My Worship Revolution

Well, here’s one way to get a new lawyer:

Last night this is where we had dinner.

The Factory in Franklin.  Very cool venue.  Very good food.  Very, very good music.  After eating we had Jared Anderson, Paul Baloche, and a coule other incredible song writers/singers.  Here’s a piece or Jared Anderson’s song, Amazed:

It was a night of incredible music and worship.  Until of course we were interrupted by tornado sirens.

I know what to do in an earthquake, but what the heck is weather?
We eventually got started again, and in case you were wondering, we didn’t get hit by the weather.
After we got started again, the power went out and we just worshipped right through it without being phased, and it was a pretty cool experience.

Throughout the night, Paul kept referring to us as leaders being able to relax this week and allow Jesus to wash our feet this week.  This is one of the main purposes of Recreate.  Refreshment.  And it is has already been an amazing week to be poured into.  I owe a HUGE thank you to Ed, my lead pastor, for allowing me to be here.  For seeing the value in eing filled.  And I always know he has go my back at our church.

Thanks for the support.  Thanks for letting Rachel and I be inspired and ministered to this week.  Watch out. I’m comin back fired up and full of ideas and excitement!

About to head to dinner after day 1 at Recreate.  Not too much time, but I wanna throw up a few notes and info for all you following along who weren’t able to be here.  Don’t think I’ll have a ton of time to share my processing right now (haven’t even had much time to process!) but I also like having these in one place for me.

Vicky Beeching

Started off the morning by being led in worship by Vicky Beeching.  Jaime, you would have loved it!  It’s too bad that she can’t really lead worship, though.  (For those of you that are a little dense, that statement is dripping with sarcasm.)  It was an incredible time of worship and a great way to jump start the day and the conference.  Video here:

Jon Tyson

WOW.  This guy is a pastor in New York.  He is like 32 years old and ridiculously genious.  He talked about coming trends and looking around the corner.  Here’s a couple of notes and quotes that really hit me.

• Holistic Missional Theology
  • Man was made to create culture, not just to be gardeners of Eden
  • The church should be in the world recreating and restoring all of culture as it was intended for the flourishing of all humanity
  • Are you limiting creativity to only creating better services?
  • Help people see the renewal mandate of creating good culture as something everybody does.
  • Why sit downstream in the river and complain about the flow when we could go upstream and put something in the water to change the flow
• Divine Imagination
  • Caesar Augustus captured the imagination of Rome…that is what he did well.
  • Early Christians took the Acts of Augustus and turned it into the Acts.  It was a subversive piece of literature with a better story than the one that was there
  • Christians captured the people’s imagination away from Caesar that Jesus is a better God.  They captured their divine imagination
• Banksy Imaginative Prophet
  • •    Our culture has forgotten how to discern good art
• What are you doing that is provocative to capture peoples divine imagination?
• Better services are not the final solution, better lives being shared in the weekend services is the answer.

Man, I can’t wait for our smaller session with this guy to discuss!

Matthew West

A surprise artis this afternoon was Matthew West.  I’m not personally familiar with much of his music, but he was great.  He also shared a piece of a documentary they filmed last year about his having vocal surgery and sharing what he learned in his "weakness" and "brokenness."  Here’s a piece of a new song of his:

Other stuff too, but there’s the highlights.  Gotta go!  More later!

Kinda expected the first couple "bonus" sessions to be kinda chill.  Just listen to some stuff, not be too intense til maybe dinner tonight.

Already expectations are exceeded.  Mind blowing listening to the knowledge of acoustic properties from Audio Ethics.  Some interesting comparisons between America’s churches and Recreate represented churches from CCLI.

But the one that really hit me between the eyes was from a founder of Sermon Spice.  He shared from a passion for digital media and the use of it to reach our culture.  (Loose) Quotables:

• We’re at a time when Hollywood is actually coming to us and we are missing out right now on a huge opportunity. 
• We kinda have a corner on the story telling market with the greatest story there is to tell.
• You’re church can become a place not for creative Christians, but creatives in your community.
• Sidenote: Check out this great video he shared with us.

So there was a lot more to it than that, but not much time to really ponder right now.  I know I was especially challenged in 2 ways:

1. I need to write more again.  Never felt like I was all that great at it, but others always affirmed it in me and I actually really enjoyed doing it.  Time to get creative and motivate myself to write more again.  Scripts.  Dramas.  Whatever.
2. Hmmm…maybe a Santa Cruz film festival?  I know, sounds odd out of context.   But who knows.  If I can flesh it out in my head this week, we’ll see what happens.  Just know that video has always been a love of mine and something that we could possibly use more out of our church to entrench ourselves in a Santa Cruz culture rich with artists and talent.

Time to go get some of the amazing food I’ve been looking forward to.
I think this is gonna be an inspiring week.  I’m stoked.

…and Rachel is already missing our kid like crazy!

Who am I kiddin?  I miss him too.
Just not enough to already need the iChat, though, but it was fun!

Just in time, before we hit another Sunday.
Here’s last week.  Chck it out:

This week, bolting out of service like a madman to catch a 1:50 flight to San Diego.
Watchin the Super Bowl with mine and Rachel’s fams.
Leaving Caleb with my Mom.
Catching a 10:30pm flight to show up in Nashville Monday morning.
See ya in the south!
(I can’t wait for the food!!  I’m fat and coming back even fatter!  Serious diet time after next week!)

A couple of mornings every week, I wake up early with Caleb to give my stay-at-home-mom wife a chance to sleep in.  In the last couple of week, I’ve noticed something kinda interesting.  Caleb now likes to go find a toy, or often times a book, and rather than play on his own, he brings it back to me and wants to just sit in my lap while he plays or reads (well, not really…looks and rips pages).  He does this once in a while at other times too, but in the morning I don’t mind it so much as I’m still waking up myself.

It got me thinking, though.  He could be off playing on his own, but as his day starts, he really wants to do what he’s doing while spending time in his daddy’s lap.  How often to I come to God with that same sort of attitude?  I have all sorts of stuff I like to do as I start out my day.  Making breakfast, reading blogs, reading a chapter of a book.  But how often do I insist upon doing none of it unless I’m sitting in my daddy’s lap?  How often do I settle for doing "stuff" all alone rather than starting my day aware of God’s presence?  Thanks for the reminder Caleb!

How about you?  What does the start of your day look like?

So I’ve mentioned in the past that I seldom put any political posts on this blog.  Not cause I’m not opinionated, just have to care a whole lot more than I do to give people another reason to dislike me.  But hey…it’s an election year!

And I’m kinda curious what the readers of this blog think. SO…in the left sidebar, I’ve added a little presidential polling box.  Go for it.  Let us know who you support.  I’m curious to see how diverse, or not, the views of this community are.

So everyone participate now.
RSS readers, make a rare stop over and make a quick pick.
The more participants, the more fun/interesting.
Why not?  It’s all anonymous. 
And if you wanna be less anonymous (I know plenty of you aren’t exactly shy)…make your click and then let us know why.

Oh, and as for me you ask…still undecided.  I admit it, I’m a Republican.  And yeah, that’s probably how I’ll vote.  But haven’t figured out who to pull for yet.  Just know I’m ANTI-Hillary.
Maybe I should start by registering to vote now that I’m in a new county.  So much for having my say in the primaries.  Oops.

A few months ago I was at a "First Impressions" workshop.  Just before that, I had a morning gathering with our CLC host teams.  At both of those gatherings, one of the questions we discussed was: When was a time that your expectations were exceeded?  You see, when our expectations are exceeded, whether it be at a restaurant, a customer service phone call, or a church, we tell our friends about it, and from that point on, all other experiences are measured by that one.

The one that came to mind immediately every time was this conference.  It put all other "conferences" to shame.  Especially the food, which I can’t stop talking about.  I attended last year for the first time one year ago, thanks to being informed by this blog.  (Read about it here.)  And ever since I left I couldn’t wait to go back this year.  I even asked about the possibility of me being able to attend when I was in the interview process at CLC.

3 more days.
Then I’ll be on a red eye to TN.
With my wife this time.
I can’t wait.
And either you will be there, or you’ll wish you were.
That’s all.