Everybody wants videos, but nobody wants to do the pre-production work.

Everybody wants curriculum, but nobody wants to write it.

Everybody wants economic turn around, but nobody wants to buy a house they can afford.

So Easter is over and you are fried. You decide to take a vacation and in mid-flight your plane goes down and miraculously you survive on a desert island with a Sony Walkman, tons of AA batteries and only 6 CD’s. Which CD’s would you wish you had remembered to pack?

• 1. J.S. Bach Complete Harpsichord Works (for reflective sunsets)
• 2. Aaradhna Amrit Vani (for morning meditations)
• 3. Radiohead Kid A (afternoon nap chill out)
• 4. John Piper Romans mp3 CD (feeding or maybe Allister Beg)
• 5. Ani Difranco Revelling Reckoning (for the angst of loneliness)
• 6. Oz Noy, Tribal Tech, Metheny or another instrumental burner (to give me musical hope)

Your turn…

How should this affect the way the Church communicates its message of hope?

[via Matt Lewis]

We intially thought we were going to hire a full time technical director as we get ready to go into our new 2,000 seat room. Now our thoughts are changing. With the money we have available, we are now thinking of getting stronger at individual positions. We were finding that our TD candidates were either very strong in one area and weak in the other two (lights, video and sound) or decent in all three but not great in any one. We have a college student already working for us who is stellar with lighting and a solid second video editor under Cristian. We can then take the remaining money and pay fairly well for a pure audio guy to mix our weekend services, with just a touch of planning and audio patching hours sometime during the course of the week.

Has anyone else gone this route? What have you experienced? Our lead producer of service flow will be done by one of our lead paid staff (Brent, Cristian, or I). Our lighting director will serve as assistant producer. Overall system maintenance and upkeep will be done by Cristian, our Director of Media, and Chris, his college associate. At the end of this year, we’ll know exactly what are needing. None of this is set in stone. Any wisdom is appreciated.

The tune emerges and now I need some lyrics. Which way to go on this one, the simplicity of Israel Houghton or the complexity of Stuart Townsend? If the lyric is too complex can it be sung? Yet I hate dumbed down worship. What to do? I know, do the anti-hit thing and write the verses very simple and the leave the chorus as complex as the mind dump that it emerged from…the unfinished result.

What I Could Never Do

Running, I was always running
Running (from the) (finish)

Reaching, you were always reaching (or chasing, You were reaching ……..)
Reaching…..(finish)

Chorus:
For as I/(while I) sinned, Your love did reach
into my heart, into this breach
that broke the very heart of God
to give His Son and spare the rod
that I deserved upon my back
O for my sin and for my lack
of righteouness in my own strength
Your Love has done what I could never do

Falling, now I’m always falling
falling deep into the arms that stretched upon a/(the) Tree

Singing, now I’m always singing
Singing of the the love of God that saved a wretch like me

Anyone want co-writer credit and piece of the CCLI royalties? Hahaha. Bring it. I’ll even email you a scratch acoustic and melody track. I wonder if the Church of the future will look at some of the songs we sing today and go, “Wow, what made them sing that?” while we fail to engage the weight of songs like How Deep the Father’s Love for Us. Worship does have a didactic element and our theologians/philosophers today for the average Joe tend to be shiny silver disks (for good or bad). And lest you yourself be challenged to dumb down the lyrics of your compositions in an attempt to make every song an easy sing, let us not forget R.E.M. who made hits by making “anti-hits.”

Someone recently fed my reading addiction by throwing a copy of Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything on my desk. Tapscott and Williams dissect the collaborative formulas of Fickr, MySpace, YouTube, Human Genome Project, Wikipedia and more. Here is the question:

How do we do wikiworship?  (updated March 24–I am using the term metaphorically, NOT as in an actual wiki.  I have gotten several emails about literal wikis.  How do we create areas/elements in our worship services which are platforms for worshipers to provide meaningful content.  Thanks Bob Kauflin for reminding me to clarify that I am not talking about a free-for-all service with no bounded structures which Paul corrected in the Corinthian Church.  Just talking about different elements that worshipers could have to space to include their creatively generated content)

Chapter 4 The Prosumers: Hack this Product Please is worth the cost of the book alone:

Prosumption…describe[s] how the gap between producers and consumers is blurring. Most still confuse prosumption with deciding what the basics are and customers get to modify certain elements, like customizing your vehicle on the showroom floor [not prosumption]. This chapter describes a new model of prosumption where customers [worshipers] participate in the creation of products [worship elements] in an active and ongoing way. As in Second Life, the user actually innovates and creates.

YouTube and MySpace are blank canvases for users to publish their own content. They contain no content in and of themselves. How do we create blank canvases for meaningful content in worship? Should we even endeavor to do this?

Crawl in and start the conversation.