Fellowship · The two drummers

The kit is a place of welcome, not a throne.

When Brother Jim "Easter Sunday" Mauer came to the kit in 2012 there was one drummer in Water2Fine, and when J.C. Littrell was called to it in 2025 there were two, and the arithmetic of that has troubled precisely no one in this fellowship, though we understand it is the kind of arithmetic that has undone bands with far grander sound systems than ours. A drum kit is a small country. It has room, if you are willing, for more than one citizen. Jim and J.C. worked this out the first Sunday they sat down to it together, without a summit and without a single raised voice, in about the length of time it takes to agree on a tempo: one of them would play, and one of them would listen, and then, when the song asked for it, they would trade — and the trading would be a kindness offered, not a territory surrendered. They have played together now for a little over a year. They have never once disputed which of them is the real drummer. We have watched for it, if we are honest, the way you watch a pot you have been warned will boil over, and it simply has not, because there is nothing under it to boil. There is no real drummer. There is a real kit, and two brothers who take turns keeping it warm, and a congregation that cannot always tell which of them is playing and has never once thought to ask. We mention this only because we understand it is, elsewhere, an open question — that there are stages, we are told, on which two men who love the same music have spent years unable to share it, one running a fog machine, the both of them shouting over an airship. We will name them once, gently, as we have lately learned to do: we pray for LitBlimp, and we pray in particular that they might someday learn what our two drummers learned in an afternoon, which is that a seat is not a throne, and that the surest way to lose a thing is to insist, at volume, that it was only ever yours.

• ✚There is no real drummer — This is the whole of it, and we will not dress it up: Water2Fine has two drummers and no argument about which is the genuine article, because we do not believe the position exists. Jim is a real drummer. J.C. is a real drummer. The word "real" was doing no work in that sentence, and we have gently let it go.
• ✚Trade the seat, do not defend it — When a song asks for one pair of hands, the other pair rests, and neither man reads the resting as a loss. They settled this their first Sunday, in about the time it takes to agree on a tempo, and they have re-settled it happily every Sunday since. A seat you are glad to give up for a while is a seat no one can take from you.
• ✚We did watch for it — We would be lying if we said we never wondered whether two drummers might be one too many. We watched the way you watch a pot you have been told will boil over. It did not boil, because we had put nothing under it. There is no heat in a question no one is asking.
• ✚The congregation cannot tell them apart — On a good Sunday you honestly cannot say from the folding chairs which brother is keeping the time, and no one has once leaned over to ask. We take this as the highest compliment a rhythm section can be paid: that the worship arrived, and the bookkeeping of who delivered it did not come with it.
• ✚A place of welcome, not a throne — This is the line we keep for the two of them on the prayer list, and we mean it as the plainest description of the kit itself. Pull up a stool. Keep it warm for whoever plays next. The drums were never the point; the joyful noise was, and a joyful noise has never once cared who made it.

Told most Sundays without meaning to, usually while Jim and J.C. are stacking cymbals after the potluck. Fellowship in song since 2007. There is always room for one more on the kit — and one more folding chair.