R-0003: Notes on how to operate a sound system

There are moments from that church that still baffle me with their surrealism. These events happened in plain sight, witnessed by multiple people, and yet somehow left me feeling as though I’d briefly slipped into an alternate reality.

This particular incident took place years after we’d joined. By then, the church had moved into a proper building, rented in the afternoons from a traditional, aging congregation in the rural Northwest. We had a small sound system that I operated, using the few years of experience I’d gained with the Lutheran Brethren and had continued to develop. Aside from my father, I was the only one who could reliably run the system, and the community was small enough that I was a known factor. Isaac would sit with me in the corner, managing the slides with lyrics and scripture.

I was under no delusions about my role. While I was trusted to control the volume of the sermon, I was not permitted to speak in church. The only reason I had this “authority” during the service was because no men, aside from James, knew how to do what I did, and James was preaching often enough that my skills were required at least once a month.

Around age fourteen or fifteen, a truly off-putting family joined the fellowship. While anecdotes about the Addams family could fill several more humorous records, it is sufficient for today to note that they were in a league of their own. Unlike others in our fundamentalist community, the Addams refused to expose their children to the heathen idolatrous influences of Christmas trees and Good Friday services; did not allow their daughters to cut their hair; actively practiced betrothal; sent their boys to Christian paramilitary camps; and prevented all their children from forming age-appropriate friendships to protect them from the World, the Flesh, and the Devil.¹ 

After a few years, two of the older Addams “boys”² expressed an interest in learning how to mix sound. One Sunday they approached James directly, who, busy preparing for spiritual intercession with another family, sent them back to me. They came to the corner where Isaac and I were sitting, and began asking a series of detailed questions about the technicalities of sound mixing, where to learn, and whether they could join the volunteer “rota” that consisted of my father and me.

At each question, I answered to the best of my ability; each time, they reacted as if Isaac had spoken. They maintained unbroken eye contact with Isaac the entire time, even though Isaac didn’t particularly appreciate being dragged into a conversation that had nothing to do with them.

What still unsettles me, all these years later, is not just the strangeness of the boys’ behavior but the way the moment unfolded in full view of the men who defined that world. A cluster of patriarchs stood only a few feet away, watching the exchange with idle interest, as if they were observing a perfectly ordinary interaction. They saw me answering, they saw the boys ignoring me, and none of them appeared confused or disturbed by the social physics at play. When I told James afterward, expecting at minimum a raised eyebrow, some acknowledgment that what had happened was bizarre, he absorbed the information with the same blank neutrality he reserved for weather reports. He never commented on it, never intervened, never suggested that it was odd for grown men to pretend his teenaged daughter didn’t exist even while speaking to her. He proceeded to teach “the boys” the basics of sound mixing for a few months, until the Addams family left the fellowship.

In hindsight, that is the part that lands the hardest: not the moment itself, but the realization that in that environment, my erasure was so unremarkable that even the people who were supposed to protect me didn’t see anything worth noticing.

¹While I generally found the patriarch deeply unpleasant, so much so that I still wish him a lifetime of paper cuts, I can only imagine how difficult life was for his daughters. I sincerely hope they got out as I did, but last I heard, many of them were re-enacting their childhoods with their own families.

²Calling them “boys” is somewhat deceptive; the older was in his mid-twenties and the younger was somewhere over nineteen. However, as with every "child" in the fellowship, so long as you were unmarried, your entire personhood was reduced to being the son/daughter/girl/boy of the patriarch of your family.