Christmas Vacation Swede from Stephen Knowlton on Vimeo.

Tonight my wife is directing her second grade students in an enthralling Christmas spectacle. Weeks of making horsey costumes and learning carols are coming together for one night only! What, you may ask, does this have anything to do with anything? Just hang in there…

Everyone has come tonight for the same reason, to see their kid, and will surely love the program regardless of the quality of singing. All things come second to the kids being on stage. For the parents, singing is second, along with costumes, staging, and any hint of a plot. The fact that is much overlooked is that the kids and my wife have been working hard learning songs, memorizing lines, and sewing tails. All of this effort and anticipation builds to a culmination in the very presence of children standing on a stage.

As I sit in the sound booth, I ponder the relation between this Christmas extravaganza and a worship service. WHAM. There it is. The purpose of this post. Every week, many people put in countless hours to prepare for a one and one half hour extravaganza. Now I ask you, what is the purpose of this event? Obvious answer is to worship the Lord. How then do we achieve this, and not make the “parents” in the audience merely observe what is unfolding in front of them. It is very, very easy to be a spectator. But worship should be something different, something with a greater purpose than spectating. Of course everyone would like things to be their best. The songs should sound spot on, the lighting should accent the important, and scenery should build a sense of wonder. But where does concern for the quality of the ancillary end and the passion for the real purpose begin?

Please excuse me, I have a program to watch…

Just for fun, let’s follow the history of worship lyric display back in time:

• Current : Video Mixing Software with Titling
• 80’s/90’s : Powerpoint, 3 bullet points, window blinds transition
• 60’s/70’s : plastic sheets on an Elmo overhead projector
• 1735-1950’s : printed books aka hymnals
• Middle Ages : Latin, sung by men in brown slankets
• Everything else : Carvings and/or oral

Lest We Forget

Every week we put all the lyrics to the songs on a projector screen/overhead/book. Why do we do this?

• Is it because our memories are that bad?
  I could easily sing plenty of pop song lyrics from memory, and i don’t even see them presented to me in an easily readable fashion every week for years. I have a terrible memory (ask my wife), but even I can remember most of the words to the songs.
• Is it because we have an overwhelming influx of visitors we really want to be able to sing along?
  If I went somewhere where I was totally out of my comfort zone, surrounded by people passionately singing a song I didn’t know, I would probably just listen anyways. And most songs are pretty catchy, so it should be easy enough to at least catch the chorus.
• Does looking at the words allow us to ponder the intricacies of God?
  I really just wrote this one so I could have a third bullet, but since it’s here, I will say that rarely in my life has reading something been more powerful than experiencing it.

So, you may ponder, what attachment is it that we really have to word on a screen? I knew you would ask that, so here they are, or at least the one’s I’ve thought of so far:

• People love to seem things move through in a progression.
  It serves as a form of “entertainment”. You think I am making this up, but I honestly believe we  could put consecutive numbers on slides and people would still be enthralled with anticipating the next.
• “As long as I’m looking at the words, I am worshipping”
  Just watch people’s faces when an incorrect song slide shows up, or even worse, there is no slide. People look all over the place in a panic trying to determine what they should do now.
• We have always done it, and it’s not that hard to have them, so why change?
  And to that I say, try sometime joining together with others in deep worship. It’s really hard when you have to keep staring slightly upward to see what you should be doing next.

What would happen if I decided to not hit the next slide button? Maybe some day, we will just find out. I may even record it for entertainment purposes later.

I often heard disappointment and despair in regards to creating a website entirely based in Adobe Flash CS3.  One of the strongest opposition points to such a website were based on the inability to bookmark specific “locations” within such a Flash site. So i set out to figure out how to wipe away that stigma.

When it was all said and done, it was quite easy… it just took some intense pre-planning. The premise is simple:

• Import a sitemap
• Import any content relative to the pages
• Use Flash to DOM calls to control URL management
• Redirect incoming URLs to correct Flash content

As for the code and the specifics, I can’t yet convince myself to pass it out to the masses. If you are nice and would like to ask for it, though, I may be willing to trade

For an example of Flash Bookmarking in action, visit the new Red Red Design studio website portfolio.