Interesting article on how sound scares scrawny people sooner. Maybe if you have a player who consistently plays on top the beat the solution is to buy them french fries and a big steak.

My sis-in-law has an incredible life story. Born in Guatemala with a cleft-lip/cleft palate, she wasn’t supposed to live, more or less ever talk. Through an amazing story she is now in her 20’s singing for the glory of God. She has a book coming out detailing her story and a  CD.  She is including her version of my song You Satisfy. Nice job Camey (www.cameyjoy.com).

Grab the new version, live version and chart here.

Professor John Stackhouse goes after Tomlin’s songwriting here.

My thoughts

1. Agree. We need deeper, richer objective content about God in our worship songs. Fortunately some of that is emerging with Stuart Townend, Sovereign Grace guys, and others.

2. Disagree. The critique of need of hard rhyme merely because it is in the  pop song genre shows a real lack of awareness the debate of current poetry standards though, ironically, he is a poet himself.

3. Agree. We do need new metaphor. Charlie Hall, another in the Six Step fold,  is very good at this (salvation spring up from the ground, between porch and altar, etc) in that his metaphor also follow biblical pattern.

5. Disagree with tone. It would have been possible to present his whole argument using only contemporary lyric and not singling out Chris with a specific, accusatory tone. He defends his position saying he shouldn’t have gone to Chris first because the Matthean passage is in the context of sin. But in its truest sense he needs to do deeper contextual work on the whole of the Matthean Sermon on the Mount and I believe, like Dr. John Piper did with NT Wright in his critique, he would have gone to Chris first and dialogued with him before publishing. This would have better exhibited the love principle Jesus commands.

I always tell my staff to bring me solution/options and not merely describe the problem. With that in mind, Prof. Stackhouse musician/poet, I’ll be awaiting your new CD to help us worship with proper lyric.

We hosted two Vietnamese artists at NorthWood, Nguyen Minh Son and Lam Duc Manh.  They displayed and sold at NorthWood last Sunday and this weekend then moved to Art in the Square at Southlake Town Center hosted by NorthWood/GVI volunteers. These two guys are good friends now along with our GVI staff who were here from Hanoi to translate. They got great coverage in the Fort Worth Star Telegram which generated a lot of booth traffic. It is great to see how the Kingdom of God runs on the rails of relationships. It is also great to see bridges built in friendship to countries that were formerly enemies. God’s grace is good.

You can read the Star Telegram article here.

A friend on Facebook is hijacking old SNL Deep Thoughts with Jack Handy quotes. People are calling him a genius once again proving the secret to creativity is hiding your adaptive source. HA! Some of his better hijacks…

Contrary to what most people say, the most dangerous animal in the world is not the lion or the tiger or even the elephant. It’s a shark riding on an elephant’s back, just trampling and eating everything they see.

I hope that after I die, people will say of me: “That guy sure owed me a lot of money.”

I guess of all my uncles, I liked Uncle Cave Man the best. We called him Uncle Cave Man because he lived in a cave and because sometimes he’d eat one of us. Later on we found out he was a bear.

Where does your area rank and how can your church reach out during these difficult times with creative ministry (job fairs, message series etc)?

Click here to see the map.

Look how we are linked globally; think of the power that has for the Gospel and transformation.

Playing For Change | Song Around The World “Stand By Me” from Concord Music Group on Vimeo.

[via rocket dave bryant]

We are called to serve the Kingdom of God with passion. Yet we are called to serve in community. Almost all of us have leaders whom we oversee. Some leaders might be paid, others are not, yet we need them to lead at high levels of effectiveness for the Kingdom. Here is a challenge I gave to my staff to COF.

CAPACITY- produce with excellence at a high rate.

1. Know your yearly goals, have them posted and make sure that is where most of your work is heading. I want to know your goals and how you are progressing towards them that week with specific actions.

2. Don’t get sucked into La-La Land. If you work on a computer, a funny youtube video is only one click away, and then another, and another.

3. Have accountability for your time. Know I will come check on you at times, asking what are you working on.  It keeps us all honest. However, if I have to babysit you, you won’t be here long. Also, we all do a time audit (free tool) at least three times per year.

OWN- your ministry responsibilities handling them like would if your whole area were a small business/ministry.

1. Be an initiator. If an event poster is out of date or we need to recruit vocalists, don’t make me be the one coming and saying, “When are we getting the new poster up? What is our recruitment strategy?” Come to me and say, “We have an event poster ending, what is the most important next event?” or “Here is my recruitment strategy; does this work for you?”

2. Be an innovator. If you are over the web area, come to me saying, “Here are the newest trends; we want to attempt this?” Don’t get trapped in maintenance mode, it will kill us. If I am the one coming to you for innovations constantly, we are in trouble.

FINISH-make sure you are hitting deadlines and  have the right polish.

1. Hit deadlines. Never surprise me with a “woops.” If we are going to miss a deadline, I want to know why and by how much so I can  provide you ideas to get us there on time.

2. No sloppiness. Don’t make me ask, “Why was it okay with you that such a poor quality of product happened?” Spend the last 10% of energy to make sure it has the polish that it needs to communicate. We can always disagree over the concept of something initially. Once me make a decision to go in a direction, make sure we are clearing the bar before something gets sung, hung, displayed, or executed. It is usually a lack of effort or fatigue in final stages that makes the concept sloppy or well executed.

If people are missing the marks of COF-ing, you must ask them, “What is your passion?” If it is not in the area they are in, they need to move laterally or move on so someone who will COF with passion as a reflection of the Kingdom of God can step into their role.

http://shinichimaruyama.com/

Check it out; nice work! Love the concept behind it. He throws India ink-water mixture into the air and photographs it midflight.

Someone please stop the madness. However, did I miss its Oct 08 release.

Susan Boyle (remember that name) sang “I Dreamed a Dream” from Les Miserables. The unexpected performance brought the audience to its feet and left the judges (including Simon Cowell) either speechless or in tears. Susan admitted she’d never been kissed. Don’t judge a book by its cover!

EASTER

Good News. Despite the rain and cold,  we had the largest Easter in the history of NorthWood. We had 3,300+ folks in the actual worship center. Good Friday we also had our largest crowd ever with 889 folks coming to experience Ancient Colors (look for the video soon).

Pre-rehearsal.

Everyone arrived on time despite the downpour. We had over 60 folks in our Mass Choir which packs the space we have available. Mark was running his Stephen Hawking rig with dual amps so it took one second to get those dialed in. Rehearsal went well. Some stress because of click track issues, but we made a decision and moved on (see below).

Service.

My Savior Lives (Desperation Band)- nailed it as we have done this song tons of times and it is quite simple. I called an audible in one service and we had a bunch of mass choir folks who weren’t used to it. My bad. We recovered super fast and it sounded like a planned counter (sort of…ha)

Happy Day (Tim Hughes)- played it to a click track with backing video. Good energy and participation.

Greeting/Welcome

Let God Arise (Tomlin version)- started with cutting electric lick and then we rolled this one like a juggernaut.

Our God Reigns (Lincoln Brewster version)- nice thick ballad. For some reason in the second service we had a wee bit of confusion about who was counting off.

He is Lord (Hillsong ) - we had planned on doing this with backing video and click track ala the week before but we were having trouble with the click signal’s 1 disappearing making it nerve racking to count off. Thus after two attempts in rehearsal with a three beat lead in, we bagged it and played a nice jumpback.

Awesome God (ol skool recap)- chorus only that built like a steamroller each repeat.

Prayer

Special: True Love (Phil Wickham) with burning background video made by Chris. Brent did a good job warbling this one.

Video Series Bump-cool newspaper bump that correlates with our mailer.

Sermon-Bob preached on Psalm 42 and the comforting of Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane

Offering

Announcements-via video with cool B-roll edited in

Great week.

GOOD FRIDAY

Thursday night rehearsal. One of the more difficult services we produce with multiple facets including narrations, sound fx, lights, solid color banners walking down and the musical aspect. The rehearsal was a bit choppy and rough as to be expected. Left that night feeling like we had a ways to go but had the core concept down.

Friday pre-rehearsal. Nailed it (no pun intended). Everything came together and we instituted a simple change suggested by Chris which made everything much easier. Only issue was someone removed the extra wicks we had laid out for the acolyte lighter/snuffer. We had to scramble and get a big Christmas Eve ushers candle to cover it but no one noticed.

Friday night service. My tech guys rocked. They provided and absolutely error free background for this powerful cross experience. Afterwards we all high fived and then rebuilt the stage for Easter. (Thank goodness for digital boards with scene recall).

Here it is. I will be rockin’ the flock with this bad boy on Easter! Click on the thumbnails to see the bigger picture of this fly rig which includes  Holy Spirit antenna not shown.

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