sequence with the goal of producing a response from the congregation. The music creates opportunity for the spoken Word to be delivered with impact. Rinse and repeat for fiftytwo Sundays a year.
There’ s the rub. The problem isn’ t the music, nor the programming, multi-tracks, hazer, lights, or even the LED video wall. It is trading substance for style and function for form. We have built a system with interchangeable parts, an assembly line of worship where each guitarist plays the same preset the same way to achieve uniformity of outcome. In a famous old Brady Bunch TV episode, Adios, Johnny Bravo, budding musician Greg Brady is wooed by talent agents to leave his authentic family group and become rock star Johnny Bravo, only to find the sole reason for his newfound fame is he literally“ fit the suit” they had sitting in the closet. We now have thousands of Johnny Bravos suiting up each Sunday morning in churches around the world.
The follow-on problem is we then put rock bands in choral settings. Imagine trying to host a rock show in a choir rehearsal room. The drums would be all over the place, guitar amps would compete with vocals for dominance, and the bass would never end. That scenario lives every Sunday in tens of thousands of churches. To solve it, we should have fixed the room, but we didn’ t want to intrude on the room’ s appearance and thus incur the wrath of the Ladies’ Aesthetic Committee, so we isolated the band instead.
Isolation is necessary, since most sanctuaries are incapable of handling amplified instruments and voices without proper acoustic treatment. We put plexiglass around the drummers to cage them into submission. They responded by playing as loud as they desired. We moved the guitar amps to isolation chambers behind the platform and then removed them entirely in favor of amp modelers. The guitarists became interchangeable. We took away floor wedges from vocalists and gave them mini digital mixers they had no idea how to run. We plugged ear monitors into everyone’ s heads and then wondered why we couldn’ t communicate.
The easy blame here is the technology and its adherents, the tech crew. However, church techs are at the mercy of the room and the expectations presented by Chris Tomlin, Phil Wickham, Crowder, and Lauren Daigle concerts with their impeccable crews and gear. When a local church tech with a simple X32 mixer and an old pair of beat-up speakers tries to deliver a Tomlin experience, they are accosted by the Volume Patrol and told to turn things down, even though they have little control over the proceedings. A live room always wins the battle. Being a church tech is like receiving a speeding ticket when you’ re just a passenger in the back seat. Exhausted from the complaints, they rid the deck of amps, wedges, live instruments, and simply compress the life out of every channel in order to survive the service and escape with their necks.
The answer to all this angst is to either accept Johnny Bravo or move beyond him. If the goal is to be a worship cover band, keep wearing
Photo by Keagan Henman on Unsplash
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