openlp.org to the Rescue!

This morning I was not on sound/data projector duty at church, so my wife and I decided to take it easy and arrive just before the service (instead of an hour or half an hour beforehand, as usual). However, unbeknownst to me, but beknownst to my pastor, the people on duty didn't rock up. So on our way to church, my wife gets a phone call from said pastor.

"There's no sound coming out of the speakers... how do we fix  that?"

So I had to trouble-shoot remotely via my wife. Of course this never really works (at least not in my experience) and so I had to hurry to church (while keeping to the speed limits along the way of course), instead of taking a leisurely drive. Somehow I knew that if there was a problem with the sound system, then chances were that there would be a problem with the data projector as well.

We got there 10 minutes before the service was due to begin, and I saw that not only was the person on sound duty not there, but the data projector was unattended as well. Thankfully, a friend who operates the sound from time to time had stepped in and was helping out there, so I quickly hopped in at the computer, opened openlp.org, and started setting up the service.

Unfortunately the service started before I had selected all the Bible readings for the sermon (our pastors like having the verses up on the screen while they're preaching), but I wasn't worried about that. Whenever I got a chance, I'd just add the next verse selection. No problem with openlp.org's everything-in-one interface.

The part which took the longest was not setting up the service, but rather finding the correct verses. Our pastor that was preaching this morning has a habit of saying he's reading one verse, when he's actually reading 3 verses on, or in a different chapter altogether!

This reminds me of another service, where the preacher had not given me a list of all the verses in his sermon, and I was pulling verses on the fly. Wow. I would not have been able to do that with another projection application. openlp.org's interface makes it easy to show adhoc things on the fly.

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