i am an offering

I hope you’re all enjoying a lovely Tuesday morning!  I wanted to point you to a few resources today:

From the Rebelution: Brett Harris just posted this great article on worship. Very cool to see the younger generation stepping up.

National Worship Leader Conference: If you’re like me and have a hard time getting to any worship conferences lately, you can “go there without going there” in a couple of different ways.  A couple worship leaders I’ve connected with are currently attending the National Worship Leader Conference in Austin, TX.  Jim Drake is keeping a pretty regularly updated twitter feed. And Fred McKinnon will be blogging and posting to his twitter feed as well.  Slake, Worship Leader magazine’s new blog, will be blogging from the conference as well.

Also, I will be preaching at our church this week.  For the rest of the week, I’ll blog on thougths that God leads me to as I prepare for the message.

Sunday Recap

Yesterday was a great day - full of family times, which I really loved.  It was also a good, albeit, slightly stressful day at Living Word.

Our service starts at 9:20.  I had the day off from leading worship yesterday but of course, like most of you out there, I was still keeping an eye out for anything that might be amiss.  Well, 9:20 comes and I realize that no one is sitting at the projection computer.  I quick find Pastor Wade and ask if the person who usually sends the file for projection had sent it or if she was coming.  Minimal panic ensues.  When I say minimal, though, I really mean it - it was quite amazing how much peace I ended up feeling, even knowing that we might not have any words for the screen.

So, after a phone call and a few minutes we realize we have the words on Pastor’s laptop, but no jump drive.  He makes a transition into announcements and calmy asks if anyone has a jump drive.  Someone does and we’re able to get up and running with all of the lyrics with a few, but not many hiccups.  The worship service goes well and God was glorified.  However, He could be glorified even more with a little bit better planning and communication.  Moral of the story - always, ALWAYS have many people in the communication loop when you’re all at different locations.  I’m really looking forward to being in our building early next year so some of these problems will hopefully go away - but at the same time, we need to work harder to make them go away now, so that we don’t face the same problems in the building.

But God was good, and blessed us anyway with great music and great teaching on “You shall not Murder.”  We sang:

• We are Called to Be God’s People
• Bless That Wonderful Name
• Knowing You
• Thou Art Worthy,  CCLI  14789
• The Wonder of it All

And Pastor Wade led us in two choruses of “I Have Decided” after hearing the pianist playing it as a music bed under the prayer time.

Subscribing to This Blog

Many of you are aware and many of you might not be that you can subscribe to this blog to get the content coming to you instead of remembering to visit every day.  Now it’s a little easier as I have added a link to subscribe at the top right corner of the blog.  Just click on the link and your browser or feed reader should automatically tell you what to do with the subscription.  If you don’t have a feedreader - you should get one.  Here is a good one for PC and here is a good one for Mac.

Also, if you happened to subscribe to this blog without using the feedburner link at the top right but used the default feed link, would you mind please resubscribing using the feedburner link at the top right that is now available?  It helps me keep track of visitors to the site and I would really appreciate it!  Thanks so much!

Hello all!  Friday is here and the weekend is almost upon us!  I wanted to share a couple of random things:

Music Theory at The Worship Community

My first article at The Worship Community has been published.  Check it out, especially if you’re wondering why it’s important to know music theory as a worship leader.

Gravatars

Secondly - do you wonder how some people get cool little images next to there comments in the comments section and some don’t?  I wondered about that for a long time as I was visiting other blogs as well and as I was designing the new theme for this one I figured out the secret - Gravatar.com! What this site does is allow you to register email addresses and assign an image to them or, a globally recognized avatar.  Every time you sign in somewhere to post a comment or something similar, if the website is set up properly, it will automatically grab your gravatar and post your image.  Pretty nifty!

Have a great weekend!

During the last several weeks I’ve had the privilege of connecting with a bunch of new worship leaders through blogs and various twitter accounts.  Through conversations I was introduced to The Worship Community, a grassroots community site for worship leaders.  It had started out as just a forum a little over a year ago and has now grown into a one-stop resource with videos, the original forum and featured articles from worship leaders all over the country.

One of the coolest things about it is that it is featuring “every-day worship leaders,” those of us that are “in the trenches” in the local church.  As great as it is to see writing and resources from “the big names” it’s so cool to see a bunch of local people featured.

Another cool thing is that I’ve been asked to write for the site!  I’m very excited to be a part of it and so thankful that God has blessed the time spent on this blog to be able to expand and encourage others.  So please, check it out and join the forums or leave a comment on any articles that are there.  It will definitely encourage you!

It was good to be at God’s house and worship after a week away.  It always feels good when you feel like you’ve “come home” to church as well!  Songs from yesterday provided by some great volunteers:

• We Trust in the Name of the Lord our God
• Be Lifted High
• Your Name
• Blessed be the Name (although, this one didn’t quite work out, more in a second)

As I was proofing the service before it was put into EasyWorship and saw “Blessed be the Name” I thought to myself, “Hmm…I don’t recognize that song.  Great!  Must be a new one that we’ll learn.”

As we came to that song and the worship leaders started it I could tell something was wrong.  The words weren’t matching what the leader was singing and the congregation wasn’t singing along.  Then the music stops.  The right words are searched for and everyone realizes that the wrong song was put into EasyWorship.  We had a good chuckle and kept going.  Although our church is very forgiving with stuff like that, it was still a bit of an awkward moment.  Coming this week I’d like to look at what happens when certain things don’t quite work out the way you expected them to.

• What Happens When…The Wrong Song is on the Screen and the Projection Volunteer can’t Find the Right One?
• What Happens When…Your Guitar is So Badly Out of Tune You Have to Stop the Music?
• What Happens When…The Music Track for Special Music Won’t Play?
• No Matter What The Sound Tech Does a Microphone Keeps Feedbacking?

See you the rest of the week!