Mission Conference

Finally I have some time to sit down and blog. Life is simply too busy for us to talk about it.

Anyhow, I meant to talk about the worship session I led at Mission Conference last Friday. At first I took this job on behalf of Nissi Fellowship. With the small number of fellowshippers, of course we had to recruit "foreign aids". I intended to find people from different congregation for the goodness of unity among the church, and for the multiple languages the conference is conducted in. The recruitment was hard, but I did manage to find people who are related to the English congregation (I am from Cantonese).

Anyhow, the practice was fine in general even though we never practiced with absolute full attendance. People were quick at learning which made my job easier. The powerpoint panel was a little worrisome though because they were not used to my improvisational style of worship leading, and so I needed to tell them in the last minute where I could be changing the sequence and such. Anyhow, I was going to yell out the beginnings of each section anyways so they said they would listen.

So we were the opening. Not anyone would have expected - the powerpoint froze right when the first slide was shown. Of course I couldn't stop and say we had to wait for the powerpoint to be fixed since the worship had already started! So what I did was I yelled out the next sentence of the lyrics while the congregation was singing the one before. Not everyone could follow, and I had a hard time spitting out the lyrics quickly and accurately as well, but the ambience was still fine. After the third verse the powerpoint was back on again (and it was after two times of rebooting), so we were back to our "normal sequence". Although, I felt the congregation wasn't yet ready to move onto the second song, so I elaborated on the first song (Holy, Holy, Holy) a bit.

The second song, "Here I Am to Worship", went fine. Everyone sang their hearts out. I was so moved myself as well so I stayed on this song for a while. I must give A LOT OF credits to the instrumentalists for their tremendous sensitivity - I did not give a significant signal as to how the music should go as I looped the chorus of the song, but they actually followed the dynamics of my voice, which was gradually softening! Wow, I was thrilled when I heard that!

By the third song (Send Me Lord), however, the powerpoint did not work again. I panicked since we still had another song to go after this, and the congregation hardly knew this and the next song! It took me a while to figure out what to do since (1) I could not continue on under this situation; (2) I need to find some way to wrap up. I finally made up something to say, and cut off the last song entirely. Bravo to my interpreter since she wasn't expecting this sudden translation.

So people suspected there was a virus to the computer at the control panel. Just before we started the conference, one of the technical people pulled out his laptop for emergency purposes. But of course, he didn't set it up "properly" since he was not expecting cases like this one (ironically, it happened!). The church did have a second computer, but by the time they brought it out, I cut off the worship already, which left them confused too. If I knew there was a second computer, I probably would have asked them to set it up too, but I didn't so that was too bad.

I interpret this situation as an attack from Satan. He was jealous about our unity in worship, so he was trying to do something to destroy it. Of course, he didn't succeed. I could see people were worshipping wholeheartedly, and many people came up to me afterwards showing their appreciations. So the power of the Lord once again reigned supreme!

Many thanks to the worship team and the technical team. And of course, glory and honour be to God ... ALWAYS and FOREVER!!!