Misery loves company, right? That’s why we invited our blog readers to share their stories of failures both epic and embarrassing. If you haven’t had an Oops! moment yet, you’ve been warned—you could be next.
Did I ever tell you about the time when I was in high school that some friends and I got to write and perform a bunch of sketch comedy at summer youth camp? It was a blast, and as is sometimes the case, there was minimal adult oversight. Most of it went pretty well, but there was one skit (which I helped write but didn’t perform) that angered our distinguished camp speaker and prompted my youth minister to hold a meeting with a group of concerned camp counselors. Let’s just say the skit featured a refrigerator box made to look like an outhouse, and let’s just say there was a guy inside that box wearing a wireless mic.
I honestly don’t know what I was thinking leading up to that moment, but I know what I was thinking after it: Oops! In thinking about that story, I realized there are some tragically funny church media and technology Oops! stories out there. For instance, when a friend of mine was a youth minister at a conservative small town church, he thought it’d be funny to show the “Farting Preacher” video from YouTube. The youth thought it was funny, but some adults weren’t too happy.
Along those same lines, I know of a church that wanted to persuade some people to start attending Sunday evening worship services in order to make more room in the Sunday morning worship services. Part of the church’s pitch to its attendees included a short video that identified a few things people could do on Sunday mornings if they weren’t in a rush to get to church—exercise, relax, and … um … celebrate the gift of marriage in an extremely private manner. If you know what I mean (and I think you do). Some people thought it was hilarious. Some people thought it was over the line. Looking back on it, the pastor can’t believe they showed the video, or that they showed it again in the next service. Oops!
In celebration of these wonderful mistakes, I turned to the COLLIDE blog and Twitter audience for their stories. Enjoy (and learn from) the cautionary tales of typos, bad assumptions, laziness, and poor judgment that follow.
Suffer the Little Children
A few years ago we were having Carol Kent speak at our Women’s Weekend. Carol has a powerful story and a powerful video. We were showing the video to promote the upcoming weekend. Carol and her husband were talking about their beautiful son being born, raising him, and then having tragedy strike in the form of their son murdering his wife’s ex-husband. Great video. What I did not put together until it was too late (the video was already showing) was that we were having a child dedication the same day. So in the congregation were families who were so excited about their new babies watching this tragic video. Oops! — Bethany
Angels What?
I volunteer as a computer graphics operator at my church. So I have to spell check everything that goes up on the screens on any given Sunday. Needless to say, the song, “All Hail the Power” now has a completely different meaning when this came on the screen: “All hail the power of Jesus’ name, let angels prostate fall.” I will never be able to sing that line without laughing. — Betsy B.
‘Tis the Season
Several years ago, during the Christmas season, I had hurriedly put together a compilation CD to play before and after the service. Most were songs off CDs of mine, but some were “of undetermined origin.” Never having listened to the finished CD, I left it playing as I ran to address some audio-related issue about 15 minutes before the service. As Harry Connick finished crooning “Silent Night,” the mix burst into super-loud, super-distorted, gangster rap. I’ve never run so fast in my life. Thankfully, most people laughed. I can laugh now, but I melted into a puddle then. — Martin M.
Say What?!?
Right out of college I was working for a church doing youth ministry. We were using a video clip for a sermon illustration one Sunday, and I was in charge of editing. It was a fantastic clip, with the exception of a few choice words. I edited all of the words out…except one that I missed on accident. So at the end of the message, we showed this clip for maximum dramatic effect. All was well – eyes were teary, hearts were moved towards God, and then BOOM…the “s” word hit us like a ton of bricks. All eyes turned back on me, so I made sure I pointed at the sound guy, like any respectable media guy does. Parents were not happy, but we survived to live another day. — Aaron A.
You Can’t Handle the Cussing!
Years ago when I was first starting, I was running sound and video for a youth event for students & parents. The youth pastor wanted to use a clip from the last few scenes of the “A Few Good Men’ VHS in the middle of his talk. Because Jack Nicholson’s character cusses at a particular part in the clip, the plan was for me to mute the cuss word, but let the rest of the dialogue be heard.
We practiced it numerous times and after half a dozen successful mutes, we were both feeling confident that we wouldn’t have a slip-up. Well, being still very green, I got really nervous, so when the clip played, not only did I hit the mute button too early killing the proceeding dialogue, but I unmuted it just in time to hear Jack Nicholson say, “I don’t give a D@&!” And then, I muted the rest of the dialogue in a panic. Yes I did.
Needless to say the pastor was in quite a predicament in the middle of his talk with parents and students in the room. He stammered out a few quick lines that I don’t remember and moved on. I was thoroughly embarrassed. Quite a lesson for both of us! — Deron Y.
Blame Gary Sinise
A few years back our Sr. Pastor wanted to use a clip from Forrest Gump as an illustration for his sermon. This was a last minute addition, so I obtained the movie and cued the clip. Knowing the section he wanted and thinking I knew the movie well enough, I didn’t take time to watch/listen to the clip. I promptly hit the “play” button only to have Lt. Dan yell an expletive loud and clear for all to hear. Never again will I not test and watch/listen to the clip no matter how “last minute” it is. — Lucas B.
Be Healed of Your Dry Skin
The guy running our video content wanted to go to our church online/chat site so he could tell the live video operator something (we use the free version of Livestream). He did this right before he had to play the sermon opener video. As it started playing, the audio from a Dove lotion ad on Livestream also started playing. He didn’t realize it because the audio from the video wasn’t loud in his monitors. I was producing that day and started yelling, “Kill the video!” into the headset. It scared his wife who was running lyrics, and she spilled her grape juice on the keyboard. He finally got Safari closed and the room went silent, then filled with laughter. The good thing is that our pastor is a goofball and made a joke about the message that day being about dry skin. An embarrassed video team and a new keyboard later, all is well, but what a crazy 30 seconds that was. — Chris M.
Cue the Curtains
Several years ago our church moved into a new auditorium, complete with a proscenium style stage, stage lighting system, and a remotely controlled (by the tech booth) curtain and drape system. At the end of one of our services, the worship team was set to play a song after the message. The plan was to have us setup behind the curtains, have them open up and start playing. About half way through the song the curtains decided to close and open at random, knocking into singers, instruments, etc. It was definitely our Spinal Tap moment. I don’t think we’ve tried using those curtains again during the middle of a service. — John V.
There’s Always Next Year
My biggest Oops! occurred a few years ago in the days of tape-recording the worship service. I often assisted the sound guy after covering for him while he was in college. It was Father’s Day, and the service began with the tech nowhere to be found. I reached over to turn on the pulpit mic and hit the “record” button on the tape player, thinking I was being helpful.
Upon the tech’s arrival, he discovered that I had not hit record on the blank tape; I was recording over the soundtrack for the soloist’s song during the offertory. That song was supposed to be sung by a 17-year-old girl … for her father … on Father’s Day … and he was in attendance, which was a rare occasion. Oh, and there wasn’t another copy
immediately available.
I had the unpleasant task of sneaking downstairs to tell both the soloist and music minister about my mistake. The minister had to come up with an excuse for the congregation and an alternative song for that time in the service. The girl, well, she ran from the sanctuary to the restroom to cry. — Nathan
Kill the Lights!
About a week before our Christmas show we installed a new lightboard. In trying to program it for church and the Christmas program, I wound up accidently deleting our presets twice. The night before the show, I stayed at the church all night working out the kinks. Positive of my ability to light everything sans tech rehearsal, I proudly hit the “go” button at show time. Unfortunately, I programmed the lights backwards, bringing up the lights on the next section of the stage while the actors from the previous scene were still frozen in the lights. It was awful and we will never again go without a tech run-through! And we now back everything up twice and on a memory stick, too! — Carol
Of Course I Was Paying Attention
We had a computer operator once hit the wrong button during a guest speaker’s message and a nice game of Solitaire showed up on every large screen. The important thing was that he was winning. — Sabrina
More Solitaire
Years back we ran our media computer from a room behind our stage. During the second service of the day our keyboard player decided she would head back there to wait out the preaching. She saw the computer on and thought she’d pull up Solitaire to kill the time. Her game was displayed on all three screens in the auditorium! To make things worse, the preacher thought he’d go track down the offender whilst narrating to the congregation. He expected to find an AWOL teen but found our respected keyboard player instead. Needless to say, she was horrified! — Cassie
The Hand You Were Dealt
My old church used to put out some sort of gimmick or promo at the beginning of each year with the new theme for the year. This one particular year, we were to be focused on personal devotionals. We produced a nice spiral-bound devotional guide that would coincide with the year’s sermons. As a companion piece, we produced a deck of devotional cards. The deck was the same size as a regular deck of cards, but each card had a daily devotional and Scripture passage. We handed out the devotional booklets and card decks on Sunday and patted ourselves on the back for producing a successful, labor-intensive job. Monday morning, the church office received a call from one of our senior ladies asking why she had devotional cards mixed in her deck with “scantily clad men.” Well, the bindery we used to die-cut the cards also produced a gay men’s magazine (which we didn’t know at the time). One of their workers thought it would be funny to use press sheets from the magazine to slipsheet between sets of the card press sheets. It’s humorous now to look back, but at the time things didn’t look so rosy. We ended up getting a letter of apology from the bindery and made them comp the job. — Henry
Double Whammy
We ran out of communion matzo one weekend. The youth group had a spaghetti dinner the night before and the ushers, in a rush, grabbed the leftover garlic bread and served it for communion. Good thing it’s California! Also, one time our children’s ministry was duplicating our kids worship CD for our 1,000 families. Someone had used the duplicator earlier to copy a CD by the comedian Demetri Martin (yes, illegal!). When the children’s ministry completed their 1,000 copies, they mistakenly handed out 1,000 Demetri Martin CDs instead of worship CDs. We had some explaining to do! I’m thankful for a community that laughs with me and at me (lovingly)! — Russ G.
We Sorta Appreciate You
Just two weeks after Easter, we held a volunteer appreciation breakfast/leadership seminar for about 350 of our volunteers and staff. The media department was asked to produce several video elements for the seminar. We produced two of the three elements and simply ran out of time for the third video. So, we did what every good church media department would do—we went looking for one online! The type of video we needed was a simple “thank you for serving”-style video. We checked the usual church media resource sites and struck out. We went to YouTube and finally ended up on Vimeo. After searching through what seemed like hundreds of videos, we decided on one.
Our editor slapped the logo of our event at the end of the clip and sent it off to the team producing the event. Of course, I included a disclaimer that we didn’t actually create the video, that it was from another church, and they should watch it and decide whether or not to show it.
The next day, I was standing in the front-of-house booth as the video began to play. At that moment, it was apparent to me that this was a bad decision. The video contained a combination of talking heads saying, “thank you” and phrases Christians like such as, “you’re my hero.” Then came the telltale signs that we had not produced this video. Besides the fact that the text on the screen said, “We honor you tonight,” and the all-white, Midwest faces and accents (we are a very multicultural church), there was one very critical line. One of the talking heads said, “Thank you to all our parking volunteers who serve even when it’s 30-below outside.”
Oops! That’s when I could see entire tables of heads turn back to look at me as if to say, “What the heck?” Yeah, we’re in Southern California and it barely reaches 45 degrees in our coldest winters. I literally knelt down in the booth, not to pray, but to hide. The video ended with a smattering of applause from the room and the emcee seemed like she didn’t quite know what to say. Yep, bad decision. Nothing communicates a sincere “thank you” to hundreds of your volunteers like a borrowed video from Vimeo! — Darrin G.
Carlos Whittaker Chimes in via Twitter
Loswhit: @CollideMagazine How about the time I brought up a website on the big screen at my last church and spelled it wrong, and, well, let’s just say, “boobs.”
Return to Sender
One year I sent a bulk mailing to our immediate community (50,000+ mailers) inviting them to our upcoming series. It wasn’t until I received mine in the mail that I realized the church address wasn’t anywhere on the flyer—not even a return address.
Learning from this mistake, we made certain that on future mailings our address was prominently featured on every mailer. Unfortunately, we were overzealous and the return address was printed so boldly on a subsequent mailer that more of them came back to the church than were delivered. — Priscilla H.
Daddy’s Little Girl
While trying the beta of ProPresenter 4 on a Sunday morning, the program decided to crash and display my desktop background image (which happened to be a picture of my daughter) on the two main screens. Luckily, my dad is one of the head pastors so he made a comment about how cute his granddaughter was and moved on. — Sam
Don’t Throw Away the Old Rugged Crosses!
The Sunday after Easter I drove up to the church for our evening service and saw three large wooden crosses lying next to the dumpster. The crosses were obviously used for our Easter program, but were being replaced. I consider myself to have a pretty good sense of humor, so I decided to take a picture of the crosses lying next to the dumpster and post it on Facebook. Early the next morning I got an unpleasant call from the senior pastor—apparently he and a few other members of the church didn’t find the picture as amusing as I did. Darn you, social media! — Doug S.
With or Without You
My story comes in the form of a PowerPoint presentation for a sermon. Our pastor’s sermon was titled, “With or Without Jesus.” He gave three examples of life without Jesus and two examples of life with Jesus. I copied the first slide to use as a template (so the next slide would be identical) and just changed the appropriate wording, but I forgot to change the header. When I projected the second slide, I saw “Life Without Jesus is Joy & Rest” on the screen. Ah! I quickly adjusted the slide and the “o-u-t” disappeared from the screen letter by letter. — Stephanie
Come One, Come All
Our church was rolling out a new media campaign, and we wanted some key ministry leaders (around 80 or 90 people) to show up to a campaign kick-off event. The plan was to use our e-newsletter software to send them the invitation to the event. Unfortunately, I chose the wrong recipient list and ended up sending the invitation to more than 11,000 people! Over 700 people ended up coming to the kick-off event. — Steven P.
Sin No More
I lead worship at my church and am responsible for typing the lyrics in our bulletins. One year during the Easter season, I planned to open our service with a hymn called, “Christ is Alive,” which starts out as follows: “Christ is alive, let Christians sing.” As I led the congregation in the hymn, many folks were snickering. As our pastor followed the song with the usual liturgy, he assured everyone that despite what we just sang, our church doesn’t encourage celebrating the resurrection of Christ by sinning. All got a good laugh; the joke was on me. I had typed, “Christ is alive, let Christians sin.” Oops. — Ben W.
Mentioning Unmentionables
As pastor, I sometimes change the sign out front for upcoming messages and events. One week I was announcing our community “Food Pantry” for everyone to see.” However, I failed to place the “R” in Pantry. We received some interesting calls and comments from folks in the community. Oddly enough, we even increased our attendance. — Greg S.
We hope you enjoyed those stories. Now, please, be careful out there!