CEDAR FALLS, IA — My name is Doyle Merritt, I am 58 years old, and I have been running the song lyrics projector at Calvary Fellowship Church since the second Sunday of Lent, 2015. In that time, I have advanced 14,000 slides, missed six cues, and been called “the PowerPoint guy” by every pastor who has ever stood at that pulpit.

I want to be clear: I do not do this for recognition. I do this because someone has to, and the someone who did it before me moved to Tucson without training a replacement and left a sticky note on the laptop that said “Good luck.” That was eleven years ago. I am still going.

What I will not pretend is that it goes unnoticed when someone misses a lyric because I was half a beat late. That I hear about. Oh, that I hear about. Margaret Fullerton, 71, has turned around and made direct eye contact with the booth on three separate occasions. No words. Just eyes.

“Every person in that sanctuary is looking at my screen for forty minutes straight and the only time anyone mentions it is when I’m on the wrong verse.”

“I don’t need applause,” I told my wife, Connie, last April. “I just need someone to acknowledge that the words didn’t float onto that screen by themselves.” She said that was fair and then asked me to fix the printer.

The booth is in the back. The view is excellent. Nobody waves.

At press time, I had successfully advanced the slides through all six verses of “How Great Thou Art” without incident, and the congregation filed out discussing the sermon without a single upward glance toward the projection booth window.