FaithEngineer

I’m excited about John Waller joining us this Sunday at Cornerstone Community Church. If you saw the movie Fireproof or listen to SpiritFM, you have heard John Waller’s music. His song, While I’m Waiting is a powerful song about waiting on God’s timing. He will be joining us and leading worship for our 10am service, and then going over to First Baptist to lead them in worship at their 11am service. At 6pm on Sunday night, we are moving our evening service over to the historic Rex Theater in downtown Galax for a special concert with John.

The great thing about this concert is that it was organized by a young man in our church. Isaac Larrowe has organized and promoted the concert and has raised the funds to allow John to come minister to us. Please help us get the word out about the concert. If you haven’t heard the song, check out the video below or check out John’s website.

I’m getting excited about our trip down to Anderson, South Carolina this week for the Unleash Conference. We’re leaving tomorrow and hopefully heading into some warmer weather. Jennifer and I have been every year and I love the encouragement that we receive from the NewSpring staff. We try to take a different group from Cornerstone each year to expose them to the hospitality and vision of NewSpring. You can’t help but leave “fired up” about what God has called you to do. All the details about the conference can be found on the website, along with a listing of all the breakout session topics.

If you can’t make it to the conference, then you can join in and watch the main sessions online at http://unleash.cc/

Here is just a sample of what you can expect. I look forward to meeting up with some online friends. Leave me a comment or send me a message on twitter if you will be there.

Promo: “Unleash 2010″ from NewSpring Production on Vimeo.

A One Day Event focused on the church and it’s potential at NewSpring Church on March 4, 2010. Visit newspring.cc/unleash for more information.

As some of you may know, since the first of this year we have been working with First Baptist Church in Galax.  They are currently in between pastors, so Sam, my co-pastor at Cornerstone has been preaching and serving as their interim pastor. He’s still working for Cornerstone, but he is also helping them through their time of transition. We have stated that we want to be the best church for the community, not just the best church in the community. By being Kingdom minded, we are showing the local community what happens when we cooperate instead of compete. We have been preaching through the same sermon series and working together on the messages each week. At Cornerstone, we have wanted to do a baptism service during the winter months, so Sam came up with the idea of a joint worship service between the two churches.

This Sunday, we are moving our Sunday evening service to First Baptist and joining them for a combined worship service. We are coming together to celebrate. Our worship band will be joining with their choir as they lead the service in worship. They practiced together last night and everything really came together and sounded great. Even though the styles may be a little different between the two churches, we come together with the same purpose of lifting up the name of Jesus Christ. Join us this Sunday evening at 6:30 for a time of celebration through worship and baptism.

Own the Mix

Since I was sharing about a resource to train your tech team in an earlier blog post today, I wanted to share some other resources that you might find helpful.  The first is Own the Mix, an online training resource for your audio team.  Here is how they describe the service

OwnTheMix.com is a comprehensive audio training solution for the modern church. Created by Buckhead Church’s Audio Director, Dustin Whitt, and Music Director, Chris Green, you will learn secrets to creating irresistible worship environments. Whether novice or professional, there is plenty for everyone inside. Subscribers have an all-access pass to every video, and are connected to all of OwnTheMix.com’s users through a state-of-the-art social network.

Check out the video below for a sample of the teaching that you’ll find

Transposr

The second service I want to highlight is Transposr. It allows you to transpose chord charts and mp3 files into different keys.  This is a great way to make practice tracks in different keys.  It will change the key of a mp3 file without changing the tempo.  I have created accompaniment tracks in new keys several times in the past, but it required a confusing mix of plugins and audio programs to accomplish.  This is a free service provided by Planning Center Online and it works great.  You will need to know the original key of the song to make it work.  We are using and implementing Planning Center to schedule our worship teams and to layout the flow of our services each week.

I have looked at both of these services in the past, but I want to thank Church Media Design for reminding me about them in their latest podcast.  Check out the CMD.tv podcast for great technology and computer tutorials.

I have been hesitant to blog about this, but the thoughts simply won’t go away.  At the Catalyst Conference I saw yet again something that has been bothering me about the church world.  When you step back and look around, all the pastors of contemporary churches look the same.  And all the worship leaders leaders looked the part as well.  It was a very homogenous group of 30 and 40 somethings all trying to look cool.  You could tell many of the pastors made a run on Buckle and picked up their wardrobe before dropping by the salon to get highlights in their hair.   And don’t even get me started on the tight skinny jeans and low-cut v-necks that many worship guys were wearing.

You may ask why does it matter?  Let me give you a couple of thoughts to think about.  And let me just say that I am in no way judging others.  In some ways, I very much lump myself in with the pastor crowd.

• Some may say that we dress that way to be culturally relevant.  I’m okay with that if the culture you live in actually dresses that way.  I don’t want to be cynical, but in most cases, the way we dress doesn’t actually match up with the people we are called to reach.
• Some may say that we are rebelling against the pretentious suits and ties of the previous generation.  But  is there any difference between wearing a $500 suit and a $500 outfit from a hip store?  How many people in your congregation can actually afford the clothes that you are stylin?  It’s a honest question that we must wrestle with.
• Why are worship leaders afraid to wear masculine clothing? It looks like a bunch of 40 year olds dressing like the Jonas Brothers.  That may sound harsh, but I really struggle with the styled long hair, manscara, and skinny women’s jeans they are wearing.

Let’s remember who we are to imitate.  I would argue that there is nothing inherently wrong about styles, as long as they are modest and appropriate.  I know those are subjective terms, but the bigger issue is one of our hearts.  WHY do we all look the same? Is there an unspoken pressure to conform to the music world? Why can’t we be normal?

I don’t have the answers, but I don’t think there is a valid reason that everyone looks the same.  I want to see the uniqueness and beauty of the world we live in reflected in the leaders of our churches.  Drop me a comment and help me understand.  Keep it civil, and remember that I live in a small rural town in the mountains of Virginia.  I’m just a little backward

It was strange tonight having a cookout with the family instead of being at church. As many of you know, we have stopped having our Saturday night service during the month of August. During the past year, Cornerstone has had two services: one on Saturday nights at 7pm, and one on Sunday morning at 10am.  If you have been at church the past few weeks, you have heard our decision to move our Saturday night service to Sunday night starting September 13th.  It was not an easy decision to make, but we feel that it will be best for everyone involved.  When you have to change something that you created, it is tough, but I am excited about the changes we are making.

Here is what was great about Saturday night:

• The laid back, conversational environment with tables and chairs surrounding the stage
• The modern/eclectic worship style of our young adult band, Scattered
• The ability for our people to attend the Saturday service and worship and then serve on Sunday mornings
• The chance for me to preach the message twice each week.  Saturday night helped me develop and fine tune my thoughts for Sunday

But here is what we struggled with:

• Encouraging people from the community to attend. After almost one year of meeting, we had very few people from outside of the church visit.  Attendance was increasing, but we weren’t reaching those in our community who weren’t already in church somewhere
• Having enough volunteers to serve each week.  It was a constant struggle to make sure that we had our children’s ministry covered and enough people to setup and run the cafe.
• Spending time with my family on the weekend.  Since Emma was in school this year, Saturdays with my family were important.  Preparing for a service meant that many Saturday afternoons were spent at the church. For the health of my family, this was not a good habit to get into

So we decided to address the good and the bad by moving the service to Sunday night.  We debated moving to two Sunday morning services, but we would lose the identity and environment that we have worked so hard to create on Saturday nights.  Having a service opportunity for our younger band to lead worship was important, and trying to incorporate two different bands on Sunday morning would have been difficult. Already, we have had much more support from our volunteers about serving on Sunday night.  It also worked well with our decision to start a mid-week youth service.

I hope that we will soon be adding a second service on Sunday mornings (that makes three services all together).   That will be the next logical time to add.  But for now, we are encouraging people to think about switching to the Sunday night service to free up some space for visitors on Sunday morning, especially our teenagers and their famillies.  I’ll share more about our youth ministry and the new changes over the next few weeks.

Here are some great pictures from the concert Sunday night.  I didn’t have my camera, so I grabbed these from several people at church who posted them on Facebook.  The crowd was estimated to be between 3000 and 3500 people, which is incredible for a city with a population around 6000.  We had several local bands play before Decemberadio, including our own Cornerstone praise band Scattered.  It was an incredible success, and we’re already planning on how to improve and make it even bigger and better next year.  Thanks to all the churches and sponsors who made it possible, and special thanks to all our Cornerstone members who put in a long, long day to make this such a success.  I have heard nothing but positive comments from everyone involved.

Over the last four years at Cornerstone, we have not developed a reputation for planning our services.  We typically showed up on Sunday morning and hoped everything would fall into place.  Most weeks it did, although the stress level was through the roof when the unexpected happened.  I have heard numerous times that we should just let the Holy Spirit lead, and not worry about how everything comes together. But my question was always, do we honor God with our lack of preparedness?

With the addition of our Saturday night service and a second band, it became increasingly difficult to coordinate everything happening in the service. How many songs is the band playing? What song should we use for the response time? Who is doing announcements? What videos are we playing? All these questions and more were asked every week. The other problem was for the band. They needed the ability to share chord charts and songs and even schedule who was playing each week. Based on the recommendations of several churches, we decided to give PlanningCenterOnline a try.

We’re two months in, and I’m loving the service. We haven’t got all our songs into the system yet, but the potential is great. We are printing out a service plan each week for our band, speakers, and audio/video operators. I am even thinking about expanding the use of it to schedule children’s workers and greeters each week. You can check out the video below to find out more.

And finally, the Holy Spirit can move just as much when we plan earlier in the week. Let’s not use the Holy Spirit as an excuse for our own unwillingness to plan and prepare. The schedules are still just a guideline.  In a few cases we have changed up the service as we go because we did feel God leading us to do things differently.  But because the plan was in place, the stress and craziness has been drastically reduced.

Introducing Planning Center Online from Planning Center on Vimeo.

If you have read through my twitter updates, you know that I have not been a big Adam Lambert fan on American Idol. I get tired of hearing every song turned into a screamfest.  But I was excited to see two worship leaders, Danny Gokey and Kris Allen, end up in the top three.   Kris surprised many by winning, but he is truly a great artist and a great guy.  Here is a clip of him leading worship at church.  I really love this song, and I’m grateful that he is using his talent to honor God.  Let’s all pray for him.  He has a huge opportunity.

Kris Allen Singing “God Of This City” from Rick Smith on Vimeo.

thanks to Rick Smith for the link

We’ve showed this video a few times before church and it really emphasizes what we want our church to be.   We want Cornerstone to be a very safe place where you can hear a dangerous message.

this video is available for purchase at Worshiphousemedia.com

We have been talking about starting a Saturday Night service at Cornerstone for a long time and we are finally pulling the trigger. We have decided to do two preview services, one of which is this Saturday night, November 15th. We will do another one on December 13th and then determine if we can do it every week. I am super excited about the opportunity to do a service that is geared toward young adults and youth and that is a little edgy and modern. Our young adult praise band, Scattered, will be leading the worship for this service.

We are starting the service at 7pm and we will be offering child care as well. If you are interested in helping this week, please let me know. The message will be the same as Sunday morning, although it will be “presented” in a slightly different way. There will be more movie clips, more interaction, and a higher use of technology. We are using this as an outreach service to the many young people in our area who have nothing to do on Saturday nights. It will be high energy, relevant, and fun, but I can guarantee that it will have the same hard-hitting Bible truth that I am passionate about.

You can download the flyer here and print it out and distribute around town. We aren’t doing much publicity for these preview services, so it’s up to you to get the word out. Thanks

We had a great time at the youth meeting last night. Jenni came up with tons of great activities, Matt shared a lesson, Todd and Matt led the discussion time, and our awesome youth band led the worship. Chad has done such an awesome job getting these guys together and I was able to jump in and play acoustic guitar with them last night. The entire band is still in their teens, and I feel OLD. Playing with them last night did allow me to live out my secret ambition of becoming a rock star. Check out the playlist below to listen to Abi, Ritchie, Mark and Luke do an awesome job. I am so proud of these guys for allowing God to use them. Check out all four videos.

I had a great question emailed to me from a worship pastor who had found my blog.  Instead of just replying to him, I decided to post my answer here. Here’s the question

How does a church incorporate technology (ie. video, graphics, etc) into the worship service without compromising the integrity of worship?  We use graphics, some video, contemporary music.  I want to be relevant but it seems the way we want to move is just to get butts in seats and feed the cash cow.  Forgive those expressions, but, those are exact quotes – not from me.  I don’t mind the technology, but, I struggle with incorporating this stuff if for those reasons.  I want our worship ministry to operate in integrity, humility, and purpose.  

This is a great question since so many churches are moving to add technology to keep up with the church down the street.   We have to really stop and examine our motives when it comes to technology.  Do we want the latest and greatest just to be cool, or are we looking for fresh ways to communicate a timeless truth.  In our church, the worship leaders have discussed how we can reduce distractions to worship.  And I include myself and anyone else who is preaching as worship leaders. Everything we do in a service from the announcements to the singing to the sharing and preaching is worship.   From the moment people walk in the door, we want them to focus on Christ.  If people leave saying we had an awesome video system, then we have missed our purpose.  They should leave saying that we worship an awesome God.

If we are trying to reduce distractions, then we must ask ourselves the question “is technology hindering or helping people worship?”   The answer to that question will be different for different churches, based on your people and your area and your history.   For us, we started very early incorporating video into our worship.  It is part of our DNA as a church, so it is easily accepted.   We have used numerous sermon illustration videos to help communicate the message each week.   During worship we also use moving backgrounds behind our lyrics to help create an environment that leads people closer to Christ.  But in everything we do, we seek to use technology to connect and communicate the truth of God’s Word.


My personal opinion is that we should use every method possible to help in our communication.  Not because we are trying to be cool, but because we have the most important message in the world to share.   Think about sound amplification in churches.   That is a technology that helps people hear and understand what is being said.  Graphics have the same application.  Many people in our congregations are visual learners instead of auditory.  When they see words and images in addition to hearing them they will actually remember them much more clearly.   They will see and understand what is being said.

With that said, we must be intentional about using technology in the church.  How do we do that? Here are some examples:

• Image magnification must be used to help people far from the stage to see the body language and facial expressions of the pastor, not to feed the ego of the speaker.
• Video backgrounds must not distract, but must be used to create an environment that engages the senses.  Check out Visual Worshipper for some awesome examples of using video to create immersive environments
• Sermon Illustrations must actually be relevant to the message!  Instead of using contemporary clips to entertain, we need to use them to help reinforce the message.  In other words, start with the truth and find ways to illustrate it, instead of starting with a cool video and trying to work it into the message.  In Acts 17, we see a great example of Paul leveraging contemporary culture in order to reach out, but he didn’t compromise the truth in using it.  

These are just some of the ways that technology can be used.  I didn’t mention anything about websites and podcasts.  Technology can be a powerful way to connect with your people, or it can be a powerful tool to distract you from your main purpose.  It’s up to each church to choose how to use it.

I have been on a kick lately sharing websites and resources for technology in the church. Sermonvideos is another site that has a great selection and an interesting subscription plan. For $150 per year, you get unlimited downloads of their videos, stills, countdowns, and illustrations. If you use motion graphics in your service, then this is another way to keep your costs down. By paying a set fee per year, it allows your church to download as many different backgrounds as you need, and it saves you all the hassle of dealing with receipts and reimbursements. Check them out, they have some good stuff available.

Here are a couple of videos about the Hillsong song Healer. It’s always helps to know the story behind the song. The first video is about how the song was written and the second video is the actual live performance. It’s powerful.

(thanks to Stephen)