This weekend we are celebrating 150 years of ministry as Orangeville Baptist Church. This is not an insignificant event and we are incredibly excited about our celebration.

Our local paper, the Orangeville Banner, ran a story on our church this week. Thanks to the Banner and Chris Halliday for doing a pretty great job at capturing who we are and what we are about. Praise God.

You can read the article over at the Banner’s website but here’s a quick excerpt with quotes from me and our senior pastor, Earl Marshall:

Although the more modern building in Mono features very little in resemblance to the aesthetics of the old church, Vacher said the message, and model, remains the same.

“We’re not the same kind of church we were 150 years ago,” he said. “But what we’re about, the message we live out as a church, is the same.”

As Marshall explained, the church’s success stems from a commitment to two things — preaching a consistent message of hope and faith in God, plus engaging with the community through various social outreach programs.

“We’re not just about what happens here, it is about impacting our community, our whole region actually,” Marshall said. “(The message) hasn’t changed and it is not going to change. How we present it might look a little differently today.”

Ephesians 3:20-21 “Now to him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, for ever and ever! Amen.”

Two historic votes this past weekend up here –

1. On Sunday night, our church voted to move ahead on name change. Lots of churches have done this recently but the thing that makes it unique for us (other than that fact that it’s our church) is that we are getting ready to celebrate our 150th anniversary later this month. It has been incredible to see this group of people willing to give so much in the pursuit of reaching more people for Christ. For us, our name has been a hindrance to that so we are moving to replace the geographic & denominational expectations some people have of our congregation.

2. On Monday we voted for a new government in Canada. We have a different system than in the US – each voter has one ballot, cast for a local member of parliament. The party (we have several, not just two choices) who has the most MPs voted in to office is considered to be the ruling party and the leader becomes prime minister. For the first time in 10+ years Canadians voted in a majority government meaning that more than half the seats in parliament are occupied by a single party. This is significant for us as a country and will have an impact for the next four years.

Interesting to me that these two votes would happen only hours apart. The outcomes of both of these votes will have great impact on me personally and on my family for the next several years.

“A goal without a plan is just a wish.”

I’ve been blogging for about 4 years but have never tied any specific goals related to stats, visitors, posts, pageviews until this month when I was inspired by John Saddington (@tentblogger) to put some short-term goals in place and work to achieve them. I’m happy to say that the goal I put in place for daily visitors to the blog during the month of April was reached! Thanks to everyone who helped give the final push over the last couple of days to make it happen. It was fun seeing people link to my site or retweet me as a way of encouraging others to help me achieve the goal.

So what was the goal?

100+ visitors every day.

And how did we do?

Very well.

A few things to notice -

1. The graph doesn’t show April 1 or 2 – I was busy and not able to grab a screenshot of the stats. Unique visitors on those two days (according to WordPress Stats) were 2,005 and 559.
2. What’s with the massive spike at the beginning of the month? I’ll blog about that next :)
3. April 1 had the highest visitor count – 2,005. April 16 had the lowest – 102.

I don’t know if this is an accurate count or not – I’ve also got StatPress installed which shows MUCH higher visitor counts but some of the numbers from Google Analytics are lower, although they do follow the same trend as the WP Stats. Either way, this is the first time in the history of my blog that I’ve maintained this number of visitors each day.

So thanks to those of you who were part of making this happen. I appreciate the feedback I got on the posts this month and I’ve got some ideas for a couple new series of posts that will hopefully launch soon.

Look for a part two of this post where I’ll talk about two specific strategies I used to help me reach my goal this month.

Someone on twitter was asking about the best tool to use to get photos posted in their tweets. I’ve been using Twitpic for a long time (my first Twitpic was posted on August 23, 2008!) and have come up with a pretty great way of sharing what’s happening around me with people who are following along on twitter.

So what’s my Twitpic tutorial? Here’s my process for taking a photo and having it posted to Twitpic in the way that makes sense for me -

1. Head over to www.twitpic.com and get your account setup. If this is too much of a challenge for you, maybe you shouldn’t read any further :)

2. Once you’re all set up, click on “Settings” and you’ll find your personalized secret Twitpic email address. I’ve blacked out part of my own email address and the PIN but this is what the screen will look like this -

3. Take a photo on your phone. This is me taking a photo of my favourite coffee mug with my iPhone -

4. Open up that photo in your camera roll and send it in an email -

(You can’t really see the photo but that greenish bar just above the keyboard is the top of the photo I’m sending.)

5. For the “To:” address, use your top secret Twitpic email that you discovered a couple of steps ago. I’ve got this in my address book as “twitp” so I only need to type that and my Twitpic email pops up automatically.

6. Type something in the subject line of the email – this will show up in BOTH your tweet and in the photo’s page on Twitpic. I’ve seen other methods of posting photos to Twitter but this is the only way I’ve found where the description of the photo appears in both places – Twitter AND Twitpic. I like that.

7. You can type a description of the photo, describe what you’re doing or just make a funny comment about what people will see when they open the link.

8. Hit send and voila! You are a twitter multimedia master!

Bonus info: I’ve got a Twitpic widget setup on my blog to pull new photos in automatically. You may want to have a look on the right near the bottom of the page and you can see some of the things I’ve been seeing lately.

Links to three interesting articles that I read yesterday -

3. New Bible draws critics of gender-neutral language

2. Keith Getty on Hymn Writing, Worship Leading, and TGC11

1. Facebook Doesn’t Kill Churches, Churches Kill Churches

I’ve got one and he certainly is. This is a photo of me and Spencer on a boat ride together a few summers ago up at my parents’ cottage -

Spencer is a gentle giant. When we got him as a puppy we were told he’d grow to be about 65 pounds. We could handle 65 pounds. Unfortunately 65 pounds came and went fairly quickly and he’s now 95 pounds of strong, playful, fun dog. Spencer is a big boy with lots of energy but he is beautifully tender with our four kids. He loves cuddles and hugs from them, loves to have them chase him around the house, loves it when they give him treats. Our kids love to climb on top of him (they probably think he’s as big as Clifford) and when Spencer has had enough play time with the kids he just gets up and walks away.

Spencer will turn 6 this spring and I can’t imagine what our family would be like without him. He’s our fun-loving boy, my backyard companion, always lying in the most inconvenient spot in the whole house – usually right behind our feet! – but he is a treasure and he makes life fun.

Two videos found their way to me today, both tributes to dogs that have died. Hopefully we’re not going through this with Spencer for a long time but I thought I’d post a little tribute to my pup and share these two videos with you today –

Now I like my coffee and wine as much as the next guy but can we agree that this seems a little unreasonable??

If you are thinking of starting a blog this year, WordPress and the Standard Theme are the first places you should start.

Every now and then I’ll have a worship leader friend ask me about blogging, different platforms and themes. Lots of people are interested in blogging but once you start looking at all of the different options available it quickly becomes overwhelming and most people give up. I started this blog in 2007 with two simple things in mind – to help discipline my thoughts around Sunday morning and to give me a tool to connect with others who are doing the same.

Those are definitely not the only reasons to start blogging but having some kind of purpose when you start out will help you get past that typical “I’ve posted five times and I’m out of stuff to say!” syndrome that hits lots of new bloggers.

So why WordPress? Lots of reasons but the big ones for me are the stability of the platform, the size of the user community and the ability for major customization.

So why Standard Theme? I’m working on a re-design of my blog and I’m mostly impressed by the ability to focus on content and the incredible simplicity of the interface that makes me want to use it. It really is the best mix of simplicity and flexibility that I’ve seen in a theme.

Are you a new blogger? Leave a comment on this post and I’ll check it out. I’m happy to share your new blog with readers here!

Well so far, 2011 is turning out to be alright!

Here are a few significant events from the past year – no real order, just some things that came to mind last night while I was talking with my kids about 2010.

Anderson Christopher Vacher
I realized that I never posted the news on the blog but we welcomed our fourth baby and first son on September 2 this year. Anderson has been an incredible blessing for our family and his big sisters cannot get enough of him. Definitely the biggest event for our family this year.

Gungor concert at re:create
No single event had more impact on me like seeing Gungor as part of the re:create conference in February. Hearing the songs from their album takes me back to that room and brings back many of the emotions and thoughts that were in my head and heart as I sat their listening/watching/experiencing “Beautiful Things” in a room full of my favourite people.

WorshipRises EP release
Spearheading the WorshipRises movement has been a real privilege and it has been amazing to see our dream of developing worship resources for & from the Canadian church actually coming true. We released our first EP this summer – four songs co-written by Canadian worship leaders. It is available on iTunes (USA|Canada) and most other digital music stores.

Len Sweet & Westwinds
My friend John invited me to come and spend a few days with staff from his church, some other friends of theirs and Leonard Sweet. If you are familiar with John, Westwinds and Len Sweet you will realize that there was major brain re-wiring as a result of that experience. I will never read John 20 the same again.

Losing two grandparents
This year both of my grandparents on my dad’s side passed away. This has led to lots of new things in our family including a trip with my brother to France (where they lived) to be with other relatives as we went through my grandparents’ home, worked out details for their estate and just took time to remember and honour the two of them.

Happy new year! Any personal hilights come to mind for you from the past year?

Alright.. a little late on this one but Happy Father’s Day. For the dads there, check out this video from Church on the Move – I’m sure you can relate :)

PS You can get this video and a bunch of other free resources at CotM’s Seeds site.