A Real Blessing

We started a new service at church today, and I think everything went really well for the first day. Recently, we did like many churches do and had a 9:30 and an 11:00, with the first service being a little more traditional (choir and organ, but with an "unplugged" band and the occasional praise chorus thrown in there) and the second one being totally contemporary, with the rock band and all that. Though I would play a little bit (on soprano, or as several of the elderly attendees called it, the "metal clarinet") at the earlier service at times, I've been mostly used in the second one, where I bust out on tenor and tend to "fill in the space" between the lyrics, generally living out my Saturday Night Live fantasies (but without so much of the Lenny Pickett histrionics...both for taste considerations and because I can't always play the notes so high that only dogs can hear them *grin*).

So what has happened is that the early service, which skews older, wasn't completely full, but the late one was totally overflowing every week, to the point that it was hard to bring visitors in. It's a great problem to have, but something had to be done, so they decided to move the early service to 8:30 and make the two other ones "twin" contemporary services starting fifteen minutes later than usual. They asked about 400 people from the 11:00 to commit to the 9:45, and, despite the overall youth of the contemporary crowd, enough people's alarm clocks went off this morning that the downstairs was about 3/4 full. We then wondered how many people would be at the 11:15, and that ended up being nearly full downstairs and a half-full balcony. So all in all, we'd have to call it a real blessing that everything has worked out this well so far, and I can only imagine how awesome it would be if, down the road, all three services were full to the gills...again, a great "problem" to have.