Thisway Gallery

Last week I had the chance to visit Thisway Gallery in St. Jacobs, Ontario at the tail end of a great couple days away with some of our staff. We had spent two days together talking, laughing, dreaming, getting to know each other (and our Myers-Briggs uniqueness!) and trying to get a sense of where God is leading us and OBC over the next several years. On our way home, we decided to stop in at this gallery and we were all so glad that we did! The gallery was opened by Derrick Mueller and his son Caleb and is definitely a memorable experience!

Here’s what their website says about Thisway Gallery –

St. Jacobs’ new art showcase, Thisway Gallery, has a fresh take on an abstract world. And it’s exactly what the room needs.

Derrick and Caleb Mueller are pleased to announce the Grand Opening of this new studio and gallery, located in downtown St. Jacobs on 10 Front Street, in the Mill Shed and Studio buildings. This father-and-son endeavour stems from a thirst to promote and pursue the arts: Caleb is a professional graphic designer, recording artist and painter from the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design, while Derrick makes no secret of his love for the pure expression available through abstract art. The gallery is itself an art experience, showcasing original music, multimedia and paintings that flood the senses and satisfy the eye.

We had the opportunity to spend 30 minutes or so with Derrick and hear about his passion for art, the church, leadership and even ministry strategy. As we walked through his gallery and heard about different feelings or emotions he was trying to express through his work, I caught myself thinking about some of the same emotions that come up during different ministry experiences. He talked about certain frustrations or stumbling blocks within organizations and structures and how he wanted his art to reveal those in a new, fresh way to people in a way that would catch them off guard.

As he spoke, some of the things he said sounded very much like some of the things that we as a staff had been talking about and wrestling with during our long discussions the previous two days. Derrick’s willingness to explore new ideas, to try things that people say don’t work, to experiment with new materials or techniques is very impressive and the final result – although probably not for everyone’s taste – is definitely enhanced once you hear the artist’s vision behind the piece.

You can find out more about Thisway Gallery through their website and can even have an online look at some of the artwork they display.

Harvest Oakville – Production Director

My friend Joshua Seller posted some exciting info on his blog. He’s on staff at Harvest Oakville (part of the Harvest Bible Chapel family) and they are looking to hire a full-time production director. If you’re pumped about serving Jesus with your A/V giftedness and equipping others to do the same, you should check this out –

The church I work at (Harvest Bible Chapel) has a new position open that probably comes once in 20 years. Recently our Audio/Video Director resigned to follow a different path God had for him and his family. With that left a immediate position available.
Because we have seen such rapid growth over the past 5 years, it has been a learning curve for everyone. From multiple services, multiple staffing, volunteers, special events, budgets and now the new building campaign we are in the middle of has forced a lot of us to play ball and “do church”, no matter what it takes, for one reason Jesus Christ!

Job Title: Production Director
If you are a Jesus loving, Audio/Video, Production, Creative, Tech Head, Gear Geek, recording guro or know someone who is and has experience in medium to large size churches then please pass this post on to them.

Planning Center Online – new mobile features

I’ve been using Planning Center Online for all of our service planning for a couple of years and it has become an invaluable tool for us in scheduling, learning new songs, communication within our worship ministry, etc etc. These guys built an incredible tool on a great platform when it launched – they listened to their customer base and did it right. Planning Center Online has really become the standard for scheduling and song management for me.

They just announced that they’ve made some changes to their mobile functionality which is pretty intriguing to me. Not only have they released an iPhone/iPod application but the first step in mobile scheduling has arrived. From the app, an administrator can schedule a person for a service and request their participation. I am really hopeful that this is the first step in total mobile functionality for Planning Center Online and being able to do full service scheduling from the mobile site.

If you are looking for a way to manage your songs, volunteers and scheduling you should check out Planning Center Online. They’ve got a free 30-day trial so you can give it a spin and see if it works for you.

Great work, guys! Very impressive.

Willow Arts Green Room – coming to OBC February 19

Willow Arts, a ministry of the Willow Creek Association, is running a one-day training event for artist who serve in the local church. They are calling it “Green Room” and will happen on Friday, February 19, 2010. Orangeville Baptist Church will be one of the satellite host churches for this event and we are pretty excited about doing this. We are looking forward to gathering together artists from our own church and other churches in our region to learn together from Nancy Beach, Francis Chan and others.

You can read a little bit more about the Green Room event over at the Willow Arts website. There will be lots more info coming shortly but if you are part of the worship ministry at OBC, you will want to put that date on your calendar now.

Review: Matt Papa – “Your Kingdom Come”

My review of Matt Papa‘s new CD “Your Kingdom Come” from Centricity Music has gone live over at The Worship Community. Check it out and leave your thoughts.

If you haven’t heard the CD yet, here’s something you might want to check out. Centricity has been kind enough to release the audio, chord chart and teaching video for the song “Open Hands” – very cool.

Download the files here and here’s the video –

Social Media Revolution

Blog – www.chrisfromcanada.com
Facebook – www.facebook.com/chrisvacher
Twitter – @chrisfromcanada

iPhone App For Worship Leaders

A friend of mine is designing the first iPhone/iPod app specifically targeted to worship leaders and is looking for some input from you. Check out the survey and let him know what would be helpful –

Can you help us launch the first iPhone app geared towards worship leaders?

We are just about to go into some expensive design and development,
and we need some insight from our worship leader friends. (forward
this to those you may know lead worship and have an iPhone/iPod

Could you complete a quick survey for us-it shows a stripped down
version of our upcoming iPhone app, and we need your feedback/ideas.

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=VoF0LXQT0mP_2bHdWNDXXUng_3d_3d

You can sign up to receive updates at www.songsuggest.net

Review: Robin Mark – Year of Grace

I’ve posted a review of Robin Mark’s new CD “Year of Grace” over at The Worship Community. Check it out!

If you are interested in buying it, it’s available on iTunes for download now.

Worship: Reverence vs. Relevance

An interesting link popped up in my twitter feed today – LifeWay is putting together a one day event they’re calling “Worship: Reverence vs. Relevance.” They’re bringing together Ed Stetzer and Mike Harland (I don’t know either dude personally but I’m assuming that lots of people will take their opinions on the matter very seriously. I’m familiar with Ed and his work, haven’t heard of Mike) to duke it out on the issue and I’m sure there will be lots of good, biblical insight in the discussion.

Here’s a little blurb from their website describing what the day is about –

Never before in the history of the church has there been as great a divide among pastors about what it means to “worship” in church. Feelings have been hurt, the work of the Gospel has been hindered, hearing aids have been blown and staff members have been fired over controversies that the rest of the world just looks at and folds their arms over. At the heart is the question: do we need worship ministries that are in the world, but not of it, or that are of the world, but not in it? What fulfills the calling of scripture?

If you’re interested, you can register for the webcast which happens on September 1st at 2:00pm CST (I think that’s 3:00 my time?) and it looks like it’s free. I’m intrigued by the topic and look forward to hearing about how it plays out on September 1st.

RVR promo from Darrel Girardier on Vimeo.

Repent. Believe. Follow.

Reminded of the power of those three words again today.

Repent.
Believe.
Follow.

Two Sundays ago, our pastor preached a message that revolved around the call on each of us repent, believe and follow. Repent. Believe. Follow.

Today I heard that a man who was at OBC for that message, who does not speak very much English, understood only those three words. There were only three words from the whole morning that he could understand. Repent. Believe. Follow.

He went home and gave his life to Christ. Awesome.

Repent.
Believe.
Follow.

Building429 & downhere – Ticket Giveaway!

UPDATE: We have a winner! Congratulations to Ami on winning the tickets. I hope your son and his friend have a great time! Thanks to everyone who entered and thanks to random.org for picking the winner –

Two great bands are coming up to Canada for a pretty solid tour and the good people at World Vision Canada want YOU to be there. Lots of tour info is available at www.building429canada.ca so head over to that site to get filled in.

If you’re not familiar with these two bands, here are the quick hilights -

Building 429

• 2005 GMA New Artist of the Year
• Signed to INO Records
• Toured with TobyMac, SonicFlood, TFK, Jeremy Camp, Tree63 and more!
• Latest album “Building429″ released October 17, 2008

downhere

• Juno, Dove and Covenant Award-winning band from Canada (!!!)
• Signed to Centricity Records
• Won 2007 Juno Award (Canada’s version of the Grammy’s) for Contemporary Christian Album of the Year for “Wide Eyed & Mystified”
• Performers of one of my favourite songs of all time, “Great Are You”

So here’s the deal. We’re going to give away one pair of tickets to one of the shows on the tour that these guys are doing together. If you live near one of the cities and are planning to hit the show, then this contest is for you! Here’s how we’ll do this giveaway -

1. Leave a comment on this post and tell me why you’re excited about winning these tickets. Lots of comments are great but it will still only get you one entry in the contest

2. Post about the tour and the contest either on your own blog or twitter – make sure you include a link back to this blog when you are posting! Post a link to your post as a second comment and you’ll get entered TWICE in the contest.

3. The winner will be chosen early on Friday, August 14th – so if you are wanting to go to the first show in Toronto on Saturday, August 15th you will have time to get your tickets worked out.

So leave your comments – good luck!

Worship Confessional – Sunday, August 9, 2009

We began a new series today at OBC where we’ll be spending the new five weeks walking through the book of Psalms – getting a new perspective on what’s written, how it’s written and how we should read the book. The series is affectionately being called our Psummer Psalms Pseries around the office

Here’s our service outline this morning -

Intro Quotes
Sing – Josh Wilson – A
w/ Psalm readings
Forever – Chris Tomlin – G
Hosanna – Paul Baloche – G
Great Is Thy Faithfulness – C -> D
Message/Communion
Jesus You Are Worthy – Brenton Brown – C

We tried something a little different this morning and did a bit of a presentation-type call to worship at the beginning of the service. Right when we hit 10:00, the band began to play “Sing” while the quotes from the post below played through on the screens. When the quotes finished up, we did two verses and choruses of the song before two people came up on stage to read verses from the Psalms which talked about the people of God singing praise to Him.

Shout with joy to God, all the earth!
Sing the glory of his name; make his praise glorious!

Psalm 66:1-2

 

Say to God, “How awesome are your deeds!

So great is your power that your enemies cringe before you.

All the earth bows down to you; they sing praise to you,

They sing praise to your name.”

Psalm 66:3-4

 

Sing to the Lord, you saints of his; praise his holy name.

For his anger lasts only a moment, but his favour lasts a lifetime;

Weeping may remain for a night,
but rejoicing comes in the morning

Psalm 30:4-5

 

Sing praises to God, sing praises;

Sing praises to our King, sing praises.

For God is the King of all the earth

Sing to him a psalm of praise.

Psalm 47:6-7

 

Oh come, let us sing to the Lord

Let us make a joyful noise to the rock of our salvation

Let us come into his presence with thanksgiving

Let us make a joyful noise to him with songs of praise

For the Lord is a great God

And a great King above all gods

Psalm 95:1-4

 

After those verses were read, we did another chorus of “Sing” before asking people to stand and going right into the other songs of the opening set. Again, this was something a little different from what we normally do – there were things in the flow that didn’t go perfect but overall it worked pretty well and was a good opener for our service and our series.

Some other thoughts from this morning –

• Today was the closest we’ve come to losing power on a Sunday morning. A huge thunderstorm rolled through at about 10:30 this morning – lots of thunder, lightning and dark skies outside. Power flickered off and on a few times but the new surge protection gear we installed during last year’s expansion/renovation did the trick this morning! We did lose power on our projectors at one point but they reset themselves and came back online pretty quick.
• Our numbers on Sunday morning have been up significantly last year. I don’t normally make a big deal about numbers on the blog just because they would be HUGE for some churches but they’d also be TINY for some churches. But.. year over year, we are seeing about 40% more people in our building on Sunday morning compared to 2008. We think there’s three reasons for that – it’s just a different crowd of new people who have been coming this year, the weather has had a BIG impact on people not taking holidays and, of course, the economy.
• We did something kind of fun (well, fun for me!) with “Jesus You Are Worthy” – this song is really familiar for our congregation and normally we do it as a medium-tempo song pretty close to how Brenton does it on his CD. During rehearsal we had the idea to bring the tempo waaaayyyy down – about 54 bpm! We really built the bridge – did it once instrumentally out of the second chorus and then three more times with the vocals. By the last time the band was really driving it – pretty different for a song like this but because we were using the song as part of communion it worked really well.
• One other thing we’re doing in this series is we’ve set up easels on the main floor of our building and each week we’re giving people an opportunity to respond to the message by writing words or phrases that express a Psalm-like heart response. At the end of the series we’ll gather these boards and display them on our stage as a community-written Psalm.
• If you were tracking along with Willow Creek Leadership Summit stuff, you might have seen Josh Wilson’s name pop up. I’m so glad to see him getting the exposure that he is – I was introduced to him in February at re:create, heard his song “Sing” a few weeks ago and knew that we would use it for this series. I’ll do a separate post on Josh and his music this week.

Check out more Sunday recaps and confessionals over at Fred’s blog.

Psalms

We began a new series at OBC this morning – we’re spending the next five weeks looking at the book of Psalms and getting a better sense of how we should read this book. I’ll do a full walk through of our service later but for now here are some quotes that we put on our screens to open our morning. Lots of good stuff here.

“Whoever has begun to pray the Psalter earnestly and regularly, will soon take leave of those other, easy, little prayers of their own and say: ‘Au, there is not the juice, the strength, the passion, the fire which I find in the Psalter.’ ” – Luther

“It seems to me also that the psalms are like a mirror. Anyone who recites them sees himself, and all the movements of his own heart and mind.” -St. Athanasius

“I read the Psalms every day, as I have done for years; I know them and love them more than any other book.” -Bonhoeffer

“Words and music did for me what solid, even rigorous, religious argument could never do — they introduced me to God, not belief in God, more an experiential sense of GOD. Over art, literature, girls, my mates, the way in to my spirit was a combination of words and music. As a result, the Book of Psalms always felt open to me.” -Bono

“The world is the theatre of God’s glory.” -Calvin

“The psalmists have season tickets in this theatre. All the Psalms are prayed in it. They pray breathless in awe, laughing and crying, puzzled and dismayed, complaining and believing.” -Eugene Peterson

Release Day Giveaway – Hillsong Live – Faith+Hope+Love

Aug 3rd, 2009 | worship | 23 Comments

UPDATE: We have a winner! Congratulations to Chris Kretzu! Chris – I’ll be in touch and Integrity will get the copy of the CD sent out to you. You can thank random.org for helping you out today.

Hillsong Church in Australia is releasing their new CD today – Faith+Hope+Love. Our friends at Integrity Music have put together a pretty cool giveaway for FIVE people out in blogworld. This Release Day Giveaway is a little different – there are five blogs all running the same giveaway and each site will have a winner who will receive a copy of the new CD.

How do you enter? Each blog owner can make up their own rules but here’s what we’ll do here -

1. Leave a comment on this post and tell me why you’re excited about winning this CD. Lots of comments are great but it will still only get you one entry in the contest

2. Post about the CD and the giveaway either on your own blog or twitter – make sure you include a link back to this blog when you are posting! Post a link to your post as a second comment and you’ll get entered TWICE in the contest.

3. Go ahead and enter on all five blogs if you like but you can only win once. I’ll choose the winner here by 10:00 AM EST tomorrow.

Here are links to the other blogs that are part of this giveaway -

• www.FredMcKinnon.com
• www.RichKirkpatrick.com
• www.JoshuaSeller.com
• www.BrentInWorship.com
• www.ChrisFromCanada.com

Hillsong Live – release day giveaway coming tomorrow!

Aug 2nd, 2009 | asides, worship, youtube | 1 Comment

The new CD from Hillsong called “Faith+Hope+Love” is being released tomorrow and I’ve got a giveaway that you will want to know about! To get you excited for that, here are some videos of a few of the songs that are on the CD – enjoy:

I Will Exalt You – Hillsong from Carlos Whittaker on Vimeo.

Hillsong “Hold Me Now” from Ben Arment on Vimeo.

We Will See Him from Pete Wilson on Vimeo.

Yahweh – Hillsong Faith+Hope+Love from Fred McKinnon on Vimeo.

Worship Confessional – Sunday, August 2, 2009

Aug 2nd, 2009 | textfessional, worship | 8 Comments

This morning at OBC was one of those ones that just makes the thankful that I get to be a part of this. Seriously – great morning with a great bunch of people, both the people service on stage as well as the people who came to be a part of our service.

The first weekend in August is a long weekend in Canada – we have no real reason to celebrate a holiday, so we’ve just called this one a Civic Holiday. That’s pretty awesome in my books! Normally long weekends show a bit of a dip in attendance but our auditorium was JAMMED and the vibe in the room was great. Our pastor, Earl Marshall (blog|twitter) finished our series called “Jesus Neighbourhood” and reminded people that our focus is “repent, believe, follow” and that when this message of Jesus is presented to others there will be some who just don’t get it. But in light of knowing that some will not respond, the call on OUR lives is to continue to “repent, believe, follow” – to persevere in the calling God has given us. Great morning and a great wrap-up to the series.

Here’s what it looked like for us -

Glory In The Highest – Chris Tomlin – A
This Is How We Know – Matt Redman – Bb
Your Name – Paul Baloche – Bb
Announcements/Q&A
Message
I Exalt Thee – E
Be The Centre – Michael Frye – E

Some thoughts from this morning:

• 8:30 call time (which we have during the summer) is way easier than 7:30 call time (which we have the rest of the year). Going back to two services will not be nice for my Saturday night sleep schedule!
• There was incredible energy in the room this morning – it really felt like a community event happening inside our building.
• I’m not sure I remember seeing so many unfamiliar faces – the woman who collects our Connection Cards had quite a pile of them so we’ll see if they were just in town visiting or if they’re people who are exploring OBC.
• When I was in university I attended a great church which was very encouraging to me personally and in my faith journey. The pastor of that church was visiting with us this morning – that was a real privilege. Great to see him & his wife.
• If you raised an eyebrow at “I Exalt Thee” and thought it was an odd song to pull out, you’ll be seeing it show up at more and more churches soon. The folks at Jesus Culture did an updated version of the song on their last record and it’s inspired lots of people to bring it out. Worked really well for us this morning.

All in all, great morning. I love my church and that I get to be a part of the leadership here. So fortunate and know that God is alive and working among us, around us and through us.

—————–
Check out more Sunday morning recaps here.

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