christmas eve attendance....

Have you watched the podcast from the Christmas eve services yet? Don't forget.

We have the offical numbers in for attendance of our ten Christmas eve services.....
8625.

There are some amazing stories flying around this place coming out of Christmas Eve. It is so cool to see how God moves in people's lives. I don't know why, as believers, we are so amazed when He does His stuff... but it's amazing. We keep getting the emails of how the service and everything wrapped around it was beautiful, inspiring and were challenged by it and how God changed lives - I love those emails!

2008 will rock!

12.24.07 Christmas Eve Service Closing

We made it through our ten Christmas Eve services. They were all beautiful. We made tweaks, changes and more tweaks and each services was perfect in it's own way. We hit overflow several times and even hit a record attendance in one of the services....more on that another time.

Programming, music, media and tech (not to mention the whole gobs of other volunteer and staff that worked guest relations, kidz ministry and more) went the distance for an amazing year.

We landed the service with Third Day's King of Glory. Here again, from my digital camera - but it was just way to good live not to post.

Merry Christmas!

12.24.07 Christmas Eve Service Opener

Ok....this is just too good to just post a few pictures of. Here is the song I posted about the other day. Again, off my little digital camera so its not the best of quality - but you should have been there! This does not include any of the art reveal that happened during the song.

What Child Is This

12.23.07 Sunday Morning Christmas Eve Services

9:30 service went great besides three glitches....3! Our 11:30 is going amazing so far. The room is packed. The Loft (our video venue is packed) and there is a crazy energy in the room. I think our 11:30 service is best so far.

No pictures or video today. Plenty will come tomorrow.

Off to do the Christmas Eve before Christmas Eve thing with the in-laws later this afternoon.

12.22.07 A few little known details…

….that you probably don’t care about –but here goes.
For our ten Christmas eve services we have….
31 LED Wall Wash units
9 LED Par Can units
7 Mac 250 Wash
2 Mac250 Entours
10 lekos for gobos
And I don’t even want to know the number of mini lights we are using.

Remember ‘Jesus is the lights of the world!’

We have 63 light cues

We are using 13 trees in the design and over 1,920 feet of luan for our lattice back drop and a total of 19 candles (which is a bit on the low side for us.)

12.22.07 Joy To The World

We showed a video clip called Christmas 101 with elementary school kids telling the story of the birth of Christ. Coming out of it we featured one of our teenagers and our NEW Youth Creative Arts dude on our version of Sufjan Steven’s Joy To The World….another sweet moment.

12.22.07 Opening Song

Service three and four of our ten service marathon have been tweaked and bugged out and running pretty smooth. I think we are a point where we want the service to be and now get to focus executing these next six services with the best we have.

We do the Daniel Kirkley’s version of What Child Is for the service opener of our Christmas Eve service. It is a bit of a mystical flavor to it…it sounded sweet. Over at house left we did this art panel reveal. Preservice we put the panels on the frame and as music begins the panels spin in to place to reveal a little hand holding an adult figure. Kinda sweet.

12.21.07 Offering Music

The band did thier version of Trans Siberian Orchestra's O Come All Ye/ O Holy Night....they kicked it!!!! WOW!

My camera does not do the sound justice.....

12.21.07 Christmas Carols

The ladies aren't named Carol...they were leding them....

O Little Town of Bethlehem

The First Noel

and Away in the Manger

...by the way, thats Ali, Dale and Robin (from left to right).

12.21.07 Worship

O Come All Ye Faithful / Here Is Our King medley (which our music director, Jack Miller, wrote the arrangment....it was killer)

So far so good....

We are about 50 minutes into our first Christmas Eve service....so far so good! Ofcourse, there are a few tweaks we need to make, but thats typical of what we do here at The Crossing.

The room looks awesome, the worship is amazing and Greg is hitting it out of the ballpark. I never knew that bugers and ten dollar bills could be a part of a Christmas Eve message....yup. You will ahve to wait till we get the podcast uploaded to see this.

Pics and video to follow.

Christmas Eve is early for me this year…

I am now counting down to our ten Christmas Eve services that begin tomorrow night at 5:30 at The Crossing. Ten identical services! That means there are about 10,000 available seats over four days that 10,000 people can sit in and be a part of this advent experience and hear the life changing Gospel at a time of the year when non-believers are more apt to attending church. 10,000 seats!. I cannot wait to see what God has in store for us this weekend.

This Christmas season has been so different for me. I have gotten use to prepping and working a number of Christmas events and concerts along with the usual weekend services. This year, I have been able to focus on our weekend services building up to our ten Christmas services. Being able to spend our resources, both personnel and technical on our main weekend services has allowed us to give our design, technical and personal best. And while we have still gone full throttle this season, I still have some physical and mental energy going into Christmas Eve and I am actually looking forward to the services and not dreading or just going through the motions.

As this is my first Christmas eve…oh by the way, because so many people attend the Christmas eve services here at The Crossing, we have to add extra which means we program one service for the weekend and add the number of services needed to get the number of seats for people … which means we have our first Christmas Eve on Friday. Here is the schedule of services …….
Friday December 21 5:30 & 7:30pm
Saturday Dec 22, 4:30 & 6:30pm
Sunday, Dec 23, 9 & 11am
Monday, Dec 24, 1,3,5 & 7pm …..which means I get to get home early and tuck the children into bed!

Now, because this is the first year at The Crossing, I am going to try to do some pic taking, video capturing and blogging during the services to give you a glimpse and taste of what The Eve @ The Crossing is like. Don’t hope for HD video from our new system…it will be captured by my digital camera and I will try to upload and post one of the highlights during each of the ten services.

So let the countdown begin!