Lessons from the Old Work Truck

By: Matt Hemmele

When I was first getting started in my career, the church I was working at had a couple of work trucks for hauling dirt, gear, supplies, and just general work truck tasks. My boss at the time asked me to grab the truck and go pick up some supplies from the hardware store for a stage design coming up. This would have been no problem except the truck had a manual transmission. My boss, upon learning that I did not know how to drive stick shift, gave me some really great advice “everyone should know how to drive a stick, you never know when you will be behind the wheel of one”.

He then proceeded to teach me how to drive it. I was clunky at first, definitely killed the engine trying to start at too high of rpm, but after a dozen or so times, I was able to shift smoothly between the gears. Over time shifting between gears became second nature, in fact, it became fun to drive.

I have had a lot of moments over the course of my career when I would think back to that old work truck and first learning how to smoothly move through the gears, careful not to start too quickly, shifting at the correct speed, not letting off the clutch too abruptly. There is a feeling, a connection, something to be in tune with, something you need to actively pay attention to and react upon that isn’t formulaic. A worship experience is a living, breathing, and ever changing entity that we need to be in tune with. There were three main pieces to that process of learning how to drive that old work truck; the explanation of the mechanics, the low risk trial and error, followed by feedback. I would like to see about taking that very practical process of learning how to drive a stick shift and see if we are able to apply those to how to create a worship experience with smooth transitions.

To the average attender, I would imagine the number of resources put into planning a worship experience is completely lost on them, and for the most part, that is the goal. Much like creating a smooth ride in the truck, we want to create a smooth ride for our attendees so that as we move through the service, the transitions seem invisible.

Explanation of the Mechanics

Most Most churches have some level of planning that goes into their Sunday services. This may range from the lead pastor simply jotting the service down on a piece of paper, day of, all the way to an entire department with complex systems working across multiple teams planning out weeks or months in advance. The process can look different, however the underlying mechanics of it are essentially the same, what is the order of the service? If I were to shove the gear shifter into fourth, turn on the ignition and slam on the gas, there is a high chance that either a whole lot of bad things would happen or nothing at all, I honestly have never tried that, but the point is that there is an order of operations to move the truck forward. It is the same idea in a worship service, prior to Sunday there should be an explanation of what it is we are going to be doing so that everybody is on the same page.

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