Picking up where part 1 left off…
Once the group of us had gathered all of our goals for the new contemporary service, the preparation began. It actually turned out to be a lot harder to find an date the would work. It would appear that, during the summer, churches like to plan Sunday night activities. Go figure! Anyway, after scheduling and re-scheduling and running into conflict after conflict, we finally managed to secure July 13 as the date for the first service, a little more than a month out. At the time, I was incredibly dissapointed that we hadn’t been able to find a June date, but as it turns out, only God knew how much preparation we really needed.
Now, the band was made up of guys who I had played with for several years before when we played in our youth group praise band. What I hadn’t fully prepared for was the fact that it would take a little while to get the band, as a whole, warmed up again. While I had been playing with Campus Crusade the year before, these guys haven’t had anywhere to play. So, just from a music standpoint, a June service could have been disasterous. But as it was, we had plenty of time to get rolling. Practice was held in my bedroom(pictures of the setup are on this blog somewhere) and we had a lot of fun jamming together. We started with a pool of 10 songs that we wanted to be ready to play. This was a lot, but in the very beginning of all this, the idea was to have worship concerts and not services. When we morphed the whole thing into a true worship service, the set list was cut to 6 songs.
Everything was going fine and dandy until, a couple of weeks before the service, my keyboardist informed me that he was going to be gone to visit family that weekend. This wouldn’t have been so bad except that I had been learning how to do more with programming and synth instruments and he was the one responsible for doing all of that stuff. At first, it wasn’t too bad. We simply cut back on are use of piano and synth, and what we absolutely had to have, we gave to other band members. As we got closer to the service, though, it was clear the music was lacking. Finally, a week before the service, I gave another guitarist from Campus Crusade a call, to see if he would be willing to give some time to help us out. Being such short notice, I didn’t expect him to do it, but he was gracious and decided to make the trip to play with us. The addition of the second guitar and the mandolin added more that one would think, and really rounded out the sound.
The Saturday before the service was spent at the church figuring out how everything would work and performing a runthrough/extended band practice. That turned out to be an extremely long day (about 8 hours at the church), but was very helpful in allowing us to gather everything we needed and to be prepared for any technical issues that we would encounter (there turned out to be quite a few).
Finally, Sunday arrived. The service was set for 6:00 that night, we arrived at about 3:30 to convert the sanctuary to accomidate our service and to set up our gear. At 4:30, our guitarist arrived and we ran through everything with him for the first time. Then at about 5:15, the band went off to have a bite of pizza before the service. At 5:45, we were heading back to the sanctuary, not knowing what to expect. One of my biggest fears was that we would put all of the effort into preparing this service: convincing the church staff, preparing the band, and bringing in a speaker and then have only 10 people show up. God rewarded our work, though, and we ended up with about 140 people (out of a congregation of 400). The service was incredible and pumped up our whole comittee in anticipation for the next one, annouced for August 10. Playing the music for this service also allowed the Micah Lee Band to get invited to play at some pretty awesome events, more on that later though. Overall, God had granted us success in almost everything we had endeavored, we was incredible considering that we often focused too much on the service itself and not who it was for. We would learn quickly what it was really all about in preparation for the second service, but that will have to wait until next time…
