Ninja:Worship

Hopefully, you read this blog enough to realize I didn't to a Sunday recap this weekend.  (Hopefully, you read The Worship Community enough to know they weren't posted there on Sunday either)  There is a perfectly good reason for these breaches of internet etiquette.  Allow me to explain.

This weekend myself and several other worship leaders participated in a great men's retreat hosted by Lifepath Church in Rhode Island, home of the infamous Joel Klampert.  Besides Joel and his dad Dave (Lifepath's pastor) on guitar and drums, respectively, the band consisted of myself on bass, Fred McKinnon on keys and Conner Byrd on guitar.  With the exception of myself and the Klamperts, none of us had played together. Some of us hadn't even met before.  Add that to a list of thirty-odd songs that most of us had never played before, some of which a couple of us hadn't heard before, and you have a recipe for disaster.

Well, disaster never showed up, but not for lack of trying.

I had a pretty rough time getting there, I won't lie.  Plans started unraveling on Friday, and it looked like I was going to have to either go home after work and drive to New Hampshire on Saturday, or skip it all together.  But some intervention by God, and some more by my wonderful wife, and off I was, two hours behind schedule.  A two-hundred mile drive through the Berkshires (oh, did I mention the blizzard like whiteout?) and I arrived at the retreat center exhausted yet excited, only to find out that the power was out on the mountain, and we were running off generators.  (They actually live for that stuff in New Hampshire)  As tired as I was, I found myself staying up until almost 2AM talking to the retreat leader, Jack Osteen, and a couple of the other guys about all kinds of stuff.

Saturday brought some ridiculous snow.  But the show must go on, and the band met early to workout the morning set. And that's when it all clicked.  This is going to sound cliche, but it felt like we'd been playing together for years.  These are some crazy-talented guys, and things just began to flow.  I hate to use another cliche in the same paragraph, but there was a Holy Spirit anointing in that place.

Saturday night's session/set was where things really took off.  Once the sun went down and we had to add lights to the generator's load, we started running into power problems.  During rehearsal, the breaker kept tripping.  We had to make a choice between lights and music, and we went with music.  We dug up every flashlight we could, and used duct tape to attach them to mic stands.

We began the set, and things were going well.  It was intimate, it was powerful, it was awesome!   On the second to last song, the breaker tripped again.  We lost the amps, we lost the keys, we lost the projector.  Then Joel and Conner - worship ninjas! - grabbed acoustic guitars and walked into the middle of the room and just kept things going. Christians don't need lights - we are lights!

During the altar call set, I was ministering at the altar, so Chris Moncus stepped in.  Turns out Chris is not only  - and I mean this - a world class photographer, he is also a seriously excellent musician.  About thirty minutes after the evening session ended, the lights - the real lights - came back on.  But to be honest, it was almost an anticlimax to have a "normal" service on Sunday.

Sunday afternoon we drove back to Rhode Island for an a.m.a.z.i.n.g. concert at Lifepath...   but that's another post.

Here's a couple of clips from that in-the-dark session.   Great stuff!