Congregational Survey – Part 3

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

The photo that will live on forever

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.

Worship Textfessional – April 27, 2008

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!!

Birthday party!

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!

Accident at Starfield show in BC

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.

FormSpring

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

Congregational Survey – Part 2

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.

Webinar

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.

John McCain on WWE Raw

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.

 

UPDATE: For Casey and others, I’m sure -

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!

Congregational Survey

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.

Another great day for a game!

I’m down at the SkyDome (I refuse to call it that other stupid name) with a good friend enjoying the last game of the Jays/Tigers series. The weather in Toronto is beautiful day and it’s a great day for a ballgame – the second game of the post-Frank Thomas era for the Jays. Maybe the last game of the pre-Barry Bonds era?? Hmmmm..

Krazee Arts Camp

Krazee Arts Camp is one of our summer camps for kids that we run. It’s for 7- to 11-year old kids and is an awesome chance for them to try different artistic expressions in a very low-pressure environment. This isn’t a performance camp – more just a chance for them to try new things and make new friends.

 

Krazee is actually an acronym which actually stands for Kreative R-tists Always Zany, Exploring & Engaging – okay, so maybe we came up with the acronym after we came up with the name but it works!!

Registration went live for our arts camp this morning and so far things are running super smooth. We’ve designed this camp as an invite event which means we are asking families from our church to have their kids bring a friend from school or their neighbourhood with them to camp. If the camp is full of kids from our church then we will have missed the mark on this camp. At the same time if the camp is full of ONLY community kids then we are losing the opportunity for kids from our church to use this as an invite event. It’s a bit of a balancing act but things are looking good so far!

A couple of weeks ago I posted our recap video from Krazee Arts Camp last year and if you’re interested in watching that you can click here to check it out.

Something new, a little early

I was planning on giving a little “Something New” shoutout to our new Canadian friend, Brandon, on Tuesday but I couldn’t wait that long to post this. Brandon found his way to the blog because he’s originally from Greenville, SC and is now living in Thompson, Manitoba. For those of you who live in the US here is a pretty good description of Thompson – imagine what you think life would be like in Greenville, South Carolina and then imagine a place where every single thing about it is 100% in the opposite direction. That’s Thompson.

For the visual learners among y’all (Casey said I even spell that right!) here’s a quick reference guide -

So yeah. I’m thinking that Brandon is a little crazy. Either that or God is up to something pretty big in his life and in Thompson, too.

Today Brandon posted just about the funniest thing I’ve seen this week. And here’s hoping he keeps up the trend – we want to know more about your South Carolina heritage, Brandon!!

Back home in South Carolina, until about 8 years ago, there were more gambling institutions than in the state of Nevada. Then video poker was outlawed. There were about 73 thousand former video poker establishments which promptly became… you guessed it, fireworks stores.

Head over to Brandon’s site, watch the video, pee your pants imagining what everyday life must be like for those South Carolina guys and then leave him a comment letting him know that you think he’s doing a pretty amazing thing by following God’s call all the way to Thompson, Manitoba (yearly average snowfall: 186 cm – you do the math!)

 

A beautiful night for a ballgame!

World Record Slam Dunk

Come on!!

RSSers – hit the blog for the video

HT: Dave Wasson

“Remember Me”

Feel like having a good cry?

“The family wanted a way to document Carolynne’s story for her children and for others who might be experiencing something similar. We saw it as an opportunity to tell a story that was both universal and unique, about a family facing death from a rare and aggressive illness while struggling to maintain the family unit.”

www.conmon.com/slideshow/rememberme/

Pulse – Sunday, April 13

Two of our core values at OBC are passionate worship and relentless prayer. Those happen on Sunday morning, they happen in individual ministries, they happen in peoples’ lives and we also put together specific events where we can give more attention and more focus to those two things. That’s the idea behind Pulse.

We started doing Pulse a couple of years ago and we’ve done it different every time – we’ve done 24 hours of prayer, we’ve done prayer stations in our building over the course of a week, we’ve done regional worship gatherings, we’ve done public readings of scripture, lots of different things. For Sunday night we decided to do a worship concert-type event with an extended time of prayer in the middle.

We brought in Dan Macaulay and his band to lead us in worship – we have very talented people in our church who are more than capable of leading events like this but it was nice to bring in someone “special” to lead us in worship. It gave a bit of a unique flavour to the evening and also allowed all of our worship ministry folks to participate.

Dan & his wife had just returned from Nashville where he was tracking some new songs with Nathan Nockels and it was very exciting to hear about the things that are in store for Dan and his ministry. Very exciting!

So last night looked like this -

7:00 Welcome/intro/explain the night
7:05 Dan & band lead us in worship
8:00 Pray
8:40 Dan & band close with worship
9:00 Done

Now I don’t know if you church is used to doing hour-long sections of worship or 40-minute sections of prayer but our folks are not! It was a great chance to do something different, push some boundaries and comfort zones and really communicate to people that these things are important.

Dan did a great job leading us in songs that were familiar to our church and also teaching us a couple of his originals. Doing an event like this usually draws people who are looking for an event like this (make sense?) so it didn’t take much to get people engaged in the worship.

For our time of prayer together, we did a few different things. We prayed corporately (I read a “pastoral prayer” and gave people a chance to pray on their own at different spots), we did some silent prayer of confession and for specific life needs and then I read a corporate prayer of confession. We then had people move into small groups and prayer for some needs in the life of our church, our region and our world. That went for about 20 minutes, I came back up to close in prayer and then threw back to the band for our closing worship.

It was a good night. We had a good opportunity to come together and pray collectively for things that are really on our hearts. We are confident that God heard our prayers and is acting on our behalf – so now we wait, we watch and we continue to pray.

I just paid $1.17 for gas

Now, Americans, before you get excited let’s do some math.

$1.17 CDN = $1.17 USD (www.xe.com)
1 litre = 0.264 gallons (google)

$1.17 USD divided by 0.264 = $4.43 USD/gallon.

That’s right. I just paid $4.43 USD for one gallon of gas. Think that’s going to have an impact on my budget this summer? You bet it is. Less room in the budget for “extra” things and a bigger chunk of my budget taken up by necessary things like food and clothing which will inevitably increase in price because of the increase in the price of gas.

What does this have to do with culture? Lots. As families are required to spend more on gas, food and clothing it leaves less space in their budget for involving themselves in culture in a way that costs money – movies, concerts, art galleries, theatre, etc. It will either force people to get creative in how they are spending their “culture” money or they will leave those things behind altogether.

Either way, it’s going to have an impact on the cultural scene in North America this summer. And I can’t say I’m excited about it.

————————————————–

This is my Watercooler Wednesday post. Check out my other posts in this series -
Songwriters Forum
If I Was Commissioner Of The NHL
Worship Leader Magazine Thoughts
Productivity Helper
Oscar Peterson & Count Basie
Fredo Viola – The Sad Song
Absolut Quartet

From my reader

Here are some blog things that have caught my eye recently -

• “Persistence isn’t using the same tactics over and over. That’s just annoying. Persistence is having the same goal over and over.” – Seth Godin
  HT: BabuLife
• “Are You A Worship Environmentalist?” by Stephen Barry
  

  At St. Paul’s, we have an entire ministry dedicated to creating “Sacred Space.” Our “First Impressions” team ensures that people feel welcomed. We believe that environment matters, and that it will either help or hinder people’s worship. We work hard to ensure that it is the former and not the latter.

• Six Questions To Ask Those You Lead at WorshipTrench
  

  1. What DECISIONS do you need from me?
  2. What PROBLEMS are keeping you from your priorities?
  3. What PLANS are you making (which we haven’t discussed)?
  4. What PROGRESS have you made?
  5. On a scale of 1-10, how are your PERSONALLY? Why?
  6. How can I pray for you?

• Prayer Stations (Part 2) by Jim Drake
  

  We had our most participants this year as I believe this has become kind of new tradition for us at Easter. We got great coverage from the local newspaper (front page the day of and a photo piece on Good Friday). This year’s stations conincided with our sermon series on the Miracles of The Crucifixion–The Ninth Hour Sermon Series.

• Carey Nieuwhof blogged about Living Your Question
  

  I so don’t want my life to be about self-indulgence or self-gratification. I want it to be about others and God.

• ParisDailyPhoto has this great shot of Notre Dame at sunset
  

  

   

• Dan Wilt posted this video of Billy Corgan doing some songwriting -

• Brent posted an example of Ingenuity & Pandemonium over at his blog

  So as I am faced with these dilemma’s I will offer them up to all of you to both share the ideas as well as learn from the mistakes. If you have ideas on how I could improve…please let me know.

• Reid Greven has a great post about the “Touring Worship Leader problem…“

  This philosophy also allows us to have no dip in quality if one – or many – people are unavailable to participate on a Sunday. Vacations, sickness, tours and other conflicts or issues become a thing of the past. This applies to all areas of Sunday morning personnel – including staff, not just stage musicians!

  We are also able to book personnel based on OUR needs. If we need a specific ability (the “right” singer for a song, a specific instrument, etc.), we are able to book accordingly. We are not “stuck” with specific, limited personnel.

• Travis has a pretty sweet list of books he’s read this year

We broke ground!

Between our two services on Sunday we officially broke ground for the expansion on our building. If you’ve been around the blog for a while you might remember me talking about BEYOND and how part of what we were doing with that was trying to create some space that could be better used for ministry than the space we have now. It’s been an exciting year and it was great to finally get a shovel in the ground!

The new portion of the building is shown on the right-hand side of this drawing -
our existing building is the left-hand side of what is shown.

It was pretty chilly out there so we did a pretty quick ceremony. One of our elders spoke and reminded people why we were doing this – it’s our vision that God would use our church to “Transform Our Region, Transform Our World” and having the right kind of space for ministry is part of that.

We had people from every age demographic represented – including people who have been part of the church since our current building was built in 1992, replacing our originaly building from the 1890’s. That original building is still standing and is currently owned by another church in town.

The hilight of the ceremony was firing up the Bobcat and actually digging up some of the parking lot. Lots of cheers!

This is part of the new space we’re building which will have
permanent staging and PA and get TONS of use.

Some of you have asked about what kinds of spaces we’re adding to the building. Here’s a quick list -

• North Venue – a mid-sized room (250+) which accommodates several growing ministries and facilitates the running of multiple programs at the same time.
• Mezzanine – a large multi-functional second floor space overlooking the North Venue.
• Youth Lounge – a dedicated room in which our students can “hang out.”
• Children’s Ministry – relocation of our nursery to the main floor, which frees up additional classroom space on the second floor for various kids’ programs.
• Auditorium – improvements to the stage, lighting, projection, and sound in our current auditorium.
• Administration – relocation and expansion of the office space for staff and volunteers

So this is a pretty exciting time for us! We’ve got someone who will be taking pictures as the project progresses so I will post some of those every now and then.

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