If you haven’t read this post yet, you need to. It will make you aware of my new blog schedule. My beautiful wife Tam helped me put a schedule together that will encourage me to write more and stay consistent with it.
So, first and foremost, I need a name for my Monday post. Each Monday, I will recap the weekend at church. I will speak to each aspect of it. The theme, music, tech and anything else I can think of. I am going to attach these to Fred’s great series of posts called Sunday Setlists. So, help me out with a name! Now to the good stuff…
If you are newer to the blog, I am the Worship and Media Pastor for Table Rock Fellowship in a smaller community in Southern Oregon. My weekly responsibilities include everything from service planning to tech team direction, worship leading to IT management. It can get busy, but I love what I get to do.
This weekend was the final week in a series called “Holy Fire”. We are going through the book of 1 Peter. Chapter 1 focused on hope. And this week dealt with finding hope beyond hypocrisy. Hypocrisy, is to believe one way and to live another. To play the part. This is what the life of religion is. Pastor Tom spoke to 3 ways of being freed from a life of hypocrisy or in this case religion.
#1 You hear God’s Word
#2 You experience a new birth
#3 You respond by changing the way you live
My favorite quote of the weekend was “Evidence of new birth, is your desire to change.” And my favorite verses from the weekend were [youversion]Hebrews 12:1-2[/youversion]
Next week we dig into 1 Peter 2 and discuss our Identity in Christ.
The setlist for this weekend was…
(opening Set)
Happy Day by Tim Hughes
All Creatures Of Our God and King – David Crowder version
Beautiful The Blood by Steve Fee
(Offering)
Praise Awaits You by Matt Redman
(Communion)
Never Lose The Wonder by Tim Hughes
(Theme Song)
Holy Fire by Jon Shirley
We closed the service with a simple version of Turn Your Eyes Upon Jesus
Two songs we did this week, we haven’t done for quite a while. Praise Awaits You and Never Lose The Wonder. I really enjoyed both of them, but I did notice that with the growth our church has seen over the last couple of years, both were pretty new songs to the congregation. I didn’t take that into consideration. I guess that’s a good problem. Holy Fire, by Jon Shirley was a song I found when looking for a them song for this series. When I first heard the song, I was sold. Loved it! Worshipful, powerfully dynamic and had a great lyric that really places at the heart, that we want the Spirit to come and change us. We want to be made new. Changed!
Technically, things went fine this weekend. The band missed a couple of cues on Saturday night, but we ironed things out through the Sunday services. I haven’t sung for 2 weeks and have been fighting a cold, so after Saturday’s rehearsal and service, I was fried. Thankfully, I warmed up Sunday AM and was able to make it through just fine. No issues with sound or video. I did notice however, that during our first service today, half the lighting on the vocalists had died. we may have blown a fuse in the dimmer pack. I wasn’t too concerned however, because we don’t have a light show and tend to keep the room fairly dark during music. The light still worked on me, so I left it alone to worry about on Monday.
We have begun streaming our services live. I am really excited about this, because we are asked for this, all the time. We aren’t an internet campus like something you’d see with Newspring or Lifechurch. Many people are sick or traveling and they want to participate in the weekend services. This will allows for that. We haven’t advertised to the church body in general yet, because we are still kind of testing it out. I am using Mogulus right now, but I am finding that Mogulus needs a pretty stable service at about 1.5mbps to work properly for the people watching the service. Our feed to you is fed with a 40mbps service, so we transmit it fine, but it seems to be very glitchy and stutters a lot for those on the other end. I want to find something stable, but also realize that I can’t make it perfect for everyone. Over the next couple of weeks I may try Ustream and see what happens. You, the end user is the one that needs to win in this. So we will make it right. Another aspect of this is that we will be setting up an audio feed soon. Right now it is just the mic off the camera. I am going to rig one of our Aviom units to push audio to the feed. We’ve been running audio for video it this way for any video venues we do on campus and I really like it. If you have any suggestions regarding streaming, let me know.
A final note. As I write out my thoughts from the weekend, I also want to hear from you. What would you like to know. What are you interested in hearing here. Also, I would love to hear about your weekend. You can leave that in the comment or give us a link t your blog if you’ve written about it!