My Worship Revolution

Interesting title.  Not sure what makes some art Christian, and other art not.  Didin’t realize art could be saved.  But that’s a whole different post sometime.  You get the point.

WARNING: todays post is really just a bit of a rant from Bobby’s head.

Last week I was watching a Christian movie that has become quite popular, in both the Christian and secular realm, and it kinda got me thinking.  Before going any further, let me preface this by saying that I had the opportunity to meet one of the guys responsible for this movie at Recreate.  I respect them and think they have great hearts.  Truth is, I am challenged by their commitment to dream and then just go for it.  Truth is, some of the acting in the movie bothered me.  Some of it was just bad.  And it has bothered me for a long that as the Church, rather than leading the way in arts as we did centuries ago, we continue to put out second rate art.  But knowing the story behind the movie and the hearts of the people doing it, this becomes very forgivable to me.

But there was one thing about the movie that really wore on me and I can’t seem to be able to kick it.  WARNING: if you haven’t seen the movie and want to, you may not want to finish as this is a big spoiler alert.  I’m gonna give it away.

As the movie begins, the lead character has been the coach of a losing football team for 6 years, is in danger of losing his job, isn’t making enough to make ends meet, has car issues as a result, and because of his own medical problems has just found out that he and his wife can not get pregnant.  They had been trying for 4 years.  He has a moment of revelation on prayer and following Christ unashamedly and changes his team philosophy.  By the end of the movie, the kids on the team all get saved, the team wins state championships, he gets a $6000 raise, a parent buys him a new truck, and his wife miraculously gets pregnant…twice!

I guess it’s a nice feel good story, and I can enjoy just about any movie with good football scenes.  So why does this all bother me?  It’s just not the reality that I have seen or experienced.  Does God work miracles today?  ABSOLUTELY!  Does God bless our socks off sometimes?  ABSOLUTELY!  Is this the typical response to following Christ?  ABSOLUTELY NOT!  Even if only 2 or 3 of those things happened and they didn’t have a kid but chose to adopt or something I would have been happier.

This past Sunday we talked about Jesus calming the storms.  Sometimes he calms the "storms" in our lives.  Other time he calms us in the midst of the storm.  For us to create and share true and meaningful art with the world, we need to be real with them.  I think we need to create art that is honest about the struggles we face and the ability to make it through even when all hell continues to break loose.  That is inspiring.

I’d really like to see a "Christian" movie that depicts a Christ-follower screwing up and then understanding what true forgiveness and grace, or being a great person but experiencing enormous difficulties in life but clinging to God, in a real way, regardless…a modern day Job story if you will. I think that is when the rest of the world will really start to listen and we can actually begin to shape the culture through our art.
Maybe I should quit ranting about it, and go start writing that script, eh? 

This post has been a part of Watercooler Wednesday at Ethos.  Join the conversation today and maybe you’ll win an iPod.  Or win me an iPod!

I have lots of stuff bouncing around in my head to post, but just been too busy or too wiped to get to it this past weekend.  I’ll catch up soon.

In the meantime, though, I saw this video over at the Life Church blog.  What a phenomenal idea!  You gotta check this out:

I was talking with Ed about it, and who knows, we may or may not be a part.  A video message would definitely be a stretch for us.  But we’re thinkin about it.  Either way, the thing I love about this idea is the incredible picture of unity of the church and the ability that technology gives us to do that like never before.  Imagine what the church of Jesus Christ could really accomplish if we all worked together for the good of our world.

And I don’t just mean 7 or 8 mega churches.  I mean the hundreds and hundreds of small faith communities all across the country that together could do enormous things for the Kingdom.
What do you think?

And as long as we’re talking about it, how about a video a came across a long time ago.  For those who are privy to the Christian subculture, I’ve had a good time with my own imitations of Joel Osteen in the past.  But Ed Young Jr. does a great one.  At least some of those church "superpowers" can get along and have fun together!

So here is what was bouncing around in my dome this morning on my bike ride home from Lulu’s.

Is it possible to love and genuinely care about a person, even go so far as to consider someone a "friend", yet at the same time have little to no respect for that person? Or do love, friendship, and respect go hand in hand, and you cannot have one without the other?
What do you think?

Wow, I’ve done 30 of these things now.
Haven’t been on the ball with it for a while, but figured I had to do one this week.  Why you ask?  Well, I started doing these things my first week here at CLC.  And it just so happens that my first week, and my first confessional, was Easter of last year.
So Easter was a few weeks earlier this year, but I guess it’s like my one year anniversary at the church if you’re using the lunar calendar.  So check out some footage from the service.

Check out our new "look" on the stage – throughout the video.
Check out my new commute – :23
Check out why everyone got a dead rose on the way in – 4:37
Check out Bobby choke on a high note – 7:40
Enjoy!

Saturday morning was our first annual Helicopter Easter Egg Drop.  It was awesome with over 500 people there and everything going fairly smooth as well.  You can see all the Easter Bunny photos we took at our website here.  Great way to drive some traffic to the site.  There were some learnings as well and I can’t wait to do it even better next year.

Someone had to go up in the helicopter to drop those 2000 eggs out, so I took one for the team.  First time in a helicopter and it was a great view of the Santa Cruz coast!  Thought I’d take you all along on the ride with me.  Check out the video blog below:

Wow.  Awesome Easter weekend this year at CLC.  It’s Sunday night and I am wiped!  We had our first annual Easter Egg Drop on Saturday.  It wasn’t without it’s hurdles, but it turned out to be what I would say was a huge success, especially for the first time doing it.  We think around 500 people showed up.  Almost all from the community!  We had 300 Easter bags for kids and at the end of the event had less than 50 left.

Sunday service was a blast as well!  Pancake breakfast.  New look on the stage.  Dead roses.  Good times.  We had around 140 adults and 40 kids at the gathering this morning.

Assuming I got my video camera working again, there should be a helicopter video blog and a Worship Confessional to look forward to this week.  In the meantime, here’s a couple pics from the weekend.

HAPPY EASTER!!

And so it begins, with 2 days still left till the event.
We sent out 10,000 flyers designed by my awesome brother-in-law to surrounding homes to get the word out about our event.
As a result we received this email:

To All in the Spirit – I recently received a postcard sent in the mail to area residents announcing your planned Easter egg drop by helicopter on the Saturday before Easter.  I want to urge you to re-consider this
ill-advised idea, if only that it is certainly not in the Spirit but is a pretty outrageous, harsh and noisy event.  I am actually not responding to the helicopter drop because of the noise it might produce.   But,  as a fun activity for children, how could you even conceive that helicopters flying over a high school field dropping eggs has any meaning whatsoever.   I am sad to respond that this seems like adult grandstanding for attention.

Yours in the Spirit,
XXXXX

My response:

Dear XXXXX,

Thank you for your response to our flyers.  I am sorry to hear that you have no interest in the event.  The helicopter noise will only be present for 5-10 minutes so we hope that this will not cause too much of a disruption for anyone.

And we do see this as a very fun event.  We want to be able to bless the families in our community with a free, safe, and fun event where they can bring their children, have a good time, and get to know some of the wonderful people that are a part of our church family.  If you see it as “adult grandstanding for attention” I am sorry, however we feel excited and OK about being outrageous and drawing attention to something that will mean a lot to our communities kids.  We also feel that it will ultimately draw attention to Jesus as a result of families experiencing that love and community and being invited to join us on a Sunday morning if they are interested in learning more of what we are about.

I hope that this helps clear up a few of your concerns and communicates the heart behind what we are doing.  God Bless.

There ya have it.
So if you were wondering, that’s why we’re having an Easter Egg Drop/Hunt.
Directly about Jesus?  No.
A blessing to our community families? I think so.
And yeah, we like to have fun.
So let’s throw a party on Saturday!
And Sunday!

Thoughts?

Easter’s right around the corner.  Do you think the building is looking better or worse than the last video?
Take a look:

So I was watching a little Dr. Phil on Monday.  Hey…don’t judge.  T.D. Jakes was on and they were talking about the Eliot Spitzer scandal in New York.  T.D. Jakes said something pretty simple, pretty common sense, yet pretty profound I thought.  The loose paraphrase was:

We succeed in the area’s of life that we devote our time.  Often the private life is neglected in pursuit of public success.  So while someone may be a public success, they become a private failure.

Like I said, simple, but profound in my head.  The ability to so easily be a "success" in the public eye, but to "fail" in the areas of family and personal life.

That being said, it also felt like confirmation in a way to how I had spent the earlier portion of that day.  It’s Easter week.  There is a LOT to do.  We have a huge Easter Egg Drop on Saturday.  We’ve never done that before.  We didn’t have a whole lot planned out for our service, and the stuff that was planned still had plenty of footwork to be done.  Plenty of justification to go to work on my day off.

Instead, I spent the morning at the aquarium in Monterey with Rachel and Caleb.  I was out of town for a good portion of the past 2 weekends and hadn’t been able to spend quality time with my family in a while.  I didn’t get anything done in preparation for Easter, but it was the best way I could have used that Monday, my day off.  I want to always be spending time on my "private" life, not allowing it to suffer for the sake of "public success."  And not to mention, I love my family and those hours spent with them, although Caleb can definitely wear us out at times, filled me up and gave me the ability to run the rest of the week hard.

So what are you doing to balance your personal life with your work or "public" life, especially on a week where it would be easy to forget?

Oh yeah, and here are a few pics from the aquarium.  I love watching Caleb get excited and scream in awe of the animals!

This year is our first annual Easter Egg Drop at CLC!!  Check out the mailer that will be showing up at 10,000 homes within a mile of us early next week:

Santa Cruz High School
6000 easter eggs.
I’ll be in the helicopter dropping 2000 of em.
Bounce houses.
Easter Bunny.
Egg dying.

Check out the Facebook invite.
Then send it to some friends.
And there’s plenty of room for more volunteers if you want to help!

Please Lord help us pull this thing off!