Projection Screens in Church, or A Little Piece of Me Dies

Last Sunday I was invited over to the TerHaars. There was some reason thrown out about something I can't quite recall, but mostly Sandra loves me. (Hi, Sandra! The feeling is mutual! Thanks for the awesome broccoli salad!) After lunch, we gathered around the piano for singing. Because this is what the TerHaars do. (I think I like that even more than the broccoli salad, because I know other people who do the salad thing.)

Anyway, enough TerHaar love for this post. This post is about projection screens in church.

After we were finished singing some Trinity Hymnal favorites, we sang a "praise song." (At my church the distinction between a hymnal song and a praise song is, apparently, whether or not it's in the hymnal.) A discussion ensued about how we were going to get the lyrics into everyone's hands when we sang the song at church. Someone mentioned (ah, here it is!) using the projection screen. We'll be using it at the new building anyway, they reasoned.

I yelled louder about this than I maybe should have in a small room full of people who are mostly not me, but there you have it. I hate projection screens in church. It's not that they don't come in handy sometimes, but they're the bare minimum version of something more substantial.

I am a very tactile person. (Take me through the clothing section of any store and see how many things I touch if you need empirical proof.) And one of the things I hate about projection screens is that they deprive me of the heft of a book in my hands, the feel of the crisp pages, the smell of it. They deprive me of all that goes into sharing a hymnal with somebody who forgot to pick one up for themselves: finding the right height (the person next to me is rarely my height), tilting it at the right angle, and in general sharing the song with someone in a way I don't when I sing from my own solitary hymnal, or (worse) from a screen.

My hands feel so empty without a hymnal. I don't know what to do with them when I'm singing if I don't have one, and often grip the chair back in front of me to keep from breaking into sweeping arm-dance gestures. (The fact that my hymnal or the chair in front of me or the presence of other people is/are sometimes the only things that keep me from dancing during worship is another subject entirely.)

I am not the best sight-reader, musically speaking, but I am getting better. I like to be able to sing the harmonies. Without a hymnal, I would still sing harmony, but it would be a harmony I found by myself. And sometimes it would fall off the harmony wagon.

With all that said, I could live without hymnals. I would be very sad, and it would feel like there was a hole in my heart that would never be mended, but the human heart is like Swiss cheese anyway, so I would live.

But I will take it up with the elders if we have Bible verses onscreen. I don't think the Bible is a book any of us should learn to go without...no matter how convenient that might be.