My Worship Revolution

Saturday morning was our first annual Helicopter Easter Egg Drop.  It was awesome with over 500 people there and everything going fairly smooth as well.  You can see all the Easter Bunny photos we took at our website here.  Great way to drive some traffic to the site.  There were some learnings as well and I can’t wait to do it even better next year.

Someone had to go up in the helicopter to drop those 2000 eggs out, so I took one for the team.  First time in a helicopter and it was a great view of the Santa Cruz coast!  Thought I’d take you all along on the ride with me.  Check out the video blog below:

Wow.  Awesome Easter weekend this year at CLC.  It’s Sunday night and I am wiped!  We had our first annual Easter Egg Drop on Saturday.  It wasn’t without it’s hurdles, but it turned out to be what I would say was a huge success, especially for the first time doing it.  We think around 500 people showed up.  Almost all from the community!  We had 300 Easter bags for kids and at the end of the event had less than 50 left.

Sunday service was a blast as well!  Pancake breakfast.  New look on the stage.  Dead roses.  Good times.  We had around 140 adults and 40 kids at the gathering this morning.

Assuming I got my video camera working again, there should be a helicopter video blog and a Worship Confessional to look forward to this week.  In the meantime, here’s a couple pics from the weekend.

HAPPY EASTER!!

And so it begins, with 2 days still left till the event.
We sent out 10,000 flyers designed by my awesome brother-in-law to surrounding homes to get the word out about our event.
As a result we received this email:

To All in the Spirit – I recently received a postcard sent in the mail to area residents announcing your planned Easter egg drop by helicopter on the Saturday before Easter.  I want to urge you to re-consider this
ill-advised idea, if only that it is certainly not in the Spirit but is a pretty outrageous, harsh and noisy event.  I am actually not responding to the helicopter drop because of the noise it might produce.   But,  as a fun activity for children, how could you even conceive that helicopters flying over a high school field dropping eggs has any meaning whatsoever.   I am sad to respond that this seems like adult grandstanding for attention.

Yours in the Spirit,
XXXXX

My response:

Dear XXXXX,

Thank you for your response to our flyers.  I am sorry to hear that you have no interest in the event.  The helicopter noise will only be present for 5-10 minutes so we hope that this will not cause too much of a disruption for anyone.

And we do see this as a very fun event.  We want to be able to bless the families in our community with a free, safe, and fun event where they can bring their children, have a good time, and get to know some of the wonderful people that are a part of our church family.  If you see it as “adult grandstanding for attention” I am sorry, however we feel excited and OK about being outrageous and drawing attention to something that will mean a lot to our communities kids.  We also feel that it will ultimately draw attention to Jesus as a result of families experiencing that love and community and being invited to join us on a Sunday morning if they are interested in learning more of what we are about.

I hope that this helps clear up a few of your concerns and communicates the heart behind what we are doing.  God Bless.

There ya have it.
So if you were wondering, that’s why we’re having an Easter Egg Drop/Hunt.
Directly about Jesus?  No.
A blessing to our community families? I think so.
And yeah, we like to have fun.
So let’s throw a party on Saturday!
And Sunday!

Thoughts?

Easter’s right around the corner.  Do you think the building is looking better or worse than the last video?
Take a look:

So I was watching a little Dr. Phil on Monday.  Hey…don’t judge.  T.D. Jakes was on and they were talking about the Eliot Spitzer scandal in New York.  T.D. Jakes said something pretty simple, pretty common sense, yet pretty profound I thought.  The loose paraphrase was:

We succeed in the area’s of life that we devote our time.  Often the private life is neglected in pursuit of public success.  So while someone may be a public success, they become a private failure.

Like I said, simple, but profound in my head.  The ability to so easily be a "success" in the public eye, but to "fail" in the areas of family and personal life.

That being said, it also felt like confirmation in a way to how I had spent the earlier portion of that day.  It’s Easter week.  There is a LOT to do.  We have a huge Easter Egg Drop on Saturday.  We’ve never done that before.  We didn’t have a whole lot planned out for our service, and the stuff that was planned still had plenty of footwork to be done.  Plenty of justification to go to work on my day off.

Instead, I spent the morning at the aquarium in Monterey with Rachel and Caleb.  I was out of town for a good portion of the past 2 weekends and hadn’t been able to spend quality time with my family in a while.  I didn’t get anything done in preparation for Easter, but it was the best way I could have used that Monday, my day off.  I want to always be spending time on my "private" life, not allowing it to suffer for the sake of "public success."  And not to mention, I love my family and those hours spent with them, although Caleb can definitely wear us out at times, filled me up and gave me the ability to run the rest of the week hard.

So what are you doing to balance your personal life with your work or "public" life, especially on a week where it would be easy to forget?

Oh yeah, and here are a few pics from the aquarium.  I love watching Caleb get excited and scream in awe of the animals!

This year is our first annual Easter Egg Drop at CLC!!  Check out the mailer that will be showing up at 10,000 homes within a mile of us early next week:

Santa Cruz High School
6000 easter eggs.
I’ll be in the helicopter dropping 2000 of em.
Bounce houses.
Easter Bunny.
Egg dying.

Check out the Facebook invite.
Then send it to some friends.
And there’s plenty of room for more volunteers if you want to help!

Please Lord help us pull this thing off!

Blogging from my BlackBerry.
2:30 am.
Still in a van.
Just chech out the Twitter feed for the play by play.
This is brutal.

So we’ve been in the process of remodeling over here for a while now.  This week paint is going up in the sanctuary.  Thought I’d give you an idea what it looks like around here during the week these days.  Here’s a quick little video:

It can be frustrating at times cause there’s just very little way to make the building appear nice in the middle of all this, but it’s a process.  Lots to do next week to have it as presentable as possible for Easter.  Good stuff happening over here!

And in a few hours I’m off to the mountains to lead worship at the youn adults retreat up in Tahoe.  Might even get a day of snowboarding in…we’ll see!!
Catch ya after the weekend!

Yeah, I know, I know.  I gotta get back to the video stuff.  But as far as services, our video camera isn’t working, and the churches seems to be missing the power adapter/battery charger.  And I don’t feel like doing the iMovie thing right now…I need a haircut.  So you get this.

As you may have read earlier this week, I had the honor of both leading worship and teaching this past Sunday.  We are in a series called Deeper where we are talking about going deeper in Christ and how we do that.  A few weeks ago was Deeper Through Knowing, and this week I got to talk about worship in Deeper Through Worship.

The main point of the teaching was actually more to get away from the idea that our quiet time with God every single day has to look like reading my Bible for x minutes and praying for x minutes.  Reading and praying are important, but not everybody connects with God primarily in these ways.  God made each of us uniquely and therefore we are created to connect with him uniquely.  In turn, we all worship a little differently in our personal times, and it is authentic personal worship during the week that leads to authentic and passionate corporate worship on Sunday mornings.

Here is an idea what the service looked like, songs and also the message is embedded below for anyone that wants to listen to it.  It’s the little button after the first 2 songs.  That’s where we actually plug the message into the morning, so I thought I’d let you see the flow here.  Here it is:

Majestic – Brewster
Indescribable – Tomlin

Breathe
Only You – Crowder
How Great Is Our God – Tomlin
Center – Hall
Let the Praises Ring Brewster

I wanted to do one other song, too, but I’m a typical pastor I guess…I talk too much!  Overall I think it was a fairly good morning.  I found it tough to concentrate this weekend, and this seemed like a tough message to put together, so I didn’t actually finish it till around 2am the night before.  Thanks to Rich Kirkpatrick for steering me toward checking out Sacred Pathways by Gary Thomas.  I couldn’t find the book anywhere in driving distance, but it led to some great concepts I grabbed from John Ortberg.

A few other things worth mentioning.

• Since I was teaching, at the very least I thought it would be nice to have someone else lead the first song.  Lori Hazen, an awesome member of our Worship Lead Team who is leading worship more and more did a great job leading Breathe.
• I read a "call to worship" of sorts at the end of the message.  It was from Charles Spurgeon and called on every part of our being to rise up to worship God.  I almost didn’t read it because of time, but I’m glad I did.  I think for some, it really set the tone of worship nicely going into the response time.
• Throughout worship and the message, one of our high schoolers and an amazing artist, Megan Bradley, painted throughout as her form of worship.  Then during the response time, we invited others to create as well with a table of watercolor materials at the back of the room.  That was really cool.  Take a look at her art, inspired by Psalm 139:13-18

Thursday morning.
Meeting for coffee w/Ryan Lipert.
I walk out the front door.
The ground and the world around is glistening with wetness.
A light spring rain falls gently from the Northern California sky.
As I walk toward my car I notice an unfamiliar whiteness about my car.
Wet toilet paper covers my black Honda Civic.

To the culprit.
I will find you.
Payback is coming.