My Worship Revolution

Within the span of about 10 minutes I found out about 2 Revolution peeps who finally started their own blogs!

RachelKaye.blogspot.com

After much prodding and encouragement, my wife has started a blog.  She’s giving it a go and is gonna see what happens.  Stop by her site and be sure to comment and give her some encouragement to keep it up!  Hopefully her blog doesn’t ever become my primary way of communicating with her, eh?  Thanks to Rob, Leah and Will for helping talk her into this one.

Bambricks.blogspot.com

Rick Bambrick is a dear friend, former life group member (until he took over when we moved to downtown Long Beach) and a great guy I look up to in many ways.  Stop by and be ready to hear what’s happening with his family (and knowing him, probably some nice long posts explaining common misconceptions and superiority of five point calvinism…youu can skip those).

I love seeing more people jumping on the blogging bandwagon.  I think it’s such a great tool to keep up with peoples lives.  They can never replace personal interaction, but when the number of opportunities for personal interaction are limited every week, it’s a quick and efficient way to encourage and keep up to date with each other and learn from one another.

How many more of you are there who haven’t started a blog yet?  Jump onboard and let me know so I can add you to my blog roll!!

Well, you’ll just have to watch the video at the bottom for the proof.  Just consider yourself warned!

So on Wednesday, Rachel and I had the privilege of getting a 4D sonogram done.  It’s amazing how much you can see with these things.  Kinda helps you realize just how real the little guy is I guess!   Here’s a few pics we got:

"Aren’t I cute when i’m smiling?"


Yawning

What can I say…I guess I’m already being the proud dad!

So here’s the deal:  there’s a great guy in our church who did these for us.  He works for Medison which is the company responsible for developing the technology to make these things possible.  Here’s the cool part.  They do training sessions for sonographers in the medical field and need pregnant women to train with regularly.  So if you’re interested in getting some shots of your own (and you’re pregnant, of course), go to their website, give them a call, and they should schedule a time for you to come in and be a part of the training.  They get the patient, you get the sonogram and pictures absolutely free!  I think they said they look for ladies at either 20 weeks or so and 28-30 weeks.

We also got some great video clips that I threw together to make a short little video with the pics.  Check it out below if you wanna!  2 more months!!

Sunday afternoon we had a whole bunch of you from Revolution come through The Hub for open house.  Many, many hours of work have been put in by staff and volunteers to get our office and warehouse space organized, operational and lookin good!  Thank you so much to all of you who have done so much to help us out!

Here’s a bunch of pics from the afternoon.  Thanks for coming to help us celebrate our new ministry center!

Our warehouse for Student Ministries, band practices and seminars.

Jenny Platt and Mama Sara serving up our ice cream sundaes.

That little girl is so darned cute!

Beatin the heat in the air conditioned office.

Before everyone left they signed their name to "the wall."  If you weren’t here, make sure to sign in next time you come by!

Here’s a spoof on the recent Mac ads.  It’s funny!!

That’s the question we asked kids at VBS a few weeks ago. This video was our intro for the message on Ephesians 5. It’s a pretty tough topic with lots of different viewpoints, so it was a fun way to kinda break the ice as we talked about our need to be in charge. Check out some of the funny answers we got!

One of the things I love to do in order to get ideas for creativity, see what else is going on that I can learn from, and just do some worshipping is visit other churches whenever I can. There is a short list of places I’ve been wanting to check out for a while, but haven’t had the chance to, and of course it’s next to impossible to visit on Sunday mornings when we have services.

So I’ve decided I’m going to be real intentional about scheduling some visits with the Sunday nights I have available fo the rest of this summer. A lot of them are filled up already, so here’s the plan for what’s left:

Sunday July 23 – Sandals Church
Rachel and I have some friends, Rob and Leah, who attend this church. We’ve been talking about wanting to hang with them sometime forever now, so we decided we should cruise out there to their Sunday night service and hang out with them afterward. Some of you may be familiar with this church also from their worship pastor Los’ blog. Been wanting to visit also after following his blog and hearing about all the great stuff God is up to there.

Sunday August 6 – ROCKharbor: Shark Club
This is a multisite venue for ROCKharbor that meets at the Shark Club in Costa Mesa. I always enjoy visiting ROCKharbor, and with my interest in checking out multisite venues and seeing how they work, I’ve been wanting to visit here for quite a while now. I’ve also heard all sorts of great stuff about the worship pastor there, Drew Bray.

Sunday August 27 – Mosaic Church
Another church I’ve wanted to visit for a long time but never gotten around to. Mosaic is very well known for a lot of their arts stuff (and for Erwin McManus, of course) so I’d love to see what they’re up to. I met a few weeks ago with their arts director, David Arcos, who gave me some great thoughts. Some other leaders in the arts and I should be going with David and mosaic up to their Artisan Retreat in the mountains the following weekend, so that should be a fun weekend to visit.

So that’s the plan for now. May change if anything comes up, but i’m hoping not. May even throw in an extra on a Saturday night or somethin. Would loave to go visit North Coast Church again with Rachel sometime. (Wow…i just noticed there’s lots of links in this post, huh? Have fun surfin! And I never did add part 2 of the North Coast visit. I guess I should get on that.)

If anyone wants to come along to any of those, let me know. The more the merrier!

Ok, so this post actually has nothing to do with off roading or my Jeep that was totaled which is in the picture.  It just made me think about my old Jeep and I wanted to tell you all how much I still miss her.

Anyway, so what is 4X4?  It was started earlier this year by Alvin and Lori as a way to get to know some other couples at church better.
4 couples.
4 months.
4 dates.
Each couple takes a turn planning the date.
At the end of 4 months, each couple picks 3 other couples to join them and it continues to multiply.

So this past Sunday night was our first 4X4 experience going out with the Alvin and Lori Velarde, Bart and Lindsey Boulton, and Richie and Selena Garcia.  We had dinner at P.F. Chang’s and had a great time sharing stories and getting to know each other better.

Afterward we walked across the street to the ferris wheel at The Pike.  Little did we know that Rachel and Lori couldn’t ride because they were pregnant.  Are you serious?  I mean I can understand a roller coaster, but a ferris wheel?  It’s like an elevator that makes you a little dizzy?  Regardless, we had a great time together.  Sorry, didn’t get any pictures so you’ll just have to enjoy the memorial to my Jeep up above.

So next month we do it again and it’s mine and Rachel’s turn to plan the date.  We want to do something really fun and creative or different.  Any idea’s?

As all of you regular readers have probably figured out, I am quickly on the road to becoming a Mac evangelist, and beyond hope at this point.  I do, however, want this to be an equal opportunity space on the web, and I understand that some of you are still stuck in your stubborn PC ways as I once was.

So for you, I thought I’d share this website: iDont.com.  Check it out.. it’s actually pretty funny!  (Thanks Maureen for the link.)

I do have to admit however, it is kinda funny how Mac began, and is often branded still, as the product for the person wanting to be different and unique, even though now it seems to have become the trendy thing to have.  I just switched over finally cause they just have a better product.  That’s all.

So I’m taking a page out of Carlos Whittaker’s book over at Ragamuffin Soul. He asked for some suggestions on a good point and shoot camera and got what he needed without the hours of research. “What a great idea” I thought to myself.

You see with a kid on the way, Rachel wants to get a good video camera to capture the moments. And since I love shooting and editing video, I’m lovin the idea. But I have no idea what the good consumer models out there are. Any suggestions to save me some researching time? Thanks again for the idea Los!

Everyday as I learn more about who God is and my understanding of worship changes and grows, that word "community" becomes more and more important.  I am recognizing more and more that we are created and built to live in community with each other.  We are created and built to worship God in the context of community, not as lone rangers.  Here’s a few thoughts that have really blown my mind lately:

• God said "Let us make mankind in our image."  I used to think that was proof for the trinity, but not anymore.  There’s already evidence for that in the first few verses of Genesis.  Because God is the trinity, a fellowship, he created us to be the same way.
• Because God created us to be a fellowship, and that is His image, I cannot be the image of God without the people around me.  I really need other people and relationships to fully be the image of God.
• Acts 2:42-47.  Acts 2:42 is like a part of our mantra here at Revolution.  It’s in our site name.  We have 242ministries as a non-profit and 242resources for podcasts and vodcasts.  These verses convey a radical sense of community.  I learned recently of a writer whose thesis was that this sense of community – way beyond evangelism as we know it today – is what was the cause for the rapid growth of the first century church.  (Rodney Stark, The Rise of Christianity)

That’s where the church becomes so important.  As long as there are people in the church, there will be sin, so we will never get it fully right.  But we need to be there together, cheering each other on in the journey.  We need to be caring for each other and about one another.  It may sound odd in this conversation, but that’s one of the things I love about this blog world we live in, believe it or not.  Should it replace relationship and personal touch…no way.  But it’s an amazing tool to help in creating community and staying connected.  I know more of what’s happening in my immediate community and have been able to form community with people I never would have connected with otherwise.

Anyway, that’s what’s in my head right now.  That’s one of the things God is teaching me right now.  I need to work more and more at building relationships and living in community and walking daily with the people around me.  That’s how he’s changing my life.  How about you?  How is he changing yours?