ShaneStanton.com

Reading Tony Morgan’s post this morning titled The New Traditional Church: Music, and was totally blown away by the following statement. “I think the number one reason why rock and pop is the predominant genre of music in churches is this: our worship music has become the new ‘hymns’ of the new traditional church. In other words, we grew up listening to that kind of worship music. Frankly, we’d rather play our ‘hymns’ in our services than consider what style of music might more effectively connect with people who need Jesus.”

I think Tony is right on, we as Christians become so complacent with what has become the norm. Why is it that we are afraid to break out of the box and try to become relevant to the culture we live in? Tony points out that nearly 1/3 of the music sold today on iTunes is either hip-hop/rap or R&B/soul, but playing that in church would make us uncomfortable…

Read more:http://tonymorganlive.com/2009/05/06/the-new-traditional-church-music/

HT:ragamuffinsoul

To get in the Christmas mood, here is the instrumental special preformed last year at Tomoka Christian Church. The audio was recorded to our 24 track digital multitrack each service, we edited the audio taking the best of each of the 7 performances, mixed and produced it in ProTools. Also took video from multiple live recordings and edited to one. There are advantages to them playing with a click for this one.

Prepare Him Room from Tomoka Christian Church on Vimeo.

Gavin was jamming out and dancing to the instrumental rehearsal tonight, had to grab some video. Sorry for the low quality, cell phone cameras are not the greatest.

‘Send Me’ – Live at MHC | Ballard from Mars Hill Church on Vimeo.

Today was spent running down the last of the gremlins in our lighting system after Saturday’s lightning strike. I am happy to say we did not lose our Jands Vista to the lightning as we had feared, after a fun afternoon of tearing apart a light dimmer to replace a bad dimmer, we got to investigate our remaining gremlins. What we found was our hazer was causing problems when it was plugged into the electrical outlet, apparently there is now a ground loop between the lights and it’s ground causing a major problem. We took the time to move it to the one of the circuits our moving lights were on, and problem solved.

We had planned on changing the lighting a little, so we worked on that as well, problem to fix tomorrow is a lack of power on the stage for our par cans… Hopefully we will have it all resolved before tomorrow night, so I can program for the weekend early. I am trying to actually get 2 days off in a row. Won’t that be wonderful!

Florida is known as the lightning capital of the world, but is the lightning capital of North America at least, supposedly Rwanda, Africa is the lightning capital of the world. In my work as a engineer (both broadcast and audio) I have seen lots of lightning damage, even been working at a tower when it was struck by lightning, had a small portion of the energy jump from me to a wire I was holding, through it’s insulation.

This weekend I got to experience it again, Saturday we have 2 worship services at TCC, well about 10 minutes before the 1st service it started to get bad outside, close lightning, power flickering, pouring rain. My boss and I decided to turn off everything, cause it was going off and on anyway.. so we shut down the PA, computers, projectors, and waited for it to pass, which included delaying the first service about 10 minutes.

Once we felt the storm had sufficiently passed we powered everything back up and started trying to get everything back online. First problem our side projectors wouldn’t show video, second problem moving lights were acting strange, third no internet. First problem wouldn’t normally be an issue, we have 3 screens in the front, and the sides only mirror the center screen lyrics and message notes on a Saturday night, but this was not a normal weekend (are any of them really ever normal at TCC?). This weekend our pastor was gone, and because of all the the summer activities there wasn’t another pastor who was there all weekend to fill his shoes. They decided we’d have a video message, so they filmed ‘on location’ at the local jail (went along with the message). I really wanted to have everything be the same as if the pastor was here, so I decided we’d run message notes like normal and show the pastor on the other screens… the screens which were now down. I had a backup plan in place for every possible problem with the video message, except this one. So some patching in the equipment rack while the worship is going and voila one screen no notes, not the end of the world.

Second problem, one moving light is doing really strange things, we doused the lamp and went on with worship, then a second and third mover starts acting up. So, I tell my LD, douse them all and be done with it. Not a huge deal, except mover #1 is randomly moving on it’s own occasionally. Once we are able to, we pull the breakers to them and are just thankful this is the worst. Third problem, internet is down, thankfully not the network, that’s all still up, just the web. Some investigation and we find that not only is the cable modem down, but the router is down, they are not dead, but the ports on each one of them that connects to each other is. Sunday, kept answering the question “I can’t check my email or get to the web, is the internet down?” and then “when will it be back up?” Not only do I have to tell them “yes it’s down” I have to become psychic and predict the exact moment in time when it will be back up and running.

We were able to get our screens back up and running for Sunday, thankfully it was just a video distribution amplifier that got zapped, one phone call and had one on the there before the second service was over Saturday, thanks Nate! I do appreciate dealers who go out of their way to help you in a crisis (however minor). The lighting is another story, Sunday am unveiled new problems which were seemingly solved by reverting to our old light console. Once the services were over though, we discovered we had a ghost in our DMX, since moving lights and dimmers were receiving DMX without the console on, and were doing weird things. I suspect there is a cable issue, and maybe there is a problem with the termination on the line, that will all be the subject of investigation Monday.

Thankfully the weekend went well, other than the issues we had in the tech booth, and it reminded me that I need to have a backup plan for everything, the lightning damage was minimal, we could have lost everything. All in all feel more exhausted from this weekend than normal, I think it was sure to all the stress I felt. Looking forward to two days off in a row this week, thank you July 4th!