that disaster. Pictures certain to be coming up soon in the slide show.
Katie dashed to the back of the church, up into the balcony, and hit the “Escape” key on the computer ending the slideshow in the nick of time. For her, anyway.
Somehow Pastor O’Donnell got through the rest of the service. On his way out to coffee hour, Del Winslow let the pastor know that the multimedia had indeed made his sermon more interesting. Henrietta Miggins only sniffed in disgust. Tammy finally arrived and spotted Jennifer. “Did it go okay?” Tammy asked.
Jennifer gave her a nasty look. “Someone needs to tell Henry to be more specific when labeling his files.”
The next week the service returned to its low-tech traditions. The projector and screen did continue to get used for weddings, church meetings and special events and in the end the equipment was well worth the expense…but it was some time before Pastor O’Donnell tried to do a multi-media sermon again.
(c) 2007 Douglas J. Eboch
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