Thanks to my beautiful wife I’ve got 3 incredibly beautiful daughters – Avery, Emerson and Isabelle. Our youngest, Isabelle, needs your help on her way to doing a photo session with our friend (and unbelievable photographer, Gillian Gauthier). We’ve been bugging everyone we know to vote for her and now it’s time for me to harass my blog readers!!

So – if you’ve got two seconds to spare, head over here and vote for Isabelle. She would definitely appreciate it! :)

Some great words from James MacDonald on how they put together the closing minutes of their service –

Hillsong United is coming back to play in Toronto on June 6th at Ontario Place & Molson Amphitheatre and people are excited about it – holy smokes! I have been getting tons of web searches landing on my blog with people looking for more info.

Here’s how much I know about the Hillsong event in Toronto -
Saturday, June 6th in Toronto
Artists: Hillsong United, Bluetree, Group1Crew, This Beautiful Republic, Hello Kelly, Turn Off The Stars & Nathan Finochio.

The event is being run by Unite Productions – great guys who do awesome events. You can get more info at their new website – www.uniteinworship.com – or buy tickets directly at iTickets.

UPDATE: Joshua Seller is the worship director at Harvest Bible Chapel in Oakville, ON and let me know about a great offer they’ve got going:

Harvest Bible Chapel in Oakville, ON. is offering a free Front Row ticket to the United Live Concert with the registration for the young adults conference “Ignite” that is taking place that same weeekend in Toronto.

Check them out on facebook “harvest young adults”

Contact Joshua for more info.

I know lots of you use Planning Center but you`re getting worried about the attachments you`re uploading and whether or not you`ve got enough room in your account to keep uploading mp3 attachments for new songs. I`ve come up with a way that will let you buy some time – I`ve been using this solution for a couple of months and so far, so good!

Watch this video – the resolution is good enough that you should be able to fullscreen it and get a better sense of what I`m doing. Sorry I went through it really quick – I`ll be happy to clarify anything if you`ve got questions after trying it yourself.

iTunes – www.itunes.com
Tunebite – www.tunebite.com
Dropbox – www.getdropbox.com
Planning Center Online – www.planningcenteronline.com

There you go. Did you try it? Did it work? Questions?

Justin at Between Two Worlds has posted an incredible collection of recordings from Southern Seminary’s Institute for Christian Worship.

I won’t post the list here – go check out and list and spend some time with some of these recordings. What an incredible resource!! There are more lectures posted on the main site but here’s a list of people linked on Justin’s blog:

• David Peterson – author of “Engaging With God”
• John Frame – this guy’s name came up twice last week in conversations and this is number three!
• Harold Best – very well known and his book “Unceasing Worship” is incredible
• Michael Card
• Keith & Kristyn Getty
• Stuart Townend
• Bob Kauflin
• Kevin Twit
• Jason Harms

What are you waiting for?? Go, go, go!!

Choir isn’t something that we normally do at OBC but I thought we’d change this up a little this year and put together a worship choir for our Easter Sunday services. We opened it up to anyone in grade 6 & up and there’s no requirement on previous singing ability. My gut told me that we would get enough people interested in being a part of this that there would be a solid group of singers who would join our band for the services on that morning.

Well tonight we had our first rehearsal and had 40 – FORTY!! – people come and sing. I know that 40 isn’t a huge choir but for us trying something new it was pretty encouraging. Like I said on twitter tonight, I’m really glad that we decided to do this and I’m really glad that we’ve got five weeks to practice before the big day :)

Thanks to a shipping issue, I wasn’t able to give our choir the actual parts they’re going to be singing but instead I just printed out the hymn charts from CCLI and we ran through those at practice. We rehearsed four songs tonight which will be part of our service -

• Hosanna by Paul Baloche
• Amazing Grace (My Chains Are Gone) by Chris Tomlin
• Revelation Song by Kari Jobe
• Mighty To Save by Hillsong United

We’ll be adding a couple more songs to this list but doing that much was a big chunk for us to chew on tonight – especially ‘Revelation Song’. I told the group when we were done that this is not an easy song and even if we were doing it with one of our bands we would need several weeks of rehearsal to pull it off. I was very encouraged to hear them sing tonight.

So here we go. A new adventure for me and for OBC – we’ll see how this turns out but it will definitely give me some material for blogging over the next several weeks :)

One of the hilights of re:create this year was our eucharist service which was led by Ian Morgan Cron. The whole experience was heightened by the creativity of John Voelz and some others who put together some amazing visuals to help enhance the spirit of worship.

A couple of weeks ago I asked if anyone had photos of what John & his team had put together and the response was great. I’ve received permission from the people who provided these photos that they are able to be shared. If you’d like to download a zip file of all of them, click here.

A few samples of what I’m talking about – beautiful!

If you’ve been involved in worship ministry for any length of time then you have certainly been bombarded with endless promotional material for countless worship conferences that will be “ministry-changing, life-altering, brain-busting” and just plain necessary for your ministry to thrive – or even continue!!

I’m sure you’ve been to more than one conference where you appreciated what was happening but realized immediately that there was just no way that you would be able to bring any of that home or even come close to the kind of production, musical quality, technical wizardry or all around awesomeness that you are witnessing. I know that I have been to that kind of conference and left more depressed and discouraged than anything.

But.. There is good news. It seems like the tide of what conferences are all about is changing. If you’ve been hanging around the blog for long or following me on twitter then you know the kind of impact that re:create has had on my life – both because of the content of the conference and also because of the quality of the relationships which have sprung from it.

I think there is a similar conference that is launching this year that I wanted to tell you about. It’s happening in Little Rock, Arkansas in November and is called Dirt . How awesome is that?? Haha.

Now, don’t let the fact that it’s happening in Arkansas discourage you :) I’ve been following the guys who are doing this for a while and I am sure that it is going to be an incredible time. I just came across the info a few days ago and I’m trying to figure out if I can make it work to get down there.

So check it out – dig around the site a little bit and get a feel for what they’re trying to do. There is some awesome stuff happening and I think this conference is going to be nice breath of fresh air compared to everything else out there.

We are putting the final touches on our building project and stage renovation. I have one piece left in the stage puzzle and that is figuring out some kind of metal truss system for the back wall of our stage. I thought it was a bit complicated to explain in a post so I recorded this quick video.

Let me know if you have any ideas!

Don’t forget – save the daylight this weekend!

HT: LifeChurch