Breaking Out of Your Ruts

The Swerve blog, from Lifechurch.tv, has a piece on "The Numbness of Frequency," by staffer Sam Roberts. Robert says that when you continually xpose people to the same thing in the same way, they become numb to it.

At work, I send email updates to our constituency on an as-needed basis--that is, whenever there's somethign to tell them. I know that if I sent an email every Tuesday, week after week, they would become numb to it. "Oh, another email from Steve. Must be Tuesday." I've sent emails on consecutive days, and I've gone three or four weeks without sending one. I don't want to send emails just to send them. I want people to know that if I send something, it's because there's something worth reading.

Church services often follow the same predictable pattern. We do minor tweaks at Anchor, nothing drastic--just rearrange the same ol' elements. But I think of some liturgical churches where the service order is firmly institutionalized. "Time for our second hymn. It must be 11:15." I imagine it's very easy to become numb in churches like that.

On the worship team, we can become numb to our own songs, doing them the same way every time. With one song this week, we tried changing the ending. In practice, we experimented with a progression of solos, but clearly saw a train wreck in the making, so we simplified it to a mere drumb solo. At least it was something different. People noticed.

Posted on August 4, 2008 08:54 AM|

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