The Good, the bad and the "it's not a big deal"

Tonight we had Worship on the Grand. Portland is known as “the city of two rivers” because the Grand River and the Looking Glass River merger together in Portland. Right where the two merge together there is a band shell that, during the summer months, hosts Thursday night music. Every Thursday a different band will play there and people can come and listen.

So tonight, Epic was able to get the band shell for the purpose of showcasing our musical style. The hope is that people will come listen to us and realize that worship music does not have to be old and boring. In addition, we have some bouncy houses for kids and free snow cones that we give out.

However, in order to perform at the band shell we had to tear down all of our sound equipment and haul it over. This is not usually a problem. In fact, most church plants have to tear down everything and set everything up every week. However, the drummer for our church worship band has also taken it upon himself to act as the chief sound technician. Every week, regardless of what he is supposed to be doing, he will be back at the sound board trying to run the sound board. This gets incredibly frustrating when I am supposed to be running the sound and cannot simply because the drummer keeps getting in the way.

While I recognize that he knows a lot about our specific sound system, it comes off and insulting when he does everything by himself and specifically gets in the way of what I am supposed to be doing. It feels like he has the attitude of “I know what I am doing and you obviously do not.”

It was especially frustrating because when it actually came time for me to run the sound system while they were playing on stage, since I had not set anything up, I had very little idea who had which microphone, which guitar was plugged in to which channel, or which monitor was which. So everything became a trial and error adjustment just to get things sounding decent.

It all makes me wonder if I should try to talk to him about the way he is acting. In some ways I feel like I could simply blow it off, since I rarely run sound and have plenty of other things on my plate. But it makes me wonder what possible damage he might be doing to other people, not to mention what that kind of mentality does to him.

But I guess that is the entire idea of sin. The reason sin is sinful is because it separates us from God, each other and ourselves. So the question becomes: If I genuinely care about our drummer as a brother in Christ, should I allow him to continue acting like this? While it is certainly “permissible” is it “beneficial”?

It reminds me of something I have started learning recently. It is rarely evil that keeps us from God. When confronted with a choice between true good and evil, most will obviously choose good. But instead it is the mediocre and the “not so bad” that keep us from God.