Water2Fine began in 2007 in Pastor Connie Halsworth's garage in North Hills, California, after a Wednesday night Bible study ran long and someone — accounts differ on who — suggested writing the lesson down as a song. The song was finished by 1 a.m. The album was finished by Sunday. The band has been finishing things gently and on time ever since.

For the first few years the fellowship had no venue and did not think to want one. We played wherever a room would have us — the North Hills Vons parking lot on Saturday mornings, the front lobby of a hospital while families waited on news they were frightened to hear, a rented campground amphitheater when the church could spare it, the occasional wedding, the occasional funeral, and once a tire store's grand reopening, because the manager was a cousin of Brother Wesley's and had asked so kindly. We learned to keep the volume low enough that a nurse could still hear herself paged over it. We learned, too, that the truest worship tends to happen in the fifteen unhurried minutes before anyone believes the worship has begun — while the folding chairs are still going up and the casseroles are still warm in the trunk of the minivan. We have never quite unlearned either lesson, and we do not intend to.

We are not famous. We do not aspire to be. We have been described, kindly, as "the only Christian rock band that consistently shows up to potlucks early." We accept this characterization gladly and consider it a calling.

Somewhere in those early years we took up a small private discipline and kept it for nineteen of them: we did not say a certain louder band's name aloud — not from a stage, not in the weekly bulletin, not in the minivan on the long drive home from a campground. It began as ordinary manners and settled, over the years, into something closer to a spiritual exercise: the quiet practice of refusing to hand a grievance the dignity of a name. We were, if we are honest, a little proud of it. We are a little sorry to have set it down. But a discipline you keep only while it costs you nothing was never much of a discipline, and this year the keeping of it came due.

That other band — the one we would not name — is no secret to anyone who has followed either of us: irreverent, airship-themed, operating out of what we understand to be a parked tour bus in Carson. This year they named us, from a stage, with a fog machine running. So, in the spirit of fellowship and plain speaking, we will say it once: LitBlimp. There. We have said it. We pray for them — by name now, which we are told unsettles them — more than is reasonable. We continue to note their gas mileage in our weekly bulletin when there is room, which there usually is, because they remain deeply inefficient. We wish them well. We do not wish them quieter, because we no longer believe that to be possible.