Sound Wars

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Every church has a doctrinal position on the volume of its Sunday morning music.

This position does not appear in the church’s statement of faith because the statement of faith was written by people who wanted the church to survive.

Officially, the congregation agrees on the inspiration of Scripture, the deity of Christ, the resurrection of the dead, and the necessity of keeping the electric guitar at a level where Mrs. Wetherby can still feel her dental work.

Mrs. Wetherby sang soprano in the church choir for forty-three years. This was during the Traditional Worship Era, when the sanctuary contained a pulpit, an organ, a piano, and an enormous wooden structure behind the choir loft that everyone assumed was architectural but was actually where the tenors went between Easter and Christmas.

The choir wore burgundy robes with white collars. The robes were designed to communicate reverence, dignity, and the fact that the church had purchased seventy-five burgundy robes and was going to use them until the Second Coming.

Mrs. Wetherby stood in the second row because she had what the choir director called a carrying voice. Her voice could carry the soprano line, the alto line, and, under favorable atmospheric conditions, several folding chairs. During the final verse of “How Great Thou Art,” migrating birds altered course.

Then the church hired Caleb, the new contemporary worship pastor.

Caleb was twenty-eight years old and had the kind of beard that begins precisely where the haircut ends, suggesting either careful grooming or advanced forestry. He wore black jeans, white sneakers, and a long untucked shirt designed to assure older congregants that he had recently escaped from somewhere.

Caleb loved Jesus deeply. He also loved ambient guitar swells, which are musical sounds that begin somewhere beneath conscious awareness and gradually increase until the congregation feels that a commercial for luxury automobiles is about to begin.

Under Caleb’s leadership, the choir loft disappeared. The burgundy robes entered what the church called archival storage, which was a climate-controlled historical preservation facility located behind the broken snowblower.

In place of the choir came the Worship Collective, consisting of two guitarists, a keyboard player, three vocalists, a drummer enclosed in a transparent plastic chamber, and a young man with a laptop whose spiritual gift was unclear.

Mrs. Wetherby regarded the drum enclosure with suspicion. It resembled a sneeze guard for percussion.

The church explained that the enclosure controlled the drums.

This was technically true in the same sense that prison walls control inmates, assuming the inmates have microphones.

The person responsible for Sunday morning sound was Trevor.

Trevor was an audio engineer, although he had never referred to himself merely as an audio engineer because this failed to convey the staggering burden he carried on behalf of civilization.

Trevor operated from the sound booth at the rear of the sanctuary. The booth contained thirty-seven illuminated devices, two computer screens, various meters, hundreds of tiny knobs, and one actual human being who understood almost none of them but had been told never to touch anything.

Trevor understood all of them.

He could identify a frequency at forty paces. If a microphone produced a faint ringing noise, Trevor could immediately determine that the problem was a 2.7-kilohertz resonance caused by the lectern microphone interacting with the east wall, whereas the rest of the congregation determined that something had gone EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE.

Trevor monitored the sound level with a professional decibel meter. He trusted this instrument because it was precision calibrated, scientifically accurate, and incapable of being cornered in the lobby by Mrs. Wetherby.

According to Trevor, the music averaged eighty-eight decibels.

According to Mrs. Wetherby, it averaged Korea.

The church staff became aware of a volume concern after receiving several comment cards.

Church comment cards are an important form of congregational communication that allows members to express their deepest spiritual concerns anonymously so the staff cannot ask what on earth they are talking about.

One card stated that the music was much too loud.

Another stated that it was not loud enough.

A third asked whether the bass player was being paid by the note.

A fourth contained only the words “REVELATION 8:1,” underlined three times.

The staff looked up Revelation 8:1 and discovered that there was silence in heaven for about half an hour.

Mrs. Wetherby had signed that one.

The executive pastor organized a Sunday Morning Audio Review Team. It consisted of Caleb, Trevor, the stage manager, two elders, Mrs. Wetherby, a twenty-two-year-old congregant named Hunter, and Jim—a deacon who had wandered into the meeting because he thought there would be doughnuts.

Hunter believed the music was too quiet. He attended concerts regularly and felt that authentic worship should produce a physical sensation in the chest similar to being struck by a moderately sized appliance.

The deacon felt the music was fine but wondered again about the doughnuts.

The stage manager was Brent.

Brent had been appointed stage manager six months earlier and had responded by becoming the most operationally serious person in the history of organized religion.

He wore black clothing, a utility belt, and a headset with a microphone extending toward his mouth. The headset connected him to four volunteers, none of whom had any reason to communicate with him.

Brent referred to the sanctuary as the room, the platform as the deck, the worship service as the program, and the moment Caleb walked onstage as the package entering the environment.

Before every service, Brent conducted a comprehensive systems check. He confirmed that the lectern was positioned, the water bottle was deployed, the pastor’s chair was stable, and all cables had been secured against what he called unauthorized migration.

Unauthorized cable migration is not common, but neither was the sinking of the Titanic, which is why Brent carried a flashlight.

At exactly 9:27 each Sunday morning, Brent moved through the backstage area announcing the number of minutes remaining until what the congregation still called church.

Caleb received a seven-minute warning, a five-minute warning, a two-minute warning, and a final communication indicating that the room was live.

The room was not actually live. It was mainly Baptists looking for their usual seats.

Brent nevertheless treated their arrival as a developing tactical situation.

The Audio Review Team met on Wednesday evening. Trevor presented a twelve-page technical report featuring several multicolored graphs. One graph showed the sound-pressure level during the opening song. Another showed frequency distribution. A third appeared to track the migration pattern of Canadian geese, although Trevor explained that it represented low-frequency buildup in the southeast quadrant.

The southeast quadrant consisted of six pews, a stained-glass window, and Mr. Peterson.

Mr. Peterson was eighty-two and wore hearing aids. He had discovered that during the worship music his hearing aids automatically entered Emergency Industrial Machinery Mode, a feature he had not known existed.

When the bass guitar began, the hearing aids attempted to protect him by shutting down, restarting, connecting to his wife’s phone, and automatically ordering doughnuts for Jim.

Mrs. Wetherby did not accept Trevor’s graphs. She had attended church since before graphs and saw no reason to begin trusting them now. She produced her own evidence, consisting of a crumpled facial tissue that had blown out of her purse during the second chorus.

Trevor explained that the tissue’s movement could not be reliably attributed to sound pressure without controlling for heating and ventilation. Mrs. Wetherby explained that the heating and ventilation had never successfully moved anything.

This was a strong point.

Caleb suggested lowering the volume by three decibels.

Nobody knew what this meant.

Trevor explained that decibels were logarithmic, whereupon the deacon began looking under the table for doughnuts. Mrs. Wetherby wanted the volume cut in half. Hunter wanted it increased until the congregation could no longer distinguish between music and weather. The elders wanted a level that would satisfy everyone, which is why they had been selected for spiritual leadership rather than mathematics.

Eventually, the team agreed to conduct a controlled sound test the following Sunday. This required Brent to develop a Sound Test Operational Readiness Protocol.

The protocol was twenty-one pages long and included emergency procedures in case the worship pastor entered the environment before the room had been declared acoustically secure.

Brent distributed laminated copies to everyone. He wore two headsets.

Sunday’s test began at 8:00 a.m. sharp. Trevor placed decibel meters throughout the sanctuary. Caleb stood on the platform with his guitar. Mrs. Wetherby occupied her usual pew and held a hymnal in front of her face as blast shielding. Hunter stood near the stage because his long-term goal was to experience internal organ displacement.

Mr. Peterson switched off his hearing aids and placed them in the church refrigerator, where he noticed a box of half eaten doughnuts.

The worship team began playing.

Trevor adjusted the main output. Brent crouched behind the front pew, watching the room through binoculars for reasons known only to Brent. At eighty-five decibels, Mrs. Wetherby remained motionless.

At eighty-eight, she narrowed her eyes.

At ninety-one, a peppermint in her purse rotated approximately fifteen degrees.

At ninety-three, the tissue emerged.

At ninety-five, three offering envelopes migrated toward the center aisle.

At ninety-seven, the baptismal water developed a light chop.

At ninety-nine, the illuminated EXIT sign came on despite already being on.

At one hundred, the drummer’s enclosure moved three inches toward Methodism.

Trevor reduced the level immediately.

Brent declared an acoustic event and ordered everyone to hold position. One of his volunteers panicked and turned on the stage fog.

The church did not normally use stage fog.

Nobody knew why the machine was there.

Later investigation revealed that it had been purchased by the youth ministry for a Christmas presentation called “Bethlehem: The Experience,” which had been canceled after the first rehearsal when the wise men disappeared into a cloud and collided with the donkey.

The fog spread across the sanctuary.

The fire alarm activated.

The house lights came on.

The projection screens displayed the words HOW GREAT IS OUR GOD while the building announced that everyone should evacuate.

Caleb continued playing because he assumed it was a spontaneous worship moment.

Hunter raised both hands.

Mrs. Wetherby raised one hand, but not in worship.

Mr. Peterson’s hearing aids, still in the refrigerator, connected to the church Wi-Fi and called his cardiologist.

Brent remained calm.

This was the moment for which he had been preparing his entire life.

He moved rapidly across the deck, issuing instructions into both headsets. One headset was connected to the lighting team. The other was later discovered to be connected to the nursery, where three volunteers received urgent orders to secure the southeast quadrant and prevent unauthorized movement of the package.

The package was Caleb.

Caleb was still singing.

The congregation began arriving for the first service and found the worship team performing in theatrical smoke while alarms sounded, emergency lights flashed, the stage manager crawled beneath the communion table, and an elderly woman in the third row attempted to subdue a fog machine with a burgundy choir robe.

Attendance that Sunday was the highest in six months.

Many visitors described the worship as powerful.

One man said he had felt the music in his chest. This turned out to be Mr. Peterson’s cardiologist, who had come directly from home.

Following the service, the church received twenty-seven comment cards.

Nine said the music was too loud.

Eight said it was too soft.

Four loved the fog.

Three believed the fog was unbiblical.

One asked whether the church was still Baptist.

One contained a proposal for a fog ministry.

One asked if they served doughnuts between services…

The final card was from Mrs. Wetherby.

She acknowledged that the contemporary worship team was talented, sincere, and clearly reaching a younger generation. She also stated that she had decided to support Caleb fully and would no longer complain about the volume.

The staff was deeply moved. The volume controversy was finally over. And only a handful of visitors noticed the nursery’s baby monitor routed through the sanctuary subwoofers the following Sunday.

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