A FORMER Adelaide pastor who inspired hundreds of thousands of young Christians with his terminal cancer “battle” has been exposed as a fraud.
http://www.news.com.au/adelaidenow/story/0,22606,24212817-5006301,00.html
A little after 3pm Dallas time we started the Echo experience. An awesome meal was served to start the conference and after meeting some people we were on the the first keynote. The keynote was kicked off with awesome time of musical worship. Mark Batterson then came on the stage to kick off the official start of the conference. He focused on how tech/media are being used to reach people for Christ. I will say that this being my first Christian conference, I did not even think of bringing a bible. So it was a little odd for me when he asked for people to take out their bibles, and some people actually had theirs. While not a tech person he understands the role that the church needs to take to reach a lot of people. One of the things he mentioned was that John Wesley took 50 years to reach a large number of people, yet because of technology he does that each week with an update to the website. It is amazing times for the church, and we have to be using the technology that we have to reach people who are used to getting their information a certain way
Last night after arriving in Dallas we met up with Greg Atkinson, author of a soon to be released book on Church 2.0, as well as the tech director at Bent Tree Bible Fellowship. He gave us a tour of their amazing campus in a suburb of Dallas. What they do for their kids area alone is way more then what most churches do in their main worship space. My only regret last night was not having a camera, because there are no words that could describe the massive size of their building. I believe the only analog audio board they have in the building is for the student ministries, everything else are all digi boards. The lighting in the main worship space matches what scbc might have, just a lot more of it. Going back to the KidsFX (I think that is what it is called) they actually have incorporated LED lighting, which is used on their two floor stage set. After he took us to dinner we headed back to our hotel, and unable to sleep I took a short walk over the Watermark Church, home of the Echo Conference. I am excited for this it should be a good time. I get to meet up with some people that I met at the Church 2.0 local forum in Santa Cruz, as well as hear some very gifted speakers. But while I was there at 11pm last night, I did get questioned by church security. Once I explained that I was still on California time and coming to the conference today I was left alone. But I was ready to make a break for it if I had to too. More later today!
My poor blog has been neglected for a very long time. I am going to start posting again in a very big way. Tomorrow morning I am leaving for Dallas Texas, where a conference being put on by Collide Magazine will be held. This conference which will focus on media in the church, will be the first Christian conference I have ever attended. I have been to normal tech conferences, it will be interested to see how the Christian aspect of it will be handled. I believe technology needs to be brought into church, as a way to bridge the gap between God and the outside world, but will it be done in a way that focuses on God and not just the technology….only time will tell. I hope to live blog some of the more interesting sessions. Some of the highlights for me are seeing Mark Batterson, Donald Miller, and some guy with the website Visualworshiper.com, where he discusses lighting and projection within the church. I will also have the chance to see Greg Atkinson again who is the author of the upcoming book Church 2.0.
I have been super crazy lately, but am hoping to start blogging again really soon. Seems like I have learned a lot since I last wrote something. With the local forum of Church 2.0 come and gone, it was great to meet the people who attended and to meet Greg Atkinson. Starting Monday I have decided to start and write a wrap up of the Sunday night Elevation service, talking about what went right and wrong for the weekly service. As I get further into this career that I believe God is drawing me into, I look forward to writing more on this site. Talk soon
I have been a little busy lately, but last I had an opportunity to help out Omar (Lead Worshipper at Elevation) with his tribute concert for his dad, Skip Spence. A few months ago O and I went to Faith Community Church, it is a church that is held at The Rio Theater here in Santa Cruz. They use the projector each week to help with the visual aspect of their service. Since O was going to have the concert at The Rio we decided that it would be a good idea to check them out, plus it is nice to see what other churches are doing anyways.
They basically run their visual stuff using an IMac and use Keynote for the message as well as the music. After meeting with them we decided that we would basically run the same setup. While I am a huge proponent of Pro Presenter made by Renewed Vision, I knew that at this time we would want to use something else to do the visual aspects. Melissa does some amazing things with Keynote for Elevation, so I decided to stick with that.
The project included some motion backgrounds for the songs, but he also wanted to include four narrations with some photos of Skip and his bands back in the day. This is where my love affair with Macs and the applications that come with continue to grow. While I know that I could do so much more with Final Cut Pro and Motion, I was still able to do some really cool things with IMovie. IMovie comes with the “Ken Burns” effect. It is basically the effect where a single photo is displayed on the screen, but movie moves around the image to focus in/out of it to make it more visually appealing. It is so crazy how easy IMovie made these narrations come alive.
After I completed the narrations/photo montage I was then able to export it as a quicktime file, import it into Keynote over an already existing moving background, and it was done.
While the show was not perfect, people did seem to appreciate it and I learned a lot….so much that if I was to do it again I would of changed a couple of things. My narrations are going to be incorporated into the video that was filmed that night, so that will also be cool. If you saw this let me know what you think.
I read a report recently where it stated that the average church has 75 people attending each week. I thought that was interesting because my current church has about 800 people attending each week (that is for four services), and my previous church had about 900 people. While those figures would not count the churches as mega-churches, you can see that they are both good size churches. I am stating this not because I am trying to brag, because if you know my church you know we are not in a situation to be boastful, but to show you that churches even smaller churches can and do exist in this tech-centric world.
In the June issue of Church Production Magazine (Yes I am a church geek), there is an article about Experience Church out of Puyallap, Washington. It is a smaller church that a few years ago had a name change and more importantly had a philosophical change. They wanted to be able to use technology to reach people through the internet, television and radio. They decided to build up their 450 seat sanctuary and add newer and better technology. Since they were a smaller church they were unable to buy a complete new setup in a matter of months, instead they have gone with the idea to do this piece by piece. While you do not have the instant gratification of having everything new, they have overtime built a church in a way that will glorify God and reach many more people. Once again I say that it is exciting to be a Christian in this day and age, the use of technology in church is only going to be able to reach more and more people.
The complete article as well as a free subscription can be found here.
It is no secret to my friends and people that I am close to know that one thing I dream about is becoming a Tech Director for a church. While I have only been involved as a volunteer tech director for a few months I really feel God is calling me to do this. That is why I have decided to start working on a resume and am going to apply for a job in Minnesota. I am not an idiot I know that there are going to be people with more experience and more knowledge than me, but I know there is nobody who will have more desire and passion for servicing God and serving the church. I plan on this only being my first step in this, as I continue to grow as a leader I look forward to seeing where God leads my family and myself.
One of the things that really bugs me about the church, specifically the tech ministries is the hoarding of their resources. I briefly spoke about this on my last post, but I wanted to bring it up again. I was talking to Andrea, the wife of the lead pastor of Elevation, about this very topic last week. We spend so much time in the church protecting our resources, making sure that our church benefits from them that we forget the church is much larger than we are. I am not speaking specifics here about my church, because I am not aware of their situation. I am really speaking in general terms.
Lately though I have been really encouraged by some churches and media companies who are realizing that they are in a position to truly help out the church at large. As churches get smaller and lose some of their resources we are unable to keep up with the megachurch attitude. Where we spend what we want because we want to be bigger and better. For every church that has over 1000 members attending each week, there are hundreds of churches with under 100. I was encouraged recently when NCC and Pastor Mark Batterson released some stuff on their recent series called “The Elephant In The Church”. It was about taboo topics that the church does not necessarily like to talk about. There are a lot of churches like that, and instead of talking about each one I will just leave it to the one example that I gave.
The main reason I am writing this though is because of a media ministry that is truly doing something about this. The company is called Muddy River Media. It looks to be fairly new so they are just starting out with offering some cool things. But check out some of their videos and you can see some cool videos for Illistrations. One of the key features they have are the many motion backgrounds for worship. This being fairly new I only look forward to seeing what they are going to be able to provide in a year or two. If I was a part of a tech ministry I would definately see what I could do to help them out. Whether providing content for their site or even a little financial assistants I am sure would be appreciated. In fact even as a volunteer at my local church I hope to help them out a little bit.
Recently I was told I am a critical person, actually I have been told this a lot lately by different people. All but one of those people though I took as a non-judgmental statement. The other one though has caused me to open my eyes a lot, not only to how they see things and how/what they think of me but also to how I come across to other people. If you are looking out for the best interest of something, especially when this thing is as important to you as your faith, about growing the Church not only at the building you go to each week but the Church around the globe. So many things are happening around me and sometimes I feel we have lost focus on the bigger picture and it simply frustrates me. In fact it has frustrated me recently so much that I had to leave the service, and I ended up pissing off my wife in the process where she had to leave too.
We are sometimes focused on our little spot in the world that we forget the end result is not that everyone attends OUR church, likes OUR pastors, rocks out to OUR worship pastor, but the end result is that we do our best to reach every single person in our neighborhood, our city, our county, our state, our country and the world we live in. It seems like we tend to get really small minded and focus on our church or we start to think so big that we focus about people half way around the world. Don’t get me wrong we need to be thinking about our church, we need to be thinking about the struggles of people that we have never met who lives oceans away from us. But we forget that it is not my church versus that church down the street, we all want the same thing and that is to reach everyone.
I have heard stories of people at another church telling worship people that they cannot play at another church because they are members somewhere else, and that is just crazy. In the same way it frustrates me when a church with a lot of resources hoardes all of their stuff when a small church down the street is struggling to pay a pastor. It just bugs me so much, and maybe that is why I get that critical label that I have been getting lately.
In my entire life I have never been involved in a church how I am involved right now. I have never had the elders know my name, never been able to walk up to a pastor and have a real conversation with him about something not church related, never feel a closeness to some people in the body like I have now, hell I have never had the keys to the place like I have now. I have never seen so many people with a genuine love for Christ who have grown so tired of the situation that they are in like I have right now. But with all of that I see so much potential at this church that I look forward to the future, and while I realize that some people will not be here when that change is made, I know that this church will survive. I loo forward to the day when my church is a church that people in the community know about and care about.
This post my seem a little random, I have tried to not get specific so I do not tell too much on purpose. But I will say this that there are a few people that I know who as I pray for them to take on a bigger role, I hope one day that will be something they want. Because when that happens I personally believe the church will have a stronger foundation to do things it has not done in a long time.