Set and Forget?
Can we set up systems to run multilingual church and then leave them to work in the background?
For a while, the most fashionable thing to buy was a robot vacuum cleaner. At least on paper, those things were huge time savers. Let it map the room once and then all you need to do is turn it on and let it go. Many of them will even detect when they are low on power and take themselves off to the charger.
It is remarkably easy to imagine that multilingual church should be like that. If we set up the right processes, buy in the right technology, and recruit the right leaders, the rest takes care of itself, right?
If only life were that simple.
Stuff Breaks Down
In my book, Multilingual Church, I tell the story of how I spent pretty much all of my teens as the lone church sound technician. For the bulk of that time, the church didn’t have its own building so each Sunday followed the same routine:
- Arrive early to drag the box of sound kit from the vehicle in which it arrived,
- Set up the sound kit, testing every cable, battery, instrument, and microphone,
- Run the sound desk during the service, sorting out issues as they arise,
- Pack the kit back into the box and wheel it to the vehicle that was carrying it.
Since it was the same person setting up, running, and packing away the kit every week, you would think that everything would be predictable. That isn’t what happened.
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