You had one job

Some of you will recall ‘the worship wars’ in the late 1970s and 1980s when corps began to move from using solely The Salvation Army songbook to including some more contemporary songs.

While originally many of these ‘new’ songs were from sets like ‘Scripture in Song’ and ‘Praise and Worship’, the movement really took off in the ’80s when Hillsong started releasing CDs and published manuscripts of their songs. Suddenly, you could hear a new Christian song and easily obtain the music to play and sing at your corps.

However, this created the problem of bulk photocopying to get the printed words into the hands of the congregation. Solution: place the words on a plastic sheet on an overhead projector and project it onto a screen or wall in your hall so everyone can sing along.

One pair of soldiers at my corps had publicly stated their dislike of the ‘plastic choruses’ and simply refused to join in; then, in one Sunday meeting, the corps officer used the overhead projector to put up the words of ‘Amazing Grace’ for us to sing. This couple didn’t know whether to sing or not – they couldn’t decide if they were supposed to hate it! So, while we all sang along, they looked up the song in their songbooks and sang it from there – determinedly not looking up at the screen.

This era also created a new role for a church member – the person who had to change words to keep up with the singing. They had one job to do: just change the plastic sheet to keep up with the music and singing, and yet how many times did they fail to achieve this task?

Words would appear backwards or upside down or both. Words would appear when we were already two lines into the next verse. Words for the wrong verse would appear. A plastic sheet would be put onto the projector so hastily that it would proceed to slide right off, and we would watch the words slip out of sight and lean sideways as we kept singing.

I think my favourite was when the person would be so late removing the chorus words and putting up the next verse that by the time they finally did it, it was time to sing the chorus again! The whispers would crescendo: “Change the words, change the words. Yes, that one. Now, take it off again!”

In the 2000s, computer hardware and software changed rapidly, and suddenly, PowerPoint and multimedia projectors meant that instead of changing plastic slides, the job became even easier – the person on the words just had to hit a button on the keyboard, and the next words appeared on screen.

Yet some of the same problems persisted! For people tasked with this role, something must be written in the position description that says they must be easily distracted.

I recall singing along in a Salvo congregation many years ago when the words just failed to change for the next part of the song. One by one, people started turning slightly to see if the PowerPoint person had fallen asleep. Then, with about 30 people looking to the back of the hall, he angrily said, “Turn around! Turn around! Stop looking back here. I’m getting it sorted. Face the front!” Which we all quickly did.

I attended a large ecumenical gathering recently with 400 people and a very professional team of presenters, worshippers and leaders, and someone on the PowerPoint who was consistently late. I laughed a little as I realised our large and very professional function had the same problem as many corps.

Perhaps we should just wind back the clock 500 years and memorise all the words to our songs. Then again, sometimes I walk into a room and don’t recall why I did so, so what chance do I have of remembering hundreds of song lyrics?

–      Major Mal Davies is Assistant Divisional Commander for the Victoria Division.