Saturday, August 15, 2020
Dear St. Andrew’s Community,  

Upon the arrival of the pandemic, which led to council’s decision to interrupt in-person gathered worship, your worship leadership has searched for ways to continue to engage all of you in collective worship of our God.  Out of that search and the skills of Kelli Steurer, came the weekly worship service presentations that are available on the Internet.  In turn, MJ mailed printed versions of the services to those for whom accessing the Internet is either a challenge or impossible.  Again, this was an effort to keep all of you engaged in some kind of worship experience on an on-going basis in spite of not being able to worship together in person.

HYMNS  

My part in this exercise was to create arrangements of selected weekly hymns and record them so that they could be included as musical offerings in worship presentations on the Internet each week.  After a few weeks of doing this, I received feedback that people would like to sing along at home with the hymns included in the worship presentations.  Initially, singability was not one of my arrangement design concerns, and accordingly, early on I created a few arrangement recordings that would have been difficult, if not impossible, to follow along - let alone sing along.  That has changed.  Singability is now a major design component of the arrangements and will hopefully be an aid to enhancing your worship life.  

Each hymn will begin with a short introduction intended to give you an indication of how the hymn music will go.  After the introduction, each full verse of the hymn will proceed in a straight-forward manner, and will follow the music as shown on your screen or printed sheet containing the order of service.  I will include played music for all verses shown on your screen or printed sheet.  If there is only one verse of lyrics in the hymn, there will be two full verses of music after the introduction.  The first full verse of music may or may not be particularly singable.  If it's not, think of it as an extended introduction and use the time to reflect on the message in the lyrics.  The second full verse of music will be singable and follow the "printed" music much more closely.  I'm hoping this written explanation will help with your worship experience.

FM TRANSMITTER on 87.9 MHz  

We have also put in place an FM radio transmitter to do live broadcasts of the sound from our Sunday morning worship services.  It is a low powered transmitter that is intended to cover merely our building's parking lot.  However, our initial broadcast tests suggest that the transmitter's range may be considerably larger, even on its low power setting.  

Our intent was to make available to persons that do not have access to the Internet a means of being able to hear live worship services without having to be inside St. Andrews' building.  If your car has an FM radio, you may park in the parking lot, remain in your car for your own protection, and tune in to the worship service broadcast.  There are a few un-used FM frequencies at our building's location.  One of them is 87.9 Megahertz which I have chosen to use because it is particularly quiet.  To date, we have not experienced a lot of interference on this frequency, nor have we knowingly inflicted any interference on other's broadcasts.  So, for now, we will use 87.9 MHz.  This is subject to change.  If we discover that 87.9 MHz is not workable because of incoming or outgoing interference, we will revisit the frequency issue, make the necessary changes, and inform all of St. Andrew's of the changes.  

Using this FM transmitter potentially offers an additional benefit for gathered worship.  Persons that have historically had difficulty hearing what's going on during a worship service will be able to tune in to the worship service FM broadcast with their own personal FM radio and, hopefully, hear what's happening more clearly.  This has not yet been fully tested, but we are hopeful that the benefit is real and that more people will be enabled to fully participate in our worship services.  

If you have additional ideas about how to more fully engage our community in worship, please contact a member of our worship team (Audra Blasdel, Chris Willman, Mark Hollman, Doug Givan, and Ed Bailey) about your ideas.  

Peace be with you all.  

Ed Bailey