Up to a few years ago 'projection' in church meant clergy standing with straight backs, intoning stirring words of comfort and challenge to the congregants huddled in the back row. Theological colleges brought in drama teachers to show young ministers in training how to speak properly. In my college that meant excruciating lessons involving groping around to locate our diaphragms and addressing inanimate objects around the room with absurd sounds.
But this is the twenty-first century and we're in the decade of the Audio/Visual Projector.
Up and down the land churches have bought projectors and laptops to show pictures, video and text during worship. In moderation and done with polish, it's a real enhancement. We bought a system just over a year ago and it's worked really quite well. Except last Sunday, when it failed during the last hymn. Some people claim to have seen a message flashed on the screen before it disappeared altogether: "Overheating - now shutting down".
This was no ordinary Sunday, of course. The church was packed at our thanksgiving and celebration of the 25th anniversary of the church's opening. So perhaps our worship was getting overheated! All went well until I announced that we'd sing "To God be the Glory". The organ struck up and then I noticed the operator of the projector making some kind of semaphore. The waving arms clearly meant something like, "It's completely busted". Sure enough, I glanced around and the wall onto which the words of the hymns are projected was blank.
But the singing was amazing. The congregation knew all the words to the hymn (though we wobbled just a little in the final verse owing to confusion about whether our 'transport' or 'worship' will be purer, and higher, and greater, when Jesus we see). We smiled at the fact that the technology let us down and sang all the louder and praised all the more. A great moment.
The installers of the projector now tell us that it's just a few weeks outside the full guarantee period so we have to send it off for repair. But this morning Colin shinned a ladder, switched it off and on again and all seems to be well. That leaves us with another detail to
Update: for those of you wanting to know, the projector worked fine so perhaps the failure was a one-off (can you detect a hopeful tone?)
