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.

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

This last week has been an easier week, at least it seems. Now that summer is in full effect we do not have a midweek service at Tomoka. It’s nice to have a break for a little while, although the service has been off for a couple of weeks, I have been busy until this week.

As I sit here with a migraine I was thinking I could catch up on my blog, but even though there is plenty to write about from the last few weeks, none of it really feels ‘blog worthy’ right now. Well I have at least accomplished one item I wanted to do today, write a blog post. I can feel accomplishment at that. Maybe some of what I don’t feel is ‘blog worthy’ will become worthy soon..

Thinking about when things go wrong… here’s a video from last year when one of our drummers did fall off the drum platform.

Sometimes it feels like it all goes wrong, as the technical director at TCC I feel responsible for tech related issues, and even though it really doesn’t all go wrong I still get that sinking feeling when stuff is going wrong. I have to admit it I am a perfectionist sometimes (ok a lot of the time), and when it comes to the production of a service I like perfection. But I know that perfection is beyond reach, we will never have a “perfect” service, sometimes lyrics or lights will be late (or early, or wrong), mic cues will be wrong, something will feedback, guitar strings will break or go out of tune, mic stands will fall over, the wrong patch on a keyboard will be played, the drummer will fall off the platform, batteries will go dead, FPL will drop 1 leg of power long enough to cause my projectors and moving lights to have to be reset, (all of this has actually happened at one time or another) basically something will go wrong. I think I sometimes confuse my desire to not be a “distraction” with perfection.

I believe that God has a great sense of humor (He created me….) and every so often I think He just goes “hey watch this, I’m totally gonna mess with them, this going to be so funny!” In our hardest to worship Him and bring others into that same worship, I think we sometimes take ourselves too seriously and we let imperfections affect our worship. Personally how I tend to worship is through what I do, when I am using the talents and gifts given to me in service I am at my best worship at that moment. What I must do, and I find I do much better than I used to as I have grown and matured, is to not let imperfections distract me from my worship of our Creator. So Father I thank you that we are not perfect, cause it’d be a boring world if we were! I pray I can laugh and enjoy it when things seem to “all go wrong” and know You are still God. I will worship you with my talents, my praise and my laughter. You created laughter and I have to let it go and just enjoy the moment.

Well we got 2 of those converter coupons from the federal government, so off to Circuit City yesterday, after a lot of research about the boxes. Picked up the Zenith ones and hooked one up. I must say digital tv looks great, when you get reception… when you get… reception. Right now I think we can get two stations in solid, and one of them isn’t in english… so I’m totally lost watching that channel. Soon I’ll be investing in some sort of outdoor antenna so we can get the Orlando tv stations in. You may be wondering why we just don’t get cable or satellite, well we decided it wasn’t worth the money every month to watch a handful of tv shows. The saga of DTV will continue on for the Stanton’s for some time to come…

Well to add to my level of web two dot oh involvement I have decided to start my blog. Still learning my way around WordPress, but shouldn’t be too hard… I hope. I figure I can use this to give you a glimpse of what is hiding out inside my head, but not too deep of a showing, that could be scary!

So stay tuned and enjoy the ride!