Here’s me pulling back the curtains of a ministry a bit again, but in the months I’ve been working at my messianic shul, one of the things that struck me is how churches get the strangest calls, sometimes.
I mean, yes, most of our calls are of the rather normal and mundane variety, but as a house of worship, we attract our share of … colorful callers. I’ve fielded phone calls from self-proclaimed prophets who didn’t even have the courtesy to say “Hi” before going into their rant, as well as some rather interesting and unique requests from complete strangers.
Now, a lot of these callers are well-meaning folks and when we get calls from people like that, oddity doesn’t really matter. However, I have had a couple calls from folks who seem to think that we’re more of a public library than a house of worship.
It’s not a big deal and often, even the odd calls add some fun and variety to my day. And it certainly helps expose me to a wide variety of expectations people bring to the table when they interact with a house of worship. Good training ground for me, as I forge ahead in my advanced studies. I learn from fielding these calls, more than I would have expected to.
If memory serves, it used to take a fraction of my day at work to pull together the slide shows for our Erev Shabbat and Shabbat services. However, since deciding last week (due to difficulty getting an old version of Corel Presentations 10 to install under Windows Vista with Service Pack 1) to move the show over to PowerPoint, it’s been taking a bit longer.
That’s not because PowerPoint is a harder program to use, by the way; it has to do with file conversion. Fortunately, I was able to get all our service and song files saved in Corel Presentations as PowerPoint 95 documents, saved to a flash drive, and loaded up into Microsoft PowerPoint 2003.
Trouble is, pretty much everything needed to be tidied up and redone to get the shows and songs looking good in PowerPoint. Nearly all the text boxes came over too big and with fonts set too large.
It’s been a bit of a labor to tweak everything, but I get the two services completed just in time last week, and this week I’ve been able to work on going through the songs and trying to get them redesigned so that we can get back to the whole process being quick and easy.
It’s been worth all the labor, however; our slide shows are now more future-proof than before, and personally I prefer PowerPoint.
