BOWLING GREEN, KY — Every Sunday morning at 7:42 a.m., before the worship team arrives and before the coffee finishes brewing and before a single soul sets foot in the sanctuary of Cornerstone Bible Church, I walk to the center of the stage and I adjust the microphone stand.

Pastor Whitfield is six-foot-two. The previous worship leader, Donna Marsh, was five-foot-four. This is a seventeen-inch differential that, left unmanaged, would require Pastor Whitfield to either crouch for the entirety of his sermon or address God’s people from somewhere around his sternum. Nobody thinks about this. Nobody has ever thought about this. I think about almost nothing else.

“The stand doesn’t adjust itself. I want to be clear about that. It does not adjust itself.”

In fourteen years I have adjusted the stand 728 times. I have corrected it mid-service on four separate occasions when a visiting speaker moved it without understanding the locking collar mechanism, which, I cannot stress this enough, you have to press and turn simultaneously. I have composed a laminated instruction card that has been removed from the stand on three separate occasions by persons unknown.

“I don’t even know who does that,” said Deacon Ron Pickford, 61, when asked about microphone stand maintenance last April. He then gestured vaguely toward the ceiling. This was the closest thing to an acknowledgment I have received since 2019.

The worship team gets a green room. The sound booth gets a dedicated volunteer appreciation Sunday. I get a collapsible music stand to set my coffee on, which is not even related to my ministry.

I am not asking for much. A sentence in the bulletin. My name said aloud once. Anything.

At press time, Pastor Whitfield had just delivered a 38-minute sermon on servant leadership from a microphone positioned at exactly the correct height.