Here’s the survey that we asked the congregation to complete a few weeks ago -

Click here for a high res PDF scan of the survey if you’re interested – survey.pdf

I told you a few weeks ago that we broke ground on our expansion. The local paper sent someone to take a photo – this is one of those shots that will live on forever in the archives of our church.

Photo/WES KELLER: Mikaela Alexander with shovel left, represents students, while Barb Chua, shovel right, represents adults, and Kyle Bauman, between them, represents children for the sod turning for the addition to Orangeville Baptist Church Sunday. The implementation team is represented by Pastor Dan Brubacher, left, chairman Hans Muntz, rear, and Wilf Woodford, the honourary volunteer representing seniors. It is the fifth major capital project undertaken by the church in its 147 years.

Sunday was the first of a two-week focus on our regional and global outreach efforts at OBC. It was pretty nice to start this series coming right out of the Impact week of our identity series and overall our morning was pretty good. It was one of those services where there are lots of small pieces that needed to fit together really well as a whole for the thing to come off as one connected experience rather than a disjointed series of parts.

This is what our morning looked like -

Hosanna – Paul Baloche – E
Open The Eyes Of My Heart – Paul Baloche – E
Mighty To Save – Hillsong – A
Q&A w/ YFC staff
Offering/Announcements
Prayer
God Of This City – Bluetree/Tomlin – Bb
Q&A Panel – single moms ministry
Message – “Greater Things” – John 14
God Of This City

Okay – so let me give some context to a few things so that this make sense.

1. We wanted to highlight regional ministry efforts that our church is already involved in. I’ve posted before (1 | 2) about our new ministry to single moms and on Sunday we did a Q&A panel with two people from our church who have been involved in the work of the ministry as well as a single mom who has been impacted by people in our church who have participated in the ministry. The moms who spoke are not members of our church and at least one of them had never been out on a Sunday morning before. It was pretty exciting to see their willingness to share with our congregation how they have been blessed by what people have done for them.
2. God Of This City – We wanted to use this song as a setup and closer to the message and the lyrics fit perfectly with the theme of our service. We sent out one of our photographers to take photos of our region this week and I put together a background video of those photos to be played the first time the song was done. That first time I intro’d the song and just did it on my own with acoustic – I sat on a stool and had the photos playing on the screen behind me with the words. The second time we did the song we had the whole band playing, leading the congregation – and we also used the click/loop track from PraiseCharts.
3. The whole push of the sevice was that God has called us to do “greater things” based on John 14. Earl nailed it and I’m excited to see what kind of response will come from Sunday. We recognize that we have been setting the bar high for people but I think it’s been a good wake up call for some in our church – if they’re going to call OBC their church home then there has to be an active “living out” of their faith in our region and in our world.

Overall the morning went very well. We had some tech issues in each service but nothing that we weren’t able to overcome. We have good people who know what they’re doing and know how to handle glitches.

It was also very exciting to hear about the work that our church is involved in. It didn’t come off at all as us tooting our own horn and was really just an opportunity to remind people that God has called us to have significant impact in our region – to do “greater things” than what has already been done in the past.

Next Sunday we’re talking about our global outreach efforts and I cannot wait for that!!

Saturday was fun – daughter #2 is officially one year old as of today so we had her party this weekend. It was really a good excuse to invite all of our friends over and if they wanted to bring their kids they were more than welcome to do that :)

Emmy is a big fan of music so we went with a music theme for her party – my wife did a music cake, we had lots of music toys for kids to play with and we did some good decorating. Lots of fun.

We haven’t got a big house (I know that you’re thinking us worship guys get paid the big bucks!) so it was fun cramming about 20 adults and 10 kids in our living room and kitchen – nothing like a little proximity to encourage some good conversation!

Avery was a very helpful big sister and did what she could to encourage the present-opening process!

And then it was time for cake! Here’s the mandatory photo -

Happy birthday Emerson Paige! I can’t believe it’s already been a year – wow! Your mom and I are so blessed to have you in our lives and we are so thankful that God has given you to us. You are a precious girl with a quiet, tender spirit. I love every moment I get to spend with you and I’m looking forward to many, many more birthday parties!

On Saturday morning someone told me that they had heard on the radio about an accident at a Christian concert out in BC. I immediately thought of my friends in Starfield and Unite Productions who had just started a cross-Canada tour with Shane & Shane, Bethany Dillon and David Nasser. I jumped online to try and find the story and was able to confirm that there had been a very serious accident at the Starfield show at Central Heights Church in Abbotsford, BC on Friday night.

I checked a couple of articles online and this was the basic story – there were between 1,000 and 1,200 kids at the show and at some point in the evening kids were jumping near the front of the church and some of them caused the floor to cave in. People fell through the hole to the basement below and then some lights and sound equipment fell in on the crowd, injuring about 40 people.

I quickly called my friend Nathan who is out on the tour and he was able to give some more details – Starfield had just started their second song and all of a sudden a 20′x20′ section of the floor just broke open and kids fell through. Nathan said that the Starfield guys did a great job of encouraging everyone to get out of the building and that everyone was pretty shaken up.

This is the hole right in front of the stage. On the left-hand side of the picture you can see the light truss that fell in towards the crowd. Wow!

Because the light & PA gear belonged to the tour and not the church the building was locked down and the police were bringing in some forensics teams to find out what happened. The show on Saturday night was cancelled but it looks like the rest of the tour is ready to go as planned.

Praise God that nobody was killed – from the sounds of things this was a pretty brutal accident and people were surprised that the injuries were not more serious. Pray for the people who were injured as well as the bands and crew on this tour – something like this has got to play with your head in pretty big ways!

A quick message from Starfield -

As you may have heard by now, there was a serious accident at our concert last night, and many young people were injured. At this moment, we are consumed with concern and compassion for those who were injured, especially for those who were described to be in serious condition. Our hearts are with them. We ask that you join us in prayer for them. As a less important side note, none of the members of our tour were injured in the accident. The band would like to thank everyone for the outpouring of encouragement and support that we are receiving.

Here’s a news report from CBC -

UPDATE from Mike Jenkinson -

Here’s a TV report about the concert. Footage of the floor collapsing appears about 45 seconds into the clip.

After posting a frustrating experience with new technology the other day I thought I’d post about a “so far, so good!” experience that I’m having. On Monday we opened registration for Krazee Arts Camp which is happening this summer and one thing we knew we needed to do was to build a registration form that would store data for us online rather than sending us individual emails with the registration info needing to be copied/pasted in to Excel.

None of our people in house were able to design that and we didn’t have the budget to hire someone to take care of it so I started hunting and eventually found a new product called FormSpring that seemed to be able to do exactly what we needed. I did some testing of it and we found out that it would be a great choice for us.

Basically we needed our solution to do three things – store all of the registration online, notify us when new registrations come in and give people the option to pay online by credit card. FormSpring does all of these things and does them beautifully.

We went live on Monday morning and we had our first registration just after 6:00 AM – people were definitely eager to get their kids signed up! We had to do some finessing to distinguish between people who are wanting to pay by credit card vs. cash/cheque but for right now we’ve found a system that works as advertised, that’s reliable and that’s easy for people to use. This is a great product and I think we’ll be using it again and again!

Check it out for yourself – www.formspring.com

I posted yesterday that we asked the congregation to take part in a survey on Sunday morning. A few of you have asked to see the survey so I’ll put that online tomorrow.

Yesterday I participated in my first webinar. What is a webinar? Basically a seminar that happens online – the facilitator/speaker/presenter is at their computer and is able to use Powerpoint and their phone to communicate with a bunch of people woh are following along at their computers. The participants/followers log in and are able to see the presenter’s Powerpoint and call a specific phone number to join a conference call where they can hear the presenter speaking. In theory, it’s a great idea and definitely has the potential to bring together people who are separated by geography and budget. In reality, yesterday’s experience was a big flaming fireball of fail.

Here’s how it went -

12:45 – Hit the website link that I was sent in my registration email and login
12:47 – Download the software. I didn’t know I needed software. Ok – that’s fine. Looks like it’s saying it worked.
12:55 – Software has downloaded but everything looks the same. Nothing has launched. I’m sure they’ll come on at 1:00 when the webinar is supposed to start and explain this.
1:00 – The “organizer” hasn’t arrived so we can’t start.
1:03 – Still no organizer.
1:05 – Organizer arrives. Perfect. He’s talk about his Powerpoint slides. I don’t see Powerpoint slides.
1:06 – Go back and find the email with the link and load it up again. This time it asks for a password. Password?? I have no password.
1:08 – I send an email to customer support asking for a password and decide to copy and paste a series of random numbers from the registration email to see if that might be the password. It works. Hooray.
1:10-3:00 What was supposed to be a two-hour webinar turns into about 50 minutes of content and what seemed like 60 minutes of commercials and cute little stories of guys who are on the phone call who are friends with the organizer.

All in all, I was pretty disappointed. I won’t talk about who was organizing this thing but they did get an email from me letting them know that I was disappointed with the content, with the presentation and with the general unorganized-ness (is that word?? it is now!!) of the whole thing.

Lessons for those of you who are interested in using “new technology” to reach more customers -

1. Do a complete dry run of your entire presentation before you hit the ground running the first time!
   It was very clear that the two presenters (who were in different parts of the country) had not done this – they were interrupting each other, going in different directions, talking over each other, etc etc.
2. If you are having technical difficulties make people aware of it IMMEDIATELY
   They could have easily sent out an email at 12:44 (by their admission that was the time that one of the presenters lost his internet connection) saying that there may be a 5- or 10-minute delay in getting started. No worries – at least I’m not sitting by my computer wondering if this thing is actually going to happen or not.
3. Give people what they want!
   If people register for a webinar on a particular topic it would probably be a good idea to devote at least 90% of the seminar time to that topic, wouldn’t you think?? Nobody minds a little blurb about other resources or helpful tools that are available but when the commercials take the focus away from the content that people have paid to receive, that is a bad thing.

So, all in all, it was a pretty underwhelming experience with my first webinar. It is exciting all of the new teaching opportunities that are being opened up because of technology but we have to make sure that we’re understanding how to use all this stuff properly. When it’s done well it can be ridiculously powerful but when it’s done poorly it becomes annoying and distracting.

This is my Watercooler Wednesday post. Give yourself a few minutes and check out the other posts linked on Randy’s site – great stuff!

Okay Americans – I DARE YOU to watch this, look me in the face and tell me that the entire American electoral process has not jumped the shark. I’m sorry but this is ridiculous.

The term jumping the shark alludes to a specific scene in a 1977 episode of the TV series Happy Days when the popular character Arthur “Fonzie” Fonzarelli literally jumps over a shark while water skiing. The scene was so preposterous that many believed it to be an ill-conceived attempt at reviving the declining ratings of the flagging show. The phrase has become a colloquialism used by U.S. TV critics and fans to denote the point at which the characters or plot of a TV series veer into a ridiculous, out-of-the-ordinary storyline. Such a show is typically deemed to have passed its peak. Once a show has “jumped the shark” fans sense a noticeable decline in quality or feel the show has undergone too many changes to retain its original appeal.

Thanks Wikipedia and JumpTheShark.com!

On Sunday during both of our services we did a church-wide survey where we asked people a bunch of yes/no questions which were all centred around the 4 I’s of our identity series – invest, invite, ignite, impact. We will be using this as a baseline to see where our church stands in terms of things like sharing their faith story with people who aren’t followers of Christ, whether or not people are able to express their love and worship of God on Sunday morning, whether they’re reading the Bible and praying on their own during the week, etc etc.

We’re excited to see the results and will be sharing them with our congregation later this spring. I’ll get a copy of the survey and post it here for those who would be interested in checking it out.