god: the ultimate source of power

A funny thing happened at our 11am worship service this last Sunday.  About 1/4 of the way through the sermon (which is a video because we have simultaneous services at 11am) the projector and audio equipment flashed a couple of times, then turned off.  The lights in our worship space dimmed.  What we soon figured out was that we were experiencing a “brown-out,” which means that the full amount of power that we usually have in the building was cut drastically (because of a transformer failure in the area).  This meant that we still had power, but equipment that required a good amount of electricity (such as speaker amplifiers, audio mixers, projectors, air conditioning, the organ in the sanctuary) shut down.

I was behind the audio and video boards in the back of the room and we quickly figured out that we had no control over the situation and needed to figure something out.  Rich Leatherberry, our pastor for the 11am service stood up from his seat and assured everyone that we were “working on it.”  When we discovered that power was out in the entire building, Rich picked up Scott Dudley’s (the preaching pastor) sermon manuscript and began preaching (reading) the message from where we were before the brown-out.  As Rich finished the sermon and prayed, I went up to the stage with the other singers and grabbed an acoustic guitar.  We sang a couple of verses of “Amazing Grace” (realizing that people would know this song without projected lyrics) and ended a capella.

There were several things about this experience that really struck me:

• Nobody (leaders or congregants) seemed to freak out too much when everything shut down.  We all knew that something was wrong, but we reacted well to our loss of control over the situation.  This showed me the importance of having faith in God’s sovereignty and control over everything in our lives.
• The Holy Spirit was in the room.  This situation could have been much more awkward.  The way in which God’s word was delivered effectively and we were still able to praise Him for his grace and mercy was not a result of good back-up plans and leadership; it was the Holy Spirit prompting us into authentic dependence on God.
• Jesus increased and we decreased.  With the power that our culture has been given through the use of technology in ministry, attention can often be diverted to the effectiveness of presentation and delivery as opposed to the effectiveness of the gospel.  When we lost all of our technology, the content of our worship service (Jesus) became more clear.
• Worship seemed more authentic.  It is often hard to know as a music leader whether the songs allow congregants to authentically worship.  Without amplification or a screen to look at, I was able to hear and worship with the congregation more organically and felt that people were fully engaged in singing praises to our God as the body of Christ.

I think God created this “problem” on Sunday for a reason.  In ministry it is easy to sit back and go through worship services on auto-pilot.  Not to say that there isn’t consistent prayer and thought going into each service, but it is easy for us as flawed humans to ignore God and continually get excited about what He is doing in our lives.  The loss of power that we experienced on Sunday was not simply electrical.  This incident left me more aware than ever that our ultimate source of power has nothing to do with electricity or our own capabilities.

Yours, O LORD, is the greatness and the power
and the glory and the majesty and the splendor,
for everything in heaven and earth is yours.
Yours, O LORD, is the kingdom;
you are exalted as head over all. – 1 Chronicles 29:11 (NIV)