Church in the dark

Our plant church had an interesting Sunday this past week. We don't yet have our own facility, so we meet in a school. We are in the middle of a series about the things that hold us hostage and this week was the biggie- the week on pornography. There are several families in our church struggling with this issue; some still together, some not. It's huge everywhere. It's the elephant in the room that no one wants to talk about in the Christian community. We went to xxxchurch.com and planned our own "Porn Sunday".

As my husband and I were getting ready around 6:45 am, we were talking about how a lot of the service was video/computer-driven today: our drama needed the computer, we used an accompaniment cd for the song "Slow Fade" (usually all our songs are live), and even the bulk of our message was a video. Our computer has crashed in the middle of the service before, causing huge problems with sermon notes on the screen, lyrics, etc... I told him that we needed to gather people together that morning to pray for the service, the technical stuff, the computer, etc... My husband said, "We need to pray to ban Satan from the room this morning..." and that very second, our power went out. Literally, his words were still hanging in the air. Our first reaction was to laugh and say, "Of course this happened... there really must be some people who need to hear this message today."

We quickly came to find out that the outage covered the entire corridor where we live, and included five different towns, and the utility company said it would be several hours before it was restored. All this happened right before setup at 7am. Last Sunday, we had 389 people attend and we were thinking it was possible again this week... we had rented a way-too-expensive plush elephant costume and planned to use it to greet people as they came in and to sit on the front row during the service (representing the elephant in the room)- we had all these huge plans... can you say stress?

Our set up team showed up right on time to discuss, and eventually solve the problem. We found out later that evening that we were one of the only churches on the corridor that continued with church that morning. Several of our guys ran home and grabbed their generators- I think we used three total- and we did our best to conserve power and have "church as usual". We didn't have our normal lighting because we didn't want to waste too much power on that, so it was a little dim in the room. But that played right into our drama and the video. It smelled a little bit like gasoline (or whatever the generators ran on)... but you know what? Our little church barely hiccuped- someone called us the church that "kept on ticking". The band sounded fantastic- and everything was so well received. I really believe that the service was better for what happened. It was so powerful, and I believe that lives were changed. It was incredible.

The power came back on about ten minutes after the second service was over while we were tearing down- which pointed a big, fat finger at exactly who our adversary had been that morning... and he was waving a white flag.

It was a complete miracle that we pulled it off, but once again... God provided and we are still standing in amazement.