You’ll see that I’ve got a whole bunch of new blog links over on the right hand side. This is a list of blogs inspired by Randy Elrod who I had the pleasure of meeting earlier this spring at re:create. Have a look through those blogs and get to know some folks over there – they’re good people!

After missing a couple of Sundays for some family time I was excited about being back at the church this week and to lead worship on Sunday. We had a really solid team (including a new keyboard player!), the song flow worked really well and our second service included a bunch of child dedications so we had a whole whack of visitors with us, too.

Every year we take a week and focus on our global outreach efforts. For the second year in a row we brought our friend Justus Miwanda from Uganda to come and speak to us. He was around all week spending time in our various ministries and then preached on Sunday morning. We had asked him to tell the North American church what it needed to hear from an African. Justus preached from the parable of the good Samaritan and focused mostly on the fact that the Samaritan went to him - how we must be willing to GO to those who need to be helped.

Sunday, May 13 – “Beyond Our Four Walls”
“He Went To Him”
Ancient of Days – Gary Sadler & Jamie Harvill
Holy Is The Lord – Chris Tomlin & Louie Giglio
Because Of Your Love – Paul Baloche & Brenton Brown

You Are – Mark Roach
Shout To The Lord – Darlene Zschech

Give Us Clean Hands – Charlie Hall

Two real highlights for me this week – we had done “You Are” once before as a presentation song on Celebration Sunday at the end of our Beyond initiative but we dropped the key to F and did it as a congregational this week. The response was awesome! This is definitely getting added to our regular repertoire. The second really cool thing was just the great energy the congregation had at the second service in response to the child dedications. Anytime you put babies on stage people are going to think it’s awesome!

So I think I’m going to start a new blog feature – New & Old. I’ll link you to a blog that I’ve been reading for a while (the “old”) and a blog that I’ve just discovered and am enjoying (the “new”). See – we like to keep things simple up here in Canada!

The New – I’ll go with the newest for this first one! I was visiting Rich‘s blog yesterday and ended up at The Wonderful Noise the blog home of Victor Estrada. Like me, Victor is a worship pastor and, also like me, is the father of a new baby girl.

The Old – I’ll stick with the theme and go with the oldest! The first blog I ever started reading belongs to Jordon Cooper. I had the opportunity to meet Jordon a couple years ago but was too chicken to tell him that I read his blog. Jordon has a very keen sense of the goings-on in “underground Christianity” in Canada and is not afraid to take significant steps to help make things better. Plus, he’s Canadian and that makes him worth reading.

Both of these guys are linked in my bloglist so check them out if you’re looking for some more reading.

Now go find your own guitar-playing, singing goat and send me a snapshot!

What a grand and glorious event – God has given us another beautiful, healthy baby girl to raise and encourage.

Emerson Paige Vacher was born Saturday, April 28 at 8:42pm and weighed 8lbs 12oz. Although most of you who read the blog haven’t met my wife, let me just say that her pushing out an almost-nine-pound anything is quite a feat! I’ve said this several times this week but my wife is the man!!