My Worship Revolution

Lately it seems like God’s kinda been messing with my paradigm of
what success looks like.  The brutal truth is, at our church, in the
city of Santa Cruz, Sunday services can be pretty hit and miss.  It’s
easy to get discouraged when I look out on a Sunday morning and see 70%
of the mass I’m used to.

Numbers in attendance at Sunday
gatherings has long been a measure of success for us in churches, and,
truth be told, a validation of our worth as pastors quite often.  Not
healthy, I know…nut true.  But as I start to name many of the people
I don’t see, I also realize a large number of them are very involved in
the actual life of the church.  They are people who are doing ministry
outside our church regularly.  They are people who are active in taking
Jesus to the people that surround them everyday.

For a long time
I’ve felt that I’d rather see a church that is alive and active
throughout the week, and that is more important than showing up on
Sunday.  But it’s a lot harder to actually consider the real life
implications of this.  And believe me, we have a long way to go in both
areas in our faith community, but it’s just really had my dome spinning.

Last week I found this post via Monday Morning Insight. 
In a class with Len Sweet they talked about measures of success within
your church.  Measures outside of numbers of butts in seats or amount
of money given.   Here are a couple of my favorites:

• The number of adoptions people in the church have made from local foster care.
• The number of pictures on the church wall of unwed mothers holding their newborn babies in their arms for the first time.
• The number of phone calls from community leaders asking the church’s advice.
• The number of emergency finance meetings that take place to reroute money to community ministry.
• The number of people serving in the community during the church’s normal worship hours.
• The number of churches your church planted in a 10 mile radius of your own church.

Please, go here and read the other 13 he shares.

A
lot of these things are a much better depiction of the heart of Jesus
than showing up for an hour and a half on Sunday morning.  Don’t get me
wrong.  That is important also, but I’d rather see ministry happening
throughout the week.  So why don’t we look at these things as much?  I
think because they are harder to measure.  And they don’t stroke our
own ego’s nearly as much as filling the sanctuary on Sunday morning.

So, how about you?

How would/should/do you measure the success of your/our/a church?

A few pics of Caleb’s first baseball game last week.
Giants v Cubs.
Giants won.
Too bad the only time I ever want the Giants to win is when they’re playing the Dodgers.

A little bummed that his first game wasn’t a Padres game.
But it’s not like he’ll remember it anyway.
After about an inning and a half he was more interested in playing with his toy car on the bleachers.

Thanks to Tom and Balch Petroleum for the tickets!!

Who is your baseball team?  Or do you even care?

Trying to keep these things going.
And we’re up to 33 of em now.
No video from the actual service again this week.
So instead I played with a couple sound effects just for kicks.
Our set:

Hosanna

Revelation Song
We Fall Down/My Jesus I Love Thee
How Great Is Our God (plus special element)
You Are Good

Check out the video for details:

So who else is still posting these?
Let us know!

As many of you may know, I spent 2 of the years I was at Revolution driving down to Vanguard University every Monday night to finish up my Bachelors degree.  It was the #1 goal Rachel and I set after we got married as we looked to the future and set some goals for ourselves and our life together.

I kinda drug my feet at the end there, but a few weeks ago I finally took my last CLEP test.
American History, 1965(oops) 1865-present.
I needed a 50 to pass.
I got a 51.
Rachel took care of the paperwork for me.
And this came in the mail today:

It’s officially finished!
At 29 years old I finally upgraded from that Associates degree.
I took the 11 year graduation plan, but hey, once again, better late than never, eh?
And it only took going to 5 different colleges to get there! (There was a sixth, but none of those units counted.)

And the biggest congrats on this one really needs to go to my wife!
She put up with a lot of crap for me to get there.  Nights away. Late nights writing papers.  (Lots of debt in school loans!)  She’s the best.

So now I’m trying to figure out what really changes.
Anyone think the board wants to give me a raise now?
Haha.  Yeah.  I figured not, too.

Well, time to weigh in once again.

Did more exercising this week, and ate a little better.
Monday: Run
Wednesday: Ride
Thursday: Run
Friday: Ride

A few fun new tools to keep track of my exercise, too.
Got Nike+ for my birthday.  So here’s an embarrassing look at my 2 short runs this week:

Also found this cool site while I was trying to map my run in Oregon a while back.  It’s mapmyrun.com.
I have a profile there and I can keep track of all my workouts, running, biking, and swimming.
Check out my profile here.
So now I really have to go for it.  Otherwise you can see just what a pansie I am.

Back to the weight loss.
Here’s the progress (or lack thereof) up till now:

Weigh in: 171.6
Week 1:  168.4
Week 2:  169.8
Week 3:  169.4
Week 4:  170
Week 5: …

In 2 1/2 weeks I’m doing my first triathlon.
I’ve been exercising, but not nearly as much as I wanted.
Tonight Rachel was picking up a friend in Sacramento.  My band all had work so practice was canceled.
So I went on a bike ride with Ryan and Ryan tonight.

2 1/2 hours.
Approximately 25 miles.
I couldn’t remember where we went half the ride, but here’s the best mapping I could figure out.

First we weaved our way through side streets up to the top of West Cliff.
Then we followed the coast all the way down to Aptos.
Tried to find an easier way out and hit some dead ends.
Made the climb up from the beach and followed Soquel back home.

My legs are dying.  It’s that weird feeling that you can’t really explain when you’re walking around.  Like your legs are moving, but you don’t really feel em.  But I guess that’s a good thing.  They’re gonna hate me in the morning.
That’s about the distance I’ll have to ride in the September triathlon.
I’m the one doing the triathlon and both of those guys pretty much kicked my butt.  I was in the back the whole time.
I’ve got some work to do the next couple of weeks.
And even more over the next couple months.
At least the Ragamuffin Top updates should get better!

So yeah…haven’t filled y’all in on the updates to our building lately.  It’s comin along.  Not as fast as I’d like it to, but hey, it’s comin along.

Filmed this a couple weeks ago, but once again, better late than never.  Enjoy.

So today is a day of catching up and updates.  The first update…Ragamuffin Top weight loss challenge.

I know it’s supposed to be on Saturday.
I did record this on Saturday though.
And yeah, week 3 is now the lost episode.
Better late than never. Record up till now:

Weigh in: 171.6
Week 1:  168.4
Week 2:  169.8
Week 3:  169.4
Week 4:  …

Wrong direction.
Back on track next week…I hope!
That Triathlon is creepin up quickly!!

If you haven’t been following along, Royal Family Kids Camp is a national camp for abused and neglected kids in the foster care system.  Our church hosts the Monterey Bay camp.  So I’ll finish the RFKC stories with this one.

An organization called Soles for Souls offered to provide 2 pairs of shoes for every camper.  Pretty awesome!  Unfortunately though, through a series of events, we ran out and 9 kids were left without shoes.  Chris, the camp director, was not OK with this and started calling around to find a local shoes store that might be willing to donate some shoes.

Aptos Shoes and Apparel stepped up big time!  Thank you to them so much!!  Chris talked to them at 3pm and someone was driving away from their store with shoes at 6:30.  That’s unheard of!

Chris of course went around to get sizes from the kids who didn’t get shoes.  He asked one boy his size, and he didn’t know.  He was wearing sandals, so Chris asked him if he knew what size his other shoes were.  He said he thought a 3.  Chris looked at his feet, and they sure didn’t look like 3’s.  After comparing the foot with another kid’s, he ended up getting 7’s and they fit great!

As he was giving him the shoes, Chris asked if he could see his old shoes.  Sure enough, they were a size 3!  Who knows how long he had been walking around in shoes 4 sizes too small!  The picture is a shot of him in his new shoes.

To end on a somewhat funny note, his counselor shared at our “Welcome Home Dinner” for staff that the kid was convinced that his feet had actually grown four sizes overnight.

This past Sunday we opened up Craig Groeschel’s One Prayer message, Make Us One, by playing One by U2.  There is a pretty cool music video for it which they also played during concerts.

So I downloaded the video to play while we did the song.  Some of the lyrics match up pretty nicely with the video, so I created a click track to go with it.  It was the first time we’ve ever done any sort of click track, and Dave Clarke did an awesome job playing with it.

To make the click track, I first downloaded the video from YouTube.  I exported it as an audio file and dropped it into Soundtrack Pro.
They have a woodblock loop that works well for a click track.  It hits on 1 and 3, so the key is to find the right tempo, then double it to get all four beats.  Change the tempo of the project and it will change the loop, but keep the song the same.
Funny thing about One is I had a lot of trouble figuring out where it was at, and couldn’t figure it out.  For one thing, I’m not sure it stays consistent the whole time, but it was somewhere around 90.  So I doubled it, and I’m pretty sure it’s 90.5 cause it worked REALLY close at 181.
I then added 8 counts lead in, and put a beep on the 1, the 5, and the 1 so we’d know right where to start it.

It worked out really well and it was a blast to play a U2 tune at Church!
I’ve embedded a YouTube view of the click track.  If anyone wants the higher res version to use, let me know and I’ll hook you up to save you the work!

Here’s the video with music.

This post has been part of Creative Chaos.  Go by Los’ blog and get all sorts of great creative ideas for ministry!