Enjoy the Spinning Beach Ball of Death!

This video is for MAC lovers and lovers of improvisational mayhem everywhere.  Check out what happened at a recent TED talk!  And all for the love of the spinning beach ball of death.  The next time it pops up, I just might have to smile!

A New Ministry Year is Here!

The summer always gets crazy, but this summer has gone especially fast!  The Worship Center remodel project is coming along and we are excited for the Grand Opening next Sunday.

MUSIC

We also have music auditions next week on Wednesday, August 10 from 6-9 PM.  We want EVERYONE who is gifted and called in music to come AND BRING OTHER BELIEVER ARTIST FRIENDS WITH YOU!  We would love to have at least 40 believer artists serving in the music ministry this coming year!

We will be unveiling a new tiered serving schedule to allow more people to join us and still make sure we’re able to make excellent music to glorify God and help others worship.  It will look like this…

LEVEL #1

• -52 weeks/year with scheduled breaks for vacation for one ministry year (Sept-Sept).
• -This group will be chosen based on gifting and calling and have preference for special music and seasonal productions.

LEVEL #2

• -1 month on/1 month off with no scheduled breaks for one ministry year (Sept-Sept).  Teams will rotate between the Sanctuary and FLC on Sunday mornings.
• -Artists in this tier find their own sub.
• -This group will be chosen based on gifting and calling and have preference for special music and seasonal productions.

LEVEL #3

• -2 weeks on with 1 1/2 months off with no scheduled breaks for one ministry year (Sept-Sept).  Teams will rotate between the Sanctuary and FLC on Sunday mornings.
• -Artists in this Tier will find their own sub.
• -The weeks an artist serves will be selected in advance.  For example, an artist in Tier #3 will serve either the first or second half of the month for one ministry year.
• -Artists in this tier will be placed as other volunteers are available.  For example, it will take two believer artists in Tier #3 to equal one artist in Tier #2.
• -This group will be chosen based on gifting and calling, but will NOT have preference for special music and seasonal productions.

LEVEL #4

• Alternate musician or vocalist.  Serves as need for one ministry year.

Obviously, we would like as many people as possible to serve in Level 1 or Level 2, but having Level 3 and 4 will help us round out the musical bench and get more people into the ministry.  Please be praying how you might serve this year, but especially pray that God will continue to call new believer artists to serve at ECC in Music.

DRAMA

We will be kicking off our ministry year with the Emmanuel Theatre Co. on August 31st in the Worship Center at 6:30.  We would love to have as many dramatists there.  We will be playing some basic theatre games and talking through the season.  This year we will be adapting our performance schedule a little bit to make sure we can do LIVE drama in ALL our venues!  It’s going to be exciting…

TECH

The Tech Ministry is getting a new booth and will be hosting an Open House to check it out this Tuesday night at 8PM in the Worship Center after music rehearsal.  Come join us for a good time of hanging out and getting familiar with our new digs!  See you there!

Proof-reading Your Way Through Worship by Julia Rhodes

One of the challenges as a worship leader working within your own limited abilities and those of amazing volunteers is avoiding typos.  I think we’ve gotten better at this, but after reading this article by Julie Rhodes of Wet Behind the Ears, I realized this might be a more pervasive problem than I realized!

Proofreading your way through worship – by Julia Rhodes

I’ll go ahead and get this out of the way up front: I’m a professional editor. It’s what I get paid to do. So I’ll concede that I’m pretty much a big mouth-breather when it comes to punctuation and plural possessives.

But I’ll bet that even if you’ve got the grammatical sense of Snooki, you too have noticed a glitch in the Matrix on a given Sunday or two. There you are, in a moment of intense worship and reflection, singing along in the aisle of your mega church, holding your chai, reading the lyrics on the big screens line-by-line for comfort and security (because do you REALLY need to be reminded that the phrase is “you are holy” when you’ve just sung it for the eight-thousandth time?), and then all of a sudden WHAM. WHAM! Somebody spelled it “Jesus Chris.” You’ve just been punk’d by spelling. And I don’t mean Tori.

This actually happened at my church a while back. Jesus apparently had two first names, like Kevin James.

And the really awful thing was that the phrase “Jesus Christ” was repeated over and over again like a mantra, except on the screens it was “Jesus Chris,” “Jesus Chris,” which after a while began to sound like all of us were angry with a man named Chris.

It wouldn’t have been so terrible except that the mistake wasn’t corrected until the third service.

I’m sure you’ve been there, too. You’ve experienced the horror of getting mugged in a grammatical alley when all you were trying to do was to connect with God at church. You probably tried to downplay it later with your friends at Wendy’s, like, “Yea, heh, did you catch that ‘your’ in ‘You Are Holy’? I mean, puhleese! Heh.” Painful crickets dying slowly. “So…wanna talk about my aunt’s fungal infection?”

But let’s step back for a moment. I want to give worship service producers the benefit of the doubt. I’ll bet they got those Power Point slides from their 20-something worship pastor who typed them in a hurry the night before while in an intense spiritual reverie.

Plus, shouldn’t we be more interested in the MEANING of the words and not get hung up on adorable little aberrations?

A few points:

1. What Would Jesus Proof?

I’m pretty sure Jesus wouldn’t fashion a whip of cords to drive the sloppy Power Point producer out of the service for demeaning his Father’s house. He has bigger concerns. Like the salvation of all mankind. But I’m sure he wouldn’t be opposed to the correct spelling of “Ebenezer” at Christmastime either, as in “here I raise my Ebenezer,” a phrase that has nothing to do, incidentally, with tiny people named Tim. (This just confuses the yule out of me — another holiday word I don’t understand, and because I don’t understand it will use as a stand-in for swear words when convenient.) But yea. Back to that salvation of all mankind thing.

2. Mr. Essene Monk, I Presume?

The Essenes were guys who transcribed the Scriptures meticulously in caves, and who would burn an entire scroll if they found even one letter off on any given page. A whole scroll. That they had just spent 84 hours penning with a jagged ostrich feather. Let that sink in for a moment. If the Essenes had been in charge of Power Point at your church, the whole building would have been burned to the ground long ago. Multiple, multiple times. I have only one thing to say about this: we Christians used to have standards.

So, what’s the appropriate level of outrage? An important question, a question we love to ask because we evangelicals love us some outrage.

My answer is, I DONT KNOW. Wait, I DON’T no. Wait, I dunno.

Their. Reed it and weap.

What are some crazy screen typos you’ve seen in your worship service lately?

YouVersion LIVE is here…get your group on!

I’ve been waiting for this!  YouVersion, the online bible that combines social networking, finally added a groups feature that allows you to create a group.  Groups can then have events with notes that the whole group can see and comment on.  What an amazing tool to extend the learning and group exerience beyond Sunday morning and into the week.  You can create multiple groups and be a member of multiple groups…your whole church could post follow up thoughts and questions to Sunday’s sermon.  Your small group could connect on a scripture or idea between meetings.  Man, is this cool or WHAT?

Maybe I’m a little too much of a tech/church geek, but this is pushing all my buttons.  What do you think?

Good Tweets!

We’ve finished up here at UBNat. Conf ’09 in Huron, OH and one of the highlights has been exploring the new social media during the sessions.  Actually, I think a number of us had light-bulbs going off in our heads as we realized the power of Twitter in community.  As the tweets were flying, I had a chance to read what other people were thinking about the business at hand.

I have been reading about the phenomenon and how some churches are harnessing social media, specifically Twitter, to communicate and even use during various worship services.  Mars Hill in Seattle and Westwinds in Michigan have embraced it while John Piper and Josh Harris are on record as being against it in worship services but for it in other settings.

The former claim that it’s yet another way to spread the gospel and in a sense bring the un-churched into the experience through their friends who are tweeting content from church.  The later group claim that worship by definition is focused on God and twitter takes us away from that and instead puts the focus on own thoughts and opinions.  I’m not going to weigh in on the debate at this point…I’m going to keep you hanging…

What I’d like to do is include some of the tweets from the conference that I thought were interesting…welcome to Twitter…

eccsam Heading to Huron, OH for #ubconf & looking forward to biking, catching old friends, pool, worship & anything besides the business meeting!

eccdan Off to the pool @ #ubconf. Please have a hot tub. Please have a hot tub!

eccsam Sitting in the business meeting @ #ubconf. Sang “Revelation Song” last night…I keep running into that song…should sing it @emmanuelfw?

eccsam Great worship at #ubconf this morning…Chris Kuntz lead really well with just a guitar and kit. Go Chris!

TimHallman woohoo – we changed the ub constitution! #ubconf

eccsam Almost missed roll call for #ubconf! Yeah…I’m not the only one…”LIke gnats com’in out of a pond” says Matt!

eccsam Almost out of battery…yikes…here at #ubconf but might be offline if I can’t get juice! Getting ready to vote for the new bish!

TimHallman wondering if Phil will get elected… #ubconf

TimHallman Blair’s bragging on HU @ #ubconf – apparently we’re better than Notre Dame! I’ll bet we even have a better football team!

eccsam Blair says, “We have to work on these things” in talking about growing diversity at HU. Amen…will look more like heaven. #ubconf

TimHallman Blair just got blessed by a mighty prayer from Rev. Dalton! #ubconf

eccsam I’m glad someone understands parliamentary procedures here because I don’t. #ubconf

TimHallman #ubconf Luke Fetters always has something interesting to propose – here comes the amendment!

TimHallman #ubconf now we have hundreds and hundreds of people about to share their opinion of a nuanced phrase…

eccsam RT @TimHallman: #ubconf thanks to Dennis Miller for wisely deferring the conversation to later…& thank you for mentioning “LUNCH”!

TimHallman #ubconf Phil Whipple gets the nod! Congrats to our new Bishop!

eccsam “We’ve started a course that is right and proper/pray for me, pray for our church. As God’s people pray, God’s hand moves.” Phil W. #ubconf

eccsam “God’s plan would be that we go ahead and just jump in…” Phil Whipple #ubconf

TimHallman #ubconf people are coming up with all sorts of exceptions to the new “rule” – interesting how complicated reality can be.

timsherman777 #ubconf seriously, let’s stop talking

Eccbob #ubconf I thinking retired pastors should be allowed to vote at National Conference.

Eccbob #ubconf Rethinking . . .

TimHallman #ubconf the phrase “retired minister” is an oxymoron.

Eccbob #ubconf Action vs. Advisory- interesting point.

TimHallman #ubconf Bishop Ramsey is a funny man! Paul Fetters is kind guy. Enuf talk, more action!

TimHallman #ubconf well look at that, the amended motion passed. well done Luke. and now Pat wants to adopt the report as amended. who said no?

eccsam The Bish just used my favorite Paul Cherry phrase…that is one “STICKEY WICKET”! THAT JUST MADE #ubconf FOR ME!

TimHallman #ubconf give it up for our cluster leaders. Pat’s praising the leaders he has poured into. thanks Pat for pouring.

eccsam Oh man, I just had to stand up as a cluster leader at #ubconf and just realized I DIDN’T SEND IN MY LATEST REPORT TO PAT…ARGH!

eccsam Ron Ramsey is like sourdough bread. All crusty on the outside, but all soft on the inside,” Jeff Bleijerveld HA-larious! #ubconf

TimHallman #ubconf we honor our Bishop Sourdough – who fortunately had his hearing aid off. Nice Jeff, real nice. Busted!

eccsam I love to take things out of context…from Missions report “Four containers of drugs…yada, yada…have been gathered” #ubconf

sheetsjason #ubconf Just finished with the business meetting now getting ready for the UB Historical Banquet

eccsam http://twitpic.com/6pezu – My ecc peeps lov’in #ubconf!

WarwickFuller #ubconf session time, I usually don’t listen to people from WV…

TimHallman #ubconf God doesn’t just call you to a church, he calls you to a community

WarwickFuller #ubconf great line “I’ve called you to this community”…

TimHallman #ubconf we must lead at the next level. learning from a church twice our size. what are thinking that is driving their ministry work.

Chriskuntz We must lead at the next level, looking forward not back!!#ubconf

Chriskuntz The last thing we need is another sissy pastor who is ruining the Kingdom of God. #ubconf

WarwickFuller #ubconf don’t be a sissy!

eccsam Do we have a LARGE church mindset or a KINGDOM mindset at ECC? #ubconf

johnpaff @timhallman @eccsam @stevedennie All of us @HU1897 appreciate your twitterization of #ubconf !

TimHallman @johnpaff is twitterization a word? i guess it is now! #ubconf

eccsam Jamaican worship team is PRAISING GOD at #ubconf. First people standing have grey hair and now we’re all up and dancing. Jesu is fo we!

TimHallman #ubconf we love our missionaries. they need our prayers. and cash.

eccsam “We need spiritual vision to know the open door and faith to enter” #ubconf mission video

eccsam “We need to be prepared to embrace the urban centers of the world” YES! #ubconf

TimHallman #ubconf @ancientmaverick well done on the video – inspiring and revealing. thanks. good job.

TimHallman @unitedbrethren “Jeff Bleijerveld is speaking about missions strategy–good stuff most of us have never heard.” yeppers! #ubconf

eccsam “Through the OT we see that God has a vision for reaching the nations and blessing the nations…” Jeff B at #ubconf

TimHallman what are the pockets of America where people have forgotten that they have forgotten God? #ubconf

WarwickFuller #ubconf “addicted to our comfort”

eccsam RT @WarwickFuller: #ubconf “addicted to our comfort”…also known as “affluence-za”

WarwickFuller @eccsam #ubconf lol…

eccsam What would have the most influence? To reach 10 Americans or 1 Pakistani? Thought from Jeff B. at #ubconf

TimHallman is Jeff’s strategic question a fair question? not sure I like it. #ubconf

TimHallman Jeff – call us to become missionaries – make the call, man, make the call!!!!! Do it! #ubconf

eccsam Good morning #ubconf. My heart and mind are at Emmanuel where the service just started. “We exist to give to God & to help others worship”

ancientmaverick Standing ovation for the 53rd Bishop, Ron Ramsay. #ubconf

ancientmaverick Run the race well, but most importantly, FINISH well. #ubconf

ancientmaverick Installation of new Bishop. #ubconf

WarwickFuller Finally, can say I am back home; what a good weekend! Glad to have met some new people at #ubconf, but sorry, guys, not as cute as fam.

unitedbrethren Photos from Sunday of XLR8 will be posted sometime Tuesday. Other info will be posted online. #ubconf

And that’s the overview of UB National Conf via Twitter.  You just saved yourself 3 days of your life and not only got the highlights, but various people’s thoughts and comments.  I’ll continue to play with Twitter because as John Piper has written…

““All things were created through Christ and for Christ” (Colossians 1:16). The world does not know it, but that is why Twitter exists and that’s why I Tweet.

You can follow my twitter world here.

Should we twitter?

I love the new twitter thing and I’ve been trying to get the staff to jump in on it, but even those staffers younger than me aren’t on twitter!  I also keep being reminded of an article I read while back about how the Amish always ask the question, “How will this technology change our community in a positive or negative way?”  Other churches are embracing it full bore like Granger and Mars Hill.  In fact, here’s a video about Mars Hill’s use of twitter!