live to tell.....

For them I sanctify myself, that they too may be truly sanctified.

"My prayer is not for them alone. I pray also for those who will
believe in me through their message, that all of them may be one, Father, just
as you are in me and I am in you. May they also be in us so that the world may
believe that you have sent me."
John 17:19-21

leadership training....

Leadership training seems to be the theme of my week starting after Labor Day weekend.

I will be kicking off the new ministry year with a Tech Team Leadership meeting. We will be gathering our volunteer and paid leaders on Tuesday, September 8th to share vision, discuss the upcoming launch of the multi-site campus, Christmas, team structure and for us to brainstorm some other team issues.

On 09/09/09, I will be watching over 75 church leaders share their passion during The Nines The theme? "If you had nine minutes to talk one-on-one with thousands of church leaders, what is the one thing that you would tell them? The result is a series of passionate and personal messages that will help you and your church navigate into the future."

I will finish up the week attending The Forum, Life Church's leadership conference featuring twelve dynamic leaders in our culture.

These two leadership training opportunities happen online and are FREE. Yup, almost 100 leaders speaking into your life and sharpening your leadership gifts from the comfort of your location for the price of $0.00. I can not wait for this week....spending it with my tech leadership team and then the three days of some of the best leaders around.

As I type this, I am in an email conversation with leadership @wcrossing about how we set up an area within our church that staff and lay leaders can come be a part of both online events...it makes it even better.

Will you be attending?

authentic worship production....

It seems we are at the beginning of another shift in church technology. The cause of this shift stems for the desire in churches across the country to move from production focused to authenticity based experiences in their services. That doesn’t mean that the production aspect is less quality, it just becomes less showy or ‘ta-da’ and more solid in expressing that authenticity. It takes vision and sensitivity to accomplish that…and a lot of hard work.

Agree? Disagree? Join the converstion...

TechWear...

Because we know that our volunteers are the fuel that allows us to pull off our services each week at @wcrossing we take priority in showing and saying our appreciation. One way we wanted to do that is to give each Tech and Design team volunteer a small token of appreciation. Here is an image of the Tech Tee that each volunteer will receieve as a gift from our volunteer Team Leads and myself.


So if you are one of the @wcrossing Technical or Design team volunteers and have not yet received information on how to receive your free thank you gift, please email me.

random stuff with lots of links....

A week or two ago LV Hanson from Catalyst swung by @wcrossing and hung out for a few chatting with some of the team. It was fun to be reminded why I love this place. Afterwards, Randall and Andy continued the conversation about how we deal with conflict and gossip with LV on video. Watch it here.

A few days ago, it was announced that a new book entitled ADVENT CONSPIRACY will be out around the first of October. Written by the three pastors that started the revolution that provides a lifetime of clean water in third-world countries, this book will tap the life changing passion that flows out of giving differently. The vision of @wcrossing lead pastor Greg Holder, Rick McKinley and Chris Seay is becoming a world wide initative – find out more about it here. Pre-order the book here.

Coming to @wcrossing on October 9, 2009… Donald Miller. Don is the author of Blue Like Jazz, Searching for God Knows What, To Own a Dragon, A Million Miles…, and a few more. Catch up on Donald before he gets here by reading his blog. I'm sure more info on his appearance here will follow.

peeking into worship rehearsal....

Just took a look at the recording of our rehearsal this past weekend at @wcrossing that I captured on Twitcam. Even though we were using a MacBook cam and mic to record it about sixty feet away from the stage, you still had a good representation of what was going on during the rehearsal.

The audio was a little crispy at times, you heard some wrong notes, missed visual cues, lights cues getting fixed and could even hear the chatter in the tech booth but it was our rehearsal for the weekend services and true to how it all happens.

When we went live over twenty viewers stuck around for a while to get their sneak peek on an impromptu opportunity. Our weekend service rehearsal and run-throughs are pretty closed door. But this twelve minutes invited my small world (which domino into many other small worlds) to view something that we keep kind of private. I was surprised when a fellow staff member mentioned it today and said he really liked the idea of us doing that more often. At first, I thought 'no way'. But as I have been chewing through the day, I think I agree.

Because staff and volunteers are passionate about getting to communicate and the standard we hold ourselves to, like many other churches, we can be associated with slick productions. We want to give our best and we work even harder to make sure our presentation of the service is not 'productiony' or have a 'ta-da factor'. We hope that our worship and message and everything wrapped up in that seventy five minutes is presented in an authentic, conversational, biblical centered way. But, we still have those that think we are slick at what we do.

I think an opportunity to watch a rehearsal would help the persona. The amount time and effort given, even before the call time on to the end of rehearsal just to get to the first service is humbling. For some to see what goes on in those few hours, the mistakes, the missed cues, the tweaks and fixes would give an authentic insight.

Do you think it's worth it?

video drops....

The Video drops we created for this past weekend services at @wcrossing were pretty easy and gave us the visual punch I was hoping for. While we do a lot of enviormental and creative projection, it was the first time we did it like this.

We flew three 60 inch wide verticle drops of 50# pound white paper. Got the paper from a school supply store and seemed to be the perfect weight and size for this application in our room.
We set three of our Eiki EIP-5000 projectors focused for each of the drops. We found that one of the projectors could cover to of the drops so we went from needing four projectors to accomplish the Video Drops and some other projection effects down to three. It was all easy from there. We connected the two projectors up to the Matrox Triple Head 2 Go 'Digital Edition'. While we didnt need the full potential of the Matrox T2G unit because we were only using the 2 projectors for the Drops I wanted to go ahead and put it to use since it was a new toy for us. We ran the projectors through the Matrox with a Mac Book Pro running ProPresenter.

That was fun for me, just for the simple fact that we have been locking up three Macs to do the same thing. This $300 device is freeing up several thousand dollars of computers.

Our content creator then came in connected his laptop up to each projector and masked out the area we did not to project on. We took the motion loops we used (most of them we get through Worship House Media) for the weekend and cut them into thirds and centered them up in the unmasked part and created a 3072x768 file and played back in ProPresenter.

Here are some pics from the weekend services.... oh, yea - everything else in the service was pretty amazing, the video drops were just icing on the cake!