My Worship Revolution

Last night was date #2 of our 4X4 group.  This was mine and Rachel’s date to plan, so we decided on a little family fun at Boomer’s in Fountain Valley.  Unfortunately Richie and Selena couldn’t make it, so there were only 3 couples.  We started with a little miniature golf competition…every couple for themselves.  Below is a picture of the trophy that my wife made for the winning couple as well as a shot of Lori and Alvin who beat Bart and and Lindsey by 1 stroke. 

Afterward we went over to Tommy’s for some amazing chiliburgers and ended up back over at Boomer’s so the guys could drive the golf carts.  All around a fun night.

I guess this is kinda like my first real Vlog.  A Sunday morning in the life of the Pastor of Celebration Arts.  The main idea here was to film our Sunday morning setup that we do every Sunday morning.  It’s amazing to see how it all comes together.

I ended up taping this on one of "those mornings" if you know what I mean, but luckily you can’t really tell there were some issues in high speed.  So check out what goes into making "church" happen every week at Revolution…

You know…it’s kinda like a makeover…I guess.  Anyway, As you can see, I have now officially changed blog servers and kinda revamped the site.  For the better?  For the worse?  Well that’s up to you I guess.  I’m having fun with it though, so welcome to my new home.

I have to admit that it has been way more of a pain switching over than I thought it would be, but it’s done now.  Once I got locked into paying the next year, there was no way I wasn’t!  We’ll see in 12 months if I stick around here.  Hope you enjoy!  Most of the changes and additions are self explanitory, so you can stop reading now if you wanna.  Or you can stick around for the brief hospitality tour of my blog clean up.

Here’s some of the features I’m enjoying:

• Banner – I don’t know, this may be the least impressive change to a lot of you graphic design types, but I have one.  I like it, but I’d love a better on too.  So if you think it could be better, than go ahead and design one for me.  That would be sweet!

• Photo Albums – To your upper right you will see my collection of photo’s for your viewing entertainment.  I’m not a great photographer either, but it will be fun to share some pics.

• Recent Comments – This is nice cause every now and then there’s a comment on something a little older that you might not ever see, but now you can.

• My Sounds – When I’m not listening to talk radio, that list is probably what I’m groovin to.

• My Books – Of course a few of these are constantly changing because of school.  The others are books that I’m trying to find time to get through, but I’ve been reding most of em for a while now. 

• Revolution Blogroll – This is everyone I know of personally at Revolution with a blog, and I love to keep up with those.  If you have one and I don’t know, make sure you e-mail me so I can add you to the list!

• My Favorite Leaders/Pastor – All great blogs from other church leaders who I enjoy reading.

• Other Blogging Peeps – These are other friends in many degrees.  Some are old pesonal friends with blogs and others are just bloggers I’ve never met but read on occasion.  Also, if you have a link to my site and you aren’t on any of my lists, please just let me know as this is where I’m more than happy to spread the love.

So there may be a few more things, but that’s already too many and really it’s all the important stuff.  Next step is figuring out the best way to manage my rss feed. 

Hope you enjoy!

I guess a quality movie starring Kirk Cameron wasn’t quite enough.  Check out this report on The Daily Show:

Come on now.  You know you want this no matter what your eschatology is!

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!