The SHINE Blog

The Debut of Christian Endeavor - Or Is It?

This is part five in what will become a series of posts following the creation and evolution of SHINE, a contemporary worship service at Glenwood Presbyterian Church. You can find the table of contents here.

When we last left our merry and somewhat delusional cast of characters, they were preparing for the debut of Christian Endeavor on June 25, 2006. The idea was to perform a few songs after our regular Sunday evening Bible Study. We currently had Kevin on drums, Sammie Jo and Josh on guitar, Jeana on keyboard, and Brian on vocals. In addition to rehearsal time and song selection, there were equipment issues to deal with. The church currently had a sound system, but nothing near big enough to deal with a “rock band.” Without a budget for our little experiment, how would we purchase the things that we needed? And it goes without saying that we still needed a bass player . . .

I recommended to Kevin that he look at Musician’s Friend - an online music store which I had used in the past. Let me pause for a moment to highly recommend this store to anyone out there who is looking to purchase anything musical - the prices are good, the selection is large, and as will become apparent later in this post, the customer service is excellent! We purchase almost all of our needed supplies from them and have yet to be dissatisfied.

Christian Endeavor was already generating a good deal of excitement and anticipation at the church. We had needed to get Sessional approval for our rehearsals and the planned performance, so the word was out. After much prayer, we started getting some pretty sizable donations from some of the members of the church to go towards the purchase of a new sound system - none bigger than Kevin, who put up the money for most of the system that we ended up purchasing…

From: Kevin
To: Brian
June 17, 2006

Here’s an update on the sound equipment. I have ordered the Yamaha EMX5000 20-Channel Powered Mixer as well as two Yamaha S115V Club Series V Cabinets. (…and I can’t wait until Jennifer sees the credit card invoice!!). I also purchased the necessary cables (20’) for them. And of course I am always a sucker for those comprehensive extended warranties, and ordered this too (for the mixer only, however).

I would recommend that we both immediately download the PDF manuals for these products and begin to familiarize ourselves with how the equipment operates, lest we destroy something that has the word “diaphragm” or “impedence” associated with it. Unless I can shepardize one of these terms and fix it that way, we’re out of luck.

The equipment is coming from Kansas City by UPS. It will intercept a gold truck somewhere near Knoxville (…no, sorry, wrong show). Actually, it should arrive by “mid-week to late-week,” so I don’t know that we will have it by Wednesday evening.
We’ll have to see. But when it arrives, it would be great if you could meet me at church so we can work on setting it up together.
I ended up purchasing more equipment than our band probably needs, in terms of power and quality, but this is one of my weaknesses. Part of my motivation, both for this purchase and for everything else this band involves, is the sense that we are doing something for Glenwood. I am sure you feel the same way with all that you and Jeana do. I will mention that I had an e-mail from LeeSa Engle this week. I had asked her if any of her “kids” (high school and older) might play bass. She said no, but on the subject of Glenwood forming a Christian Rock band, she was enthusiastic, and mentioned that her church doubled in size upon forming a band and starting a contemporary service. We’ll have to see about that at Glenwood … first things first … but LeeSa’s remark was just the extra motivation I needed to get my credit card out on this one. I do pray for this little project of ours, and I hope to never lose sight of my need to continue to do so!

Then, in the same email, we have a dose of what you literary types call “foreshadowing.”

On the subject of our debut for June 25th — and I hope this won’t sound like a downer — it occurs to me that we could postpone this and not do ourselves any harm. Without a bass player we’re really not ready to perform, in all honesty. And in fact, the June 25th date has been overtaken by events. In other words, the purpose of this 6/25 debut was to simply introduce the concept of a Christian band, and see how it might be received by the church (somehow I had imagined that we might put all of this together without generating any notice and rather surprise the Sunday night crowd with the easy-going “Word of God Speak”). As it has developed, the church is already fully aware of our efforts, and very enthusiastic (from what I hear), and the last thing I would want to do now is go on stage half-cocked and dampen expectations for this. Bass player aside, if we don’t get a chance to rehearse with the sound system prior to this outing, there’s another chance for something “not to sound good.” The 6/25 date was of course arbitrary, but served its purpose by motivating us to “get going.”

So just give postponement some thought (we’ll see how practice goes this week). At this point, I wouldn’t mind if we elect to debut CE with “Word of God Speak” on a Sunday morning sometime mid-summer. That sounded really good Wednesday, I thought. I really wish we were ready to do the July 2nd cook-out. Oh well…

I was able to talk Kevin out of delaying our debut and we awaited the arrival of our new sound system as we worked to perfect our first set of songs. Then we ran into some problems….

Problem number one was the arrival of the sound system -

From: Kevin
To: Brian
June 22, 2006

Hey Brian. The sound equipment arrived this morning. Unfortunately, there was some damage in transit. One of the cartons apparently took a pretty good wallop, and the horn is popped out of one of the speakers – screws knocked out, wood stripped out of the cabinet, it will definitely have to go back. The other equipment (speaker #2 and mixer) looks okay, but if it took a wallop like the first carton did, it may be suspect. I’ll plug the stuff up later today and see how it does. It is probably okay, going just by appearances. And tell you what: I may delay returning speaker #1 until Monday. It will probably play okay, it’s just that the horn is knocked loose (hanging on by a single screw) but is otherwise “still connected” via all the wiring. This way we can still use it Sunday.
Hey, the mixer has a whole lot of knobs on it – any idea what they’re for?

Musician’s Friend agreed to let us use the damaged speaker (which worked fine) for our first performance before shipping it back for a replacement.

Finally, the big day was upon us - June 25th - and we had a great crowd that Sunday night including many that came just to hear the band play. But God apparently didn’t want us to play that night. Josh had gotten a replacement at his restaurant job so that he could be there - only, his replacement didn’t show up. To Josh’s credit, he was ready to quit his job so that he could make our performance, but Kevin was able to talk him out of that. Sammie Jo had agreed to be a bridesmaid in a friend’s wedding that afternoon - but the wedding was outside and a summer thunderstorm had caused all sorts of havoc with the schedule such that Sammie Jo couldn’t be there that night either. So we had to tell everyone that we were unable to perform that night because we were missing two members of the band. We took it in stride and regrouped…

To: Brian
From: Kevin
June 26, 2006

Don’t worry about our aborted performance. I heard on Entertainment Tonight that the entire incident is being dismissed as a publicity stunt. Ticket sales are really taking off now.

Seriously, I was pleased by the level of excitement generated last night, and the “large” crowd. From the youth to the seniors, enthusiasm is widespread, and I thought we were going to have to call a bouncer to deal with Jane Anderson when the service began with the traditional calling out of hymn numbers (please don’t forward this e-mail to anyone, as I wouldn’t want that silly remark to find its way back to Jane, lest she think I am anything but THANKFUL!! for this level of enthusiasm).

So all in all, last night was a great success, in terms of our modest objective announced back in early April.

The new plan was to perform for our church’s July 4th cookout to be held on Sunday, July 2nd. This is an event the church has done the last several years and invited the neighborhood for hot dogs and hamburgers. We were able to perform for a much larger audience and actually performed our “set” twice during the event. We were well received, and more donations started coming in to cover the costs we had incurred. God certainly knew what He was doing - as always!

Here’s a video of one of the songs at this first performance - Never Been Unloved by Michael W. Smith. This was taken with an old camcorder, so the picture and sound quality is not the best (which will drive Kevin crazy). But it gives you a picture of our start, and you’ll understand that we sound better in person.

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Written by Brian Beasley.

"But seek first His Kingdom and His Righteousness and all these things will be given to you as well." Matt. 6:33

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January 1st, 2008 Posted by Brian Beasley | The Evolution of Shine | 2 comments