Sunday Setlist and Recap, January 25, 2009

To continue my participation in Fred McKinnon's Setlist Carnival, where you post your song service setlist for the week and link back to his site with the goal is to see what others are doing in order to help with our own planning and whatnot, here's our setlist for Christian Church of Broomfield for this past week:

10:45 (Contemporary) Service
Here I am Worship (Tim Hughes)
We Bring the Sacrifice of Praise (Kirk Dearman)
You're Worthy of My Praise (Reginald Heber, John Dykes)
Praise Adonai (Paul Baloche)
Here I am to Worship (reprise) (Tim Hughes -communion)
I Will Come and Bow Down (Martin Nystrom -invitation)
Everlasting God (Brenton Brown -closing)

We were short several band members this week, so we made some major changes to our intended set. We orginally had "Let God Arise"(Tomlin), "Father, Spirit, Jesus"(Casting Crowns), and "We Fall Down"(Tomlin) in the set. Those got axed, and "Here I am to Worship" was added. For musicians we had Jeff as leader on acoustic guitar, Robert on synth, and me on (Jeff's) acoustic bass (I wasn't on the schedule at all). Our pianist was sick and didn't show this morning. The scheduled guitar player didn't show at yesterday's rehearsal nor today's service, our normal worship leader was out of town, and there was no drummer scheduled.

The service went well, all things considered. There were a few rough patches: getting into songs was harder than normal because the 2 primary song-starters were out. There were a couple of turns missed, but we compensated well and kept a flow within songs. The starting and transitioning between songs (really the overall flow) of the song service was our biggest concern at our post-service chat.

The post-service chat went well. I led the discussion with my idea from last week, and I think that really encouraged participation. I look forward to chatting with Todd this week. I find myself brimming with hope that we've collectively come to a focal point for improvement. There are so many aspects we could address that nothing really improves. This helps us to point our energies.

Start of a new era

Tomorrow begins a new era in the United States, for better - and worse.

Yes, America needs to move on from the Bush administration. No question about that. Yes, it's great that a minority was elected to the highest office in the land, giving a lot of people a sense of validation and renewed hope. And maybe even some healing.

The expectations, though, are frightening. When people realize, and many never will, that government can't (and shouldn't!) fix everything that's wrong in their lives, the honeymoon will be over.

The current mess we find ourselves in isn't due any one political party or even ideology. It's due to one thing, and one thing only: entitlement. Our culture has so convinced us that we need and deserve a nice house, a nice car, the latest television, the best cellphone, and the nicest clothes We're convinced that if we don't have these things that we don't measure up - and there's an easy way to get the shiny thing that will make us think we've arrived: Credit.

When we ALL stop believing that BS and start living within our means - that's when real change will happen. That's the change that's needed in our economy. Proverbs says "The borrower is slave to the lender." Is it really any wonder what's going on?

There's always an answer to the desires of our heart, but is it right one.

Thanks to Michael Sitarzewski for the inspiration to write this.

Sunday Setlist and Recap, January 18, 2009

To continue my participation in Fred McKinnon's Setlist Carnival, where you post your song service setlist for the week and link back to his site with the goal is to see what others are doing in order to help with our own planning and whatnot, here's our setlist for Christian Church of Broomfield for this past week:

10:45 (Contemporary) Service
The Lord Almighty Reigns (Terry Butler)
Wholly Yours (David Crowder)
Holy, Holy, Holy (Reginald Heber, John Dykes)
You are God Alone (Billy Foote, Cindy Foote)
God of Wonders (Steve Hindalong, Marc Byrd)
Above All (Paul Baloche, Lenny LeBlanc)
I Stand in Awe (Mark Altrogge -communion)
Power of Your Love (Geoff Bullock -invitation)
Awesome God (Rich Mullins -closing)

I ran sound for our first service at 8:00, but again neglected to bring a bulletin home so I could post that setlist. Our DVD player (which we also play CDs with) made some interesting noises, so we'll be looking into that before next week. The music for first service went fine - there were no other issues with sound and the team did a fine job. The only problem I could hear, or rather couldn't, was the organ. See the organ's volume is controlled solely by the organist, it's not connected to the sound system at all - due to voiced speakers, I'm told. I try to stay away from organ discussions, it's something of a sacred cow. It gets played twice a month at hardly-audible levels and is a waste of space and resource, in my opinion.

For second service I played guitar. You'll notice the length of our set..that was a challenge. We cut down songs to make them all fit. I think we should've axed a couple songs instead, and that's something I'll bring up with our leader tomorrow. The performance aspect got off to a bad start because all the instruments and vocalists were muted in the house. The sound tech was distracted with recording, and didn't realize the problem right off. The whole first song was.. missing :) Once that was resolved, the songs went pretty well from a band standpoint.

A significant change was made at the drum set during rehearsal. Working with the drummer, we found a patch in the Roland brain that has a more defined bass and snare drum. That made a big difference in timing and tightness of the band over weeks past, and gives me some hope about our rhythm section, certainly much room for improvement there - but progress happened.

My favorite song this week was "God of Wonders" because I thought we did the best job on it overall. We hit the changes, we hit the tempo, we hit the parts, we hit the breaks. Everyone did, it was beautiful. The only real problem we had was starting "Holy, Holy, Holy". We'd worked out an arrangement during rehearsal, and decided that bass and piano were going to start the song together immediately after we finished "Wholly Yours". It didn't go well because the pianist forgot, and the bass player was waiting on eye contact with pianist to get started. Finally, the bass just started and we were able to get into the song. It tripped up our flow, but we recovered.

We tried something new this week: we held a 10 minute debrief immediately after the service. The purpose is to come up with things that we did good with, and things we can improve upon. As I listened to the discussion, I think I'd like to make sure everyone has a chance to participate, so I'd like to try a format of

- each person say one thing they thought was good about the service that someone else did
- each person say one thing about what they themselves need to improve on
- each person say one thing they think the team needs to improve on

and see how that goes next week. I'm excited about how this went this week and look forward to this being a tool for improvement.

The 2 major things that came out of this were: starting songs, and transitions between songs. Other things I thought of later were the 'too many songs' issue, and quality of sheet music/chord sheets. That issue tripped myself and the bass player up a couple of times this week.

Sunday Setlist and Recap, January 11, 2009

This post is part of Fred McKinnon's Setlist Carnival, where you post your song service setlist for the week and link back to his site with the goal is to see what others are doing in order to help with our own planning and whatnot, here's our setlists for Christian Church of Broomfield for this past week:


10:45 (Contemporary) Service
Hosanna (Baloche/Brown)
How Can I Keep From Singing (Tomlin)
Victory Chant (Fitts)
Bless the Name of Jesus (Carman)
Praise Adonai (Baloche)
Amazing Grace (My Chains Are Gone) (Tomlin -communion)
More Precious than Silver (Deshazo -invitation)
All Hail King Jesus (Moody -closing)

I didn't play this week as a long-lost guitarist decided to show up. I also forgot to bring home my bulletin, so I don't have the first service songs to list this week. If I think of it, I'll try to find one tomorrow night when I'm at the church for the Bethel class.

The band had energy that was lacking this week, due mostly to using a drummer-in-a-box, and Jeff's solid bass playing. There some mix issues, the synth was too loud on a couple of songs, the electric guitar seemed to be missing from a couple of songs, and the piano was too low on one. The bass and vocals sounded great, and Todd's guitar sounded pretty good, too. The overall mix was too quiet

'Hosanna' and 'How Can I Keep From Singing' came off good, due in large part to good drum groove. The electric guitar tone was too distorted and buzzy, and was lacking musically. 'Victory Chant' was fun, but Todd muffed the lyrics a couple of times throwing off the congregation - plus I don't think most realized it was a call-and-response tune. I think Todd was going for a male/female thing, but I don't think most others got that.

'Bless the Name of Jesus' is a great song, and we typically do it with a lack of...something... funk. Today's rendition was probably the best we've done - hope we can improve that one. Praise Adonai came off ok. This song needs some polish, but i think we're doing it pretty well so far. 'Amazing Grace (My Chains are Gone),' one of my favorites, was pretty good, too. This the one where the piano was too low in the mix, and the synth was overpowering it. The singers did the vocals more traditionally, but miss some of the nuance and style that makes this song great.

All-in-all, an improvement and a good experience.

I thought a lot about the drummer versus the drum box this morning, and had a good lunch with Todd after service where we talked about options. We're considering purchasing Abelton Live and using Interactive Worship Live to help take up the load there (among other things). Pretty excited about that.

iPhone - 2 months in

Back in November thanks to a generous employer and an unexpected windfall, we decided to take the plunge get iPhones for Tonia and I. This meant switching cell service from Verizon to AT&T, and also meant that we'd have to get my son a new phone as well.

First off, let me say that I was skeptical about switching to AT&T. At my last job, the company coverage was with AT&T, but since I had my own phone and account already on Verizon, I just kept that. I was always impressed that I had coverage in areas where my coworkers didn't much of the time, but rarely had the opposite occur. I was bummed that the iPhone was only available on AT&T. It also annoyed me to no end that GSM/GPRS/EDGE phones and devices would almost always cause audio interference - that buzzy-poppy sound you hear in your speakers when such a device is near an audio component. Well, I'm happy to report that coverage in my neighborhood (where I use it the most) is much better than Verizon - so much so I wish now I'd switched some time ago! The current 3G technology the phone uses also doesn't cause the interference. Finally, I did need to call AT&T customer service about a billing change, and they were great to deal with. So, woo and yay all around for AT&T so far.

Now to the phone. Wow, it lives up to the hype. It's an amazing device that works well, is easy to use, and has been rock solid. Having come from a Windows Mobile HTC device to a Palm Treo 700p and now to an iPhone - I can say the smartphone market is strong and improving.

The genius of the iPhone isn't that it does web browsing, or that it plays music and video, takes pictures, does text messaging, email and, oh yeah, phone calls, and does them superbly. It's the hardware and apps. The hardware is amazing. I still find myself amazed at what the thing can do. And the couple that with the apps that are coming out in droves, make this thing invaluable. I never dreamed someone could code up something like Decibel - and SPL meter in your PHONE. I do sound occasionally at my Church, and this app has been very helpful. Guitar Toolkit is another. I play guitar, and having a tuner, scale and chord reference, and metronome in such a handy app on my phone, has been so helpful. Finally, I do computer systems work and am oncall a lot as part of my job. Sometimes that can be hindrance to real life - but not anymore. With the iSSH app, I can login to our servers from anywhere at anytime without needing my laptop. What a great thing to have. Not too long ago, I was at a movie with my son. One of our webservers was having fits, and let me know via (silent, of course) text message. I was able to leave the theater, login to our network with my phone, correct the problem, and be back in my seat in 5 minutes.

The drawbacks: there are several things, however, that just boggle the mind. First is text messaging. 2 things about text messaging on the iPhone bother me. First off, the conversational style is great if your use case of text messaging is solely interacting with people. When machines are sending you texts, that style just gets in the way, especially when it comes to deleting messages. If something bad happens, it's not unusual to get several hundred texts in the space of a few minutes when dealing with a systems problem. It's real pain to go back and delete those one at a time. With my Treo, it was 2-click operation. Purge messages, confirm. The other thing about texting is the tones. There's a small set of tones available to set for messaging, and the loudest one doesn't always wake me right away. That's a bad thing when you're responsible for responding to issues in the middle of the night. It boggles the mind that you can't use any tone on the device for any sound event you want.

The next mind-blower is you can't take video with the camera. I can't understand why this feature (which my son's $20 LG does an admirable job of) isn't available on a device of this caliber.

And speaking of pictures and video, the thing doesn't do MMS. Say what? Again, my son's $20 LG does this well, why is this not a feature on the iPhone? My sister-in-law used to send my wife a picture of our niece (who turned 1 yesterday, Happy Birthday, Kenzie!) every week via MMS. Now those messages just disappear. She can't email from her phone, so now we have no way to get our weekly updates on the little one.

Next, there's the lack of Flash. This also boggles the mind. Doing a lot of creative work for my church, I run into flash-based websites all the time. I have to get the laptop out to deal with them, no quick fixes or queries from the phone when comes to Flash sites. I know the tech is there - there's a YouTube app that plays videos...come on already.

Finally, there's the lack of cut/copy/paste functions. This has become a real annoyance for me. If I'm working with someone online troubleshooting something, I can't just copy/paste a command with from my shell to IM or vice-versa. Also, if someone sends you a link in an email that isn't formatted so Mail recognizes - can't copy/paste then correct it. Again, boggles the mind why such a ubiquitous and expected functionality in a GUI OS is missing from the iPhone.

So, all that said, I love the iPhone, and hope these annoyances get resolved sometime soon on my current hardware. It's strengths do outweigh it's weaknesses for me, but I'd still like to see some progress. If it were to get destroyed, I'd replace it in a heartbeat - well it might take a bit longer than a heartbeat, but I currently wouldn't consider anything else currently on the market.

Change: Getting on with it.

I've posted about change several times, and have been thinking about it again lately, perhaps from little different perspective. Death. Several people I know have had to deal with death of loved one in the past few weeks, so the subject has been higher in my consciousness than normal, and has caused me to evaluate my own experiences. My dad died from cancer just over 15 years ago. I still think of him often, almost daily-but the memories are real. Not sad, just real.

Most of us lose someone very close to us in our lifetime. Conventional wisdom says we go through a period of grief, then we move on. We all grieve differently, but the process is basically the same. The 'seven stages of grief' are well-documented. We experience shock and denial, pain and guilt, anger, then depression. We start to turn back, we rebuild, and then we accept what's happened and our life continues.

The grief process is the ultimate study of change. Change in the most extreme form most of us will ever experience. Reality is not a constant, in fact the only constant about the world we live in is it is constantly changing. Death of loved one, or more precisely, someone close to us changes our reality. Forever. They're never coming back to us in this life, and we have to learn how to live in this new reality.

The grief process, then, is more correctly titled the change process. I believe that every change in our lives that we have to process follows this same pattern. The degree of which we experience the emotions will vary depending on many factors in our psyche, and the nature of the change itself.

There are many sources of change, but only 2 types: internal and external. Internal change is the change we desire to make. Like to change a bad habit. This is transformational change, you must let something die in order for this change to occur, thus initiating the change process from within. You make this choice. External change is the change that happens to us from outside. Like the death of loved one, an unexpected job loss, a divorce, and so on. This is change out of our control, but still initiates the change process. Both types change reality.

What's really happening in this process? Behind the scenes of our denial, anger, sadness and acceptance, our psyche recreates our view of the world. Our perceptions are altered. Our core values, beliefs, attitudes, and expectations are reprogrammed to adjust to this new reality. The new facts are used as input, and when the compiler completes, we have our shiny new paradigm through which we operate in the world.

Romans 12:2 "Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind." The context here is changing to be more like Christ, but the process is the same. 'Renewing of your mind' is rewriting that roadmap within which we guide ourselves (credit to M. Scott Peck in 'The Road Less Travelled' for that metaphor). Again Paul writes in Ephesians 4:22-23 "You were taught, with regard to your former way of life, to put off your old self, which is being corrupted by its deceitful desires; to be made new in the attitude of your minds." Paul's metaphor is 'put off your old self' - or toss out that old map. Also, James 1:2-3 says "Consider it pure joy, my brothers, whenever you face trials of many kinds, because you know that the testing of your faith develops perseverance." Change is hard, but purposeful. There are many more biblical examples, but I hope my point is clear with these.

So. Death makes change, reality is in a constant stage of change (irony that I used constant to describe change, eh?). We have to change to match reality, the change process is what gets us there. When someone close to us dies, we don't get 'over' it, we get 'on' with it.

There's more to sport than winning

Mikey and Roy both posted this on their blogs. After reading, I felt compelled to share it as well. Sometimes, we get so caught up in our immediate goals and needs that we lose sight of the bigger picture or purpose. I see this at work, at home, at Church - and here's a great example of sport.

They played the oddest game in high school football history last month down in Grapevine, Texas.

It was Grapevine Faith vs. Gainesville State School and everything about it was upside down. For instance, when Gainesville came out to take the field, the Faith fans made a 40-yard spirit line for them to run through.

Did you hear that? The other team's fans?

Click here to read the full story. Warning, you'll likely need a couple of these:

Sunday Setlist and Recap, January 4, 2009

Getting back to posting. It's been a couple of months - I hope I can be more regular this coming year with my goal being at least a weekly worship recap and setlist.

This post is part of Fred McKinnon's Setlist Carnival, where you post your song service setlist for the week and link back to his site with the goal is to see what others are doing in order to help with our own planning and whatnot, here's our setlists for Christian Church of Broomfield for this past week:

8:00 (Traditional) Service
If Your Heart Keeps Right
I Would Be Like Jesus
Send the Light
Love Divine
I'll Live for Him (communion)
Draw Me Nearer (invitation)
Find Us Faithful (closing)

10:45 (Contemporary) Service
King (Tree 63)
Hallelujah (Your Love is Amazing) (Brenton Brown)
Open the Eyes of My Heart (Paul Baloche)
Your Love, Oh Lord (Third Day)
Nothing Without You (Bebo Norman)
Healer (Michael Guglielmucci -communion)
Draw Me Close (Kelly Carpenter -invitation)
Find Us Faithful (Jon Mohr -closing)

I played bass this week for second service because the guy scheduled for bass didn't show and I felt it more important to have a rhythm section than to have 2 guitars. We also didn't have our pianist, she was out sick this morning. So, our band was Worship Leader on guitar and lead vox, 2 female vocalists doing harmony and lead vox, a synth, drums and bass.

We did ok, but really lacked energy. 'King' rocked, then right after we had announcements and meet and greet time (we call it Hug and Howdy time). As we got into the meat of the set, things just fizzled. I struggled to find a groove with the drums, and I think that was the key. There was no groove to find because the drums were all over the place. Drums are one of our weak spots at the moment.

I continue to just love 'Healer.' It's one my favorite songs. I'm looking forward to getting into the swing of the new year, though. We haven't added any new material since October due to the holidays. I think we're adding 'Mighty to Save' next month, can hardly wait!

2009 - already?

Hard to believe it's been two months since I've posted. A lot has happened in the past 8 or so weeks, many of which really deserve their own posting, so I'll just lightly touch on what's been going on personally and professionally.

Tonia and I celebrated an amazing 9 years of marriage last month. I can't begin to express what that means to me in words. She's the best wife a guy could hope to have. She's put up with me, helped me grow, encouraged me, pushed me, been a great step-mom to my son, and a wonderful manager of our home. I repay her by doing stupid stuff, and for the life of me can't imagine why she chose me.

Nick continues to learn to be a teenager - and I continue to learn how to be the parent of a teenager. We're entering one of the biggest transitions in his life, and our relationship. As such, roles are changing. My job needs to change from being more the coach or manager that gives him direction and instruction, to that of the encourager and cheerleader he needs to help apply the things he's learning in his own life. It's an interesting and challenging time for certain, but a defining time as well. My son is becoming a man.

For me, I continue to struggle to make positive change in my life (details later). It's a daily, sometimes hourly, question whether I'm up or down about life in general. My last physical had some disturbing news about the progression of diabetes. I need to make significant lifestyle changes now, or this disease will kill me sooner rather than later. So it's a constant battle internally to resign myself to the fate of the disease, or to learn how to fight harder.

Professionally, the scope of my job has changed significantly. I'm now in the systems department, focusing primarily on security and PCI/DSS compliance. I welcome the new challenge and hope this process can help our company move forward. It's an exciting time as it feels like we're on the verge of turning a corner. Several things we've been working toward are falling into place, so 2009 should be an exciting year.

The Worship Team is going pretty well. We've made significant progress in the quality of what we do. I LOVE to play, but more than that, playing with a purpose of leading our congregation's hearts and minds into the presence of the Throne is also a great responsibility. I'm honored to be able to participate at several levels from planning, to running sound, to playing instruments.

For goals this year, health has to be top priority. I'll make a detailed list of goals for my next post, I think.

Happy 2009!