My Worship Revolution

Well, back in the U.S. and back on the blog for 2009 anyway.  On vacation to see family for Christmas this week though.

Just got back from an awesome week in Mexico.  Like any trip, it had it's ups and downs, it's victories and it's hiccups, but after 5 days, between 2 groups equaling 115 people, one from Santa Cruz and one from L.A., 3 houses were built, 2 VBS experiences hosted, lots of other homes worked on, and lots of families were prayed for and loved on.  You can't beat that!

Here's a little video we showed at church on Sunday to share a piece of the experience.  Enjoy!

P.S. – The thumbnail in the video was Georgina leading us in morning exercises.  Hilarious!!  We need to produce her a workout video!

It’s been pretty quiet around here lately.
It’s gonna stay pretty quiet until after the New Year.
It’s actually provided kind of a nice break from blogging.
Kinda like it’s nice having an “off season” from Triathlon I guess.
Plenty of thoughts to ducument, just little time and motivation to bang em out.
But I’ll be back up and running (figuratively and literally) come January.

In the meantime, though, keep up with the next week in Mexico (internet service willing) over at the CLC Mexico blog.
Leaving with all these clowns in about 2 hours:

Keep us in your prayers!
It’s gonna be an awesome week!

Kinda like this, but a little bit different.
Saw this idea at both Whittaker blogs.
Comes from a Flickr group.
I like to steal good ideas.
It's a whole day in clips of a couple seconds each.

Yesterday I took the day off.
Here's the entire day in 90 seconds.
Welcome in to my life.
Enjoy.

Since I’m in a groove of pimping design, swing by our church site and check out the new design.
Tarena Heitmann, who is in our life group, designed it.  She is the bomb and did an amazing job!

Few small changes to tweak and then we’ll start adding some more functionality to it soon with the help of Aaron Mapes.
Good stuff!

A couple times a year I give designing a shot of my own.  We’re handing out a flyer at Caroling On The Wharf to advertise our Christmas Eve service as well as our New Years Series.  Used the same design as last year for our Christmas Eve candlelight service, but threw together a design for our January/February series using some background images Ed had grabbed for the branding.

I think it actually came out alright.  Better than some in the past in my opinion.  Take a look:

Any tips from you hot designers out there to make it better next time?

As a sidenote about that series, one of the things I’m really looking forward to is bring our friends Rex and Eve Johnson up here to do a marriage seminar at our church on Valentines weekend.  Unfortunately I might not be able to take part cause we should have a new baby that week, but if you are in Santa Cruz you wanna make it over for this.  They’re great!

I have a good excuse.

I was petty stoked about a creative element we added this past week.  We talked about advertising and the stock that it holds in todays consumeristic culture.  During the message, Rae Albrecht covered the cross with a collage of advertisements.  We pointed out that this is what our culture has done at Christmas, covered the cross of Jesus with consumerism and advertisements.  During the worship time after the message, we invited people to respond y removing the ads from the cross as a commitment to uncover the cross during this advent season.  It went really well and there were lots of people who responded that I don’t typically see get out of their seat to respond.

Thanks again to the brother-in-law Joel for designing a sweet mailer for our Caroling On The Wharf event.  Check it out:

This morning my wife is at a Secret Sister brunch while I watch Caleb and our youth pastor's daughter.

I love those 2 signs next to each other.  Crackin me up.
As Ryan said, only in Santa Cruz!

Sunday night we hosted a screening of the movie What Would Jesus Buy as a kickoff to our Advent Conspiracy series.  It is not a “Christian” movie.  It is a docu-comedy about reverend Billy and the Church of Stop Shopping Gospel Choir on a protest tour to save Christmas from the shopocalypse.

We made the screening free, and invited people to give toward Africa Oasis Project instead, one of our projects for this Advent Conspiracy.  The turnout, wasn’t huge, but it was decent with probably around 100 people showing up.   Nobody got an official count.  The biggest win was the percentage of people with no connection at all to our church.  It was cool to make a contact with a bunch of people from our community and to make available to them some brochures about Advent Conspiracy.  We also managed to raise almost $200 toward the building of wells in Africa.

Now for the non-win part.  You wanna keep reading for this part.  Although consider this the parental advisory warning.  If you are a youngin, stop reading. 

I bought the movie a few months back to watch and see if we thought it would be a good idea to screen.  Rachel and I watched the movie together, and while there were some issues presented that we might not particularly choose to push, it definitely reflected some positive values that are particularly important to people in our community.  It brought some issues to the forefront, and like any good piece of art, forces you to really think about them.  Some of the depictions were a bit of a stretch perhaps for our people, but we felt it was appropriate to show.  There was a “crap” and a “damn” in there which we figured we could handle.

Fast forward to the screening.  The company we licensed the movie from has sent our theatrical DVD, it is working well, and we are in business.  I’m sitting down into my seat after checking on something in the lobby part way into the movie.  As I’m sitting down we are at a scene where Rev. Billy is inside a Starbucks protesting.  All of a sudden I hear from one of the patrons in the Starbucks,

(Feel free to read that sentence again, but yes, you probably read it correctly the first time!)

My heart instantly sunk like a rock in my chest.  I don’t know if it really happened, but I swear I heard an audible reaction from the audience and I felt a physical reaction in my chest that lasted a good 10 minutes at least.  The thoughts in my head:

• I do NOT remember hearing that either of the 2 times I watched this movie!
• This movie is rated PG.  How in the world could it have that word in it?
• I can already see our email inbox filling up.

Well, luckily Ed and Julie were awesome about it and totally understanding.  He just said, “Don’t worry.  We’ll get through it.”

I went home afterward and immediately went to that part of the movie in my my copy.  Sure enough, the word is edited out in the copy they released on DVD.  You can tell what he says, but the word is definitely dropped out.

Well, the happy ending (I hope it’s the ending anyway!) is this.  First of all, no emails.  Not a single one.  Second, I personally emailed everyone I could think if who had kids there to apologize for the mishap and explain what happened.  I got a response from a couple of the people and it was really positive.  The overall consensus seemed to be, yeah we were surprised by that.  But unfortunately my kids have heard that word before, and they really came away from the movie made aware of some important issues.  One parent shared that they had some conversations since then that they never would have had and they were glad we had showed the film.

So there ya have it.  I thought there was really no need to watch the whole movie a third time.  But apparently I was wrong.  I was definitely mortified to hear that happen, but even with that, I think it turned out to be a positive experience with some good themes, some good connection, and some money given to make a difference in Africa.

But let’s please not have a repeat of that faux pas ever again!