My Worship Revolution

Razr (v3)

As we’re hanging out at my place last night at life group, it comes to our attention that a member of the group had a Motorola Razr that they didn’t like and were looking for someone with T-Mobile service to give it to. To make a long story short, it somehow ended up in my hands and I now have a pretty spiffy new phone.

Not even close to an idea what cool things the phone has on it, but I like it. Looking forward to checking it out more. Bluetooth, scheduling, fun stuff. Thanks Johnstons!

iMac

As many of you know, we like doing lots of videos at Revolution. (To see some past videos look here, or here.)  They are most commonly edited on my incredibly slow Dell laptop which adds hours to the process. Today we got the church and iMac and Final Cut Studio for editing as well as capturing our services for the web.

This will save lots of hours, hopefully increase the quality of the videos, and allow to start creating more of a team of people to be editing. I’m totally stoked about this. It’s pretty hard for me to admit it, but I think my conversion to believing in Mac products is almost comlete.

Easter Update
Dance rehearsal tonight, drama tomorrow night, a few videos to edit for Good Friday, sound to edit for Easter, almost have all the props for Easter, need a few stage hands, gotta finish figuring out the overflow room setup.

Met with Dave and Elijah today to make sure all our ducks are in a row for the weekend: flow, rehearsal schedule, etc. Easter weekend at Revolution is gonna rock. Don’t miss it. Maybe I can get Jenny to add an adult area to the Egg Hunt on Saturday. See ya there!

This post summarizes my week perfectly.  Well put Carlos.

So yesterday was a pretty busy morning at Revolution Church.  Baptisms were a blast.  They always are.  And then there was the announcement of some staff transitions.  Of course, this was of particular significance to me personally with my changing role at Revolution.
I am no longer the Director of Worship and Creative arts at Revolution church.  My new "title" is Pastor of Celebration Arts. 

Since July of 2004, it has been my job to oversee the worship, production, and arts ministries at our church, with most of my time being toward worship.  This past week we hired Elijah Young (who just became a father on Friday night, by the way!!  Congrats!) as our part-time Lead Worshipper.  With this shift, it becomes my role to focus primarily on production and creative arts as our church continues to grow.  (P.S. – we also hired our first part-time Director of Student Ministries.)
This is a shift that we have been processing for a few months now, and with it comes lots of different thoughts and emotions for me. 

For the past 5 years I have been consistently leading worship somewhere, whether on staff or as a volunteer.  It has become a large part of who I am, and I have a huge passion for it.  It is something I will miss, have missed, though I also have loved being able to worship from within the congregation, and I’ll still have opportunities on occasion, both in and outside of Sunday mornings.
At the same time I am really excited to see God stretch me in new and different ways.  I am excited to see him equip me with more abilities that I already sense he has begun in me.  I’m excited about the ways that this shift will form me and draw me closer to Christ, making me more like Him.  I’m really excited about the endless possibilities for our Creative Arts ministries at Revolution Church.  There are lots of visions and dreams I have to see that minitry do great things, and I look forward to sharing those as time goes on.

Anyway, I guess that’s it for now.  Just a peek into the thoughts of me as God transforms me and moves me into new areas and challenges and possibilities in ministry.  And I know God will continue to change and transform all of us here as he continues to grow our church and do amazing life changing things within the people of our community.  I’m stoked.
And now, I gotta go get ready for Easter.  CRAZY week ahead getting ready for Easter weekend, so I may not be back much this week.  We’ll see.  Anyone know a florist?  I could use some help.  Random.  Seriously though, e-mail me if you do, please.  Anyway, catch y’all later!

I know that there are some of you out there who link over here or type the URL for this site in your browser every so often to see if anything new is posted. Well, maybe a couple of you at least. Anyway, just want to share a great tool with some of you who haven’t delved to deep into the blog world yet (key word being yet).

Bloglines.com allows you to subsribe to a feed of all of your favorite blogs. It will create a "blog roll" on the left side of the page with the names of all your favorite blogs. Each time you log on and there’s a new post from one, it will appear bold with the number of unread posts next to it. It’s just that easy.

I’ve been using it for quite a while now, and it revolutionized my life (maybe some kick back or a sponsorship from bloglines is in order – oh yeah, it’s free…nevermind). I’ve turned some others on to it too and they love it. So go sign up and make your life a little easier.

Went to the doctor again today.  Got to hear the baby’s heartbeat for the first time.  So of course I whipped out the mp3 player (thanks Randy, still need to return that to you) and got it on tape.  (That’s just an expression…nobody uses tapes anymore). 
It sounds kinda crazy.  I seriously think it’s kinda like the background loop for a remix.  Maybe I’ll hold on to it, and after the kid’s born I’ll get sounds of crying and drooling (if that makes a sound) and make a Techno Baby Dance Mix!  Check it out!
Listen Here!

So we’re sittin in church this morning, and all of a sudden the fire alarm goes off during Dave’s message. Now we’ve set it off before with our haze, but it wasn’t our fault this time! Check out the video below.

All this after the custodian forgot to change his clock, too, so we got a pretty late start to the morning.
Unfortunately, I had them stopping the tape after the message, so we didn’t get the worship on tape, but it was awesome to see everyone so into worship even with the fire alarm going off forever. You guys rock!

Just a reminder to everyone (especially those helping out tomorrow). We lose an hour of sleep tonight. So get some extra sleep and set those clocks ahead! See y’all later!

That’s right friends, it’s time for the first ever Friday Giveaway. Don’t get your hopes up, though. Unless someone wants to find me a sponsor or start donating things to give away, this won’t happen often.
the Toyota Long Beach Grand Prix is coming up next weekend, and I happen to have a bunch of vouchers for a Free Friday Pass ticket for Friday, April 7th. This isn’t the day of the race, but there should be bands, qualifying races, and access to all the exhibits and garages in the area.
There’s 30 tickets available, so it’s first come first serve. Leave a comment or shoot me an e-mail. Depending on who you are, we’ll figure out the best way to get it to you. I can probably just meet most of you downtown that morning. Or for Revolution attenders, I can bring yours on Sunday. And I won’t even make you answer 2 random questions to win.

Download PDF circuit map (437 kb)

Anybody out there at Revolution or in the Long Beach area interested in taking some voice lessons? Christina Walker is the Pastor of Belong/Grow ministries here at the church, and she teaches voice on the side.
Christina is a well trained vocalist with a Bachelor’s Degree in Performing Arts Ministry from University of Hartford. She started down the professional opera road, then God called her into ministry. She has sung and given lessons for many years.
This is a great opportunity to grow and work on your instrument if that is something you want to continue doing, whether you are on the worship team, in your high school choir, or just want the person in front you at church to stop cringing during worship (don’t worry, it sounds great to God as long as your heart is in it – the rest of us can suffer cause it’s really about Him anyway).
E-mail Christina for availabilty and rates, or any other questions you might have.

So I saw this article over at the xxxchurch blog. It’s a pretty interesting write up from an integrity online e mail. Check it out:

At Integrity Online we received many customer requests to block Xanga and MySpace, as well as some customer requests to keep them open. We have researched, at great length, the pros and cons of free, unmonitored, Web Logs ("Blogs") such as these. It has become clear to us that in order to provide the best filter protection to our customers, we must block xanga.com and myspace.com.

Blog hosts like these do not monitor, filter, or block the content of the Blogs they publish for all to view. Children can easily access these Blogs, and millions of these Blogs have proven themselves to be obscene and even dangerous.

As part of our research, we chose some words that might be used by ministries or businesses and searched for them on myspace.com. The “hits” are how many times these words are found on MySpace Blogs.

Bible Study 246,000 hits

Salvation 238,000 hits

Ministry 711,000 hits

Investment 82,400 hits

Medicine 571,000 hits

Architecture 164,000 hits

Antiques 25,700 hits

Now compare these words above with some obscene words below, that we searched on MySpace Blogs. These figures are beyond belief but sadly true.

Sex 9,960,000 hits

F*** 13,900,000 hits

Porn 2,300,000 hits

Sh** 17,700,000 hits

Nude 5,380,000 hits

More threatening to our customers are the dangers to children. National headlines have been made with tragic stories of sex crimes carried out against teenagers, and even younger children, through contact on these Blog sites.

My Space is an interesting animal. I have to admit I do have a My Space myself, and I’ve found it to be a useful tool to make contact with some old friends I haven’t talked to in years. Some of them are even doing ministry in other parts of the country and it’s been a great resource and opportunity for us. I’m able to here about the lives of people who are in my ministries. Some of you may have even found my blog through My Space.

On the same note, you don’t have to be on there long to see all the negative uses for it. Obviously, based on my own use of it, I won’t completely condemn the use of My Space altogether. But if you’re a teenager reading this, hopefully you can at least understand why your parents don’t let you use it, and I can’t say I blame them.