My Worship Revolution

So, I have yet to do this in the past on this blog, but this week I’m gonna take a chance to pimp a couple of ministry teams at Revolution where you are needed and can get involved.
And the first one to throw out there is our lighting team.  It is a blast to use our lights at Artesia High School to create an atmosphere for people to encounter God.  With our setup/teardown church, it is probably the BIGGEST factor that goes into creating the atmosphere we have.  I don’t know if you’ve been there early or late before, but trust me, worshipping with those bright flourescent lights would be a whole different experience.  (*Disclaimer: Yes, we could still worship God in any circumstance, of course, it’s just a huge benefit to be able to create the mood.)
Obviously, in order to make that happen on a weekly basis we need people who can work with those lights and run them throughout the service. It’s really not too difficult.  Shoot me an e-mail if you want to get involved. 

You all remember The More You know PSA’s, right? It always has some TV star telling you not to do drugs or put up with abuse. Well the cast of The Office now has some fake PSA’s that have been running on NBC. They’re pretty funny.
So we decided to take our cue from them during our 3 week series, The Office: Imagine a Wonderful Workplace. For our "video bump" that we use to introduce the message each week, we decided to make our own PSA’s related to the mornings topic. This first week was about How to Handle the Watercooler, you know, gossip, slander, etc. This series should be a lot of fun. A nice breather after a tough book like Job. Practical, fun, but still lots of challenges and scripture. Check out the watercooler PSA below.

P.S. This is milestone post #100 for my blog. Just a little tidbit for ya. And it only took…more than a year!

For those of you who were at Easter this past weekend at Revolution, we had a ton of awesome flowers. Some of you have them sitting on your tables at home now after the flower picking session that followed the services.
Just wanted to give some mad props to Jenny’s flowers for creating those 6 floral sprays you saw around the room. They did an awesome job for us and gave us a great price for it, too. They were way helpful and a blast to work with. So there ya go, if you need flowers for an upcoming occasion, check em out.

Wow, what a weekend. A lot happened this past weekend. Quick recap:

GOOD FRIDAY
Awesome service. This really is one of the coolest services we have all year in my opinion. How rad to be able to focus on the death of Christ and the reality of it’s impact on our lives in such a special way once a year. As is the tradition for this service, I love watching people all over the room nailing their sins into the crosses. I love to hear the sounds of the nails being driven into the wood to the backdrop of worship. I love tasting the bread and reflecting on Christs death during a time of communion with God. Good stuff.

EASTER EGG HUNT
Yeah, Saturday was an early morning. Everything got set up and ready to go for our community Easter egg hunt and free pancake breakfast. Bounce houses, game boths, the Easter Bunny, and the mascot for the Long Beach Armada baseball team. It was my job to emcee the morning, playing tunes and constantly inviting people to join us the next morning for Easter services. The morning really was a blast!

Afterward, I had to jump right into getting together lots of last minute details for our Easter rehearsal on Saturday night at Artesia High School. The look team created an AWESOME look in that room, and then the worship/drama/dance/technical teams showed up for a late night rehearsal to make sure everything went smoothly for the next morning. Luckily, the janitor had a late night which allowed me to stay late to be sure that lighting plots got finished and the overflow room got setup and operational.

EASTER CELEBRATION SERVICES
Over 700 people showed up for Easter services! The morning went over awesome. For those of you who weren’t able to join us (or just don’t live anywhere near Long Beach for that matter), it was probably a lot different than any other Easter service you’ve ever been to. We actually staged the service as a funeral for Jesus, with a casket, flowers, and eulogies. Of course the climax of the morning was the discovery that there was no body in the casket and the realization of what the resurrection could mean in our own lives. It went over really pretty smoothly and the tear down team did an awesome job of getting us out of there a little earlier than I expected. Now there’s just a lot of extra stuff that needs to be taken off the trailer this week. Anybody have some extra time this week?

For more info and some great pics, check out Dave’s blog.

The rest of the afternoon was spent with the in-laws at our place – kinda. Really I pretty much went comatose once I got home. Luckily my father-in-law took a quick nap, too, so I didn’t feel too rude. It was a long week for lots of people and all the work paid off. I owe HUGE THANKS to lots of people who helped us out tons! There were so many that I won’t even start naming them all cause I’ll inevitably leave out some really important person. You all know who you are. Thank you all so much for all the work you put in to make these events impactful and successful. I heard about so many people walking out of the service touched and just pumped, and none of that would be possible without you guys!

That’s it for now. Today was mostly a day of rest and recovery – with the exception of class – and tomorrow it’s back to work to get ready for this coming Sunday and our new series – The Office: Imagine a Wonderful Workplace. Goodnight.

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!