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.
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!
I’m always on the lookout for new resources and I thought I’d pass this on.
Often we’d love ways to share cool things with people or perhaps we might like to email a file to someone but it’s too big for our inboxes. We could upload it to a personal website, but not everyone has one of those.
I recently discovered Second Brain. What it does is takes any services on the internet you might be using (del.ico.us, twitter, flickr, etc…) and feeds them all into one spot. It also lets you upload files and share them. You can comment on content, follow other people’s feeds and a whole lot more. Here’s mine. Check it out!
I might be behind on this one, but recently I was looking for a tool to collaborate for worship planning that would get rid of messy mass emails. Being as we’re a church plant with no building (yet - but soon!), those of us who plan services are all in different places and need an easy way to communicate that’s constantly up to date.
Writeboard
I discovered writeboard.com, brought to you by 37 signals, the developers of Basecamp and Backpack (the fee-based apps that offer tons more than writeboard). This handy little free tool allows you to post a document, invite others to be able to edit, view and comment on it, revise the document and subscribe to an RSS feed to see any updates to the document. It’s been so helpful in worship planning and in other areas for our church.
If you’re looking for a great way to collaborate online, you should definitely check it out.
If you have time (and you should make the time) you should definitely stop and check out this video interview between Bob Kauflin and Tim Smith (worship pastor at Mars Hill in Seattle). It’s over an hour long, and I haven’t watched the full interview yet but I’m sure it’s definitely worth it. If you don’t want to take an hour out of your day, however, Bob has posted a condensed segment dealing with “the worship experience and the presence of God” and will be posting some more clips soon.