Monday, May 8, 2006

regional conference

heading down to cincinnati for the vineyard great lakes regional conference tomorrow. really looking forward to it.

experimented with motion backgrounds behind the song lyrics during worship at church yesterday. curious to see if it helped people worship, or if it was experienced as distracting/showy. it sure was easy to experience God's presence during worship, but i don't know if had anything to do with the multimedia, since the worship team was really in a groove. rarely get feedback on anything, so i'm not optimistic anyone will actually say anything voluntarily. i'll have to do a little investigating, i suppose.

also, going to see a chiropractor today; see if maybe some relief for head pain is available. should be interesting.

had batting practice for softball yesterday. while pitching, took one to the radius. can still see the stictches imprinted on my forearm. should leave a nice bruise, but nothing lasting, i'm sure.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

i will voluntarily give my opinion - since you asked (: (is that really volunteering???)

i will second the motion that the worship team rocked yesterday and i just thought in general the worship was really great.

my personal preference is not the background images during worship. i liked some of them - and i think i would like it if it was more still and not changing so frequently.....i especially did not like the outerspace ones (i feel that those might fall under your category of showy) - i thought it was nice even when the words were just on the screen with a black background instead of the normal - that looked cool! anyways just my humble opinion (:

Anonymous said...

Hi Jesse,

This is a bit off topic, but I hope an ok place to ask a question.

I've just discovered this movement called the "emerging-missional church". At least in language there seems a lot of common ground with Milan VCF.

What are you thoughts on this movement? Do you consider yourself a part of it? What's good about it? What's bad about it? Appreciate your thoughts.

Pete VW

Anonymous said...

Hi Jesse:

Since you asked...

I liked most of the backgrounds with the worship. The nature scenes were beautiful and was a good alternative to worshipping outside (my favorite place!). I have to agree with Amy, however, the outer space scenes reminded me of Starwars. I kept expecting the words of the song to be "...in a galaxy far, far away..."

So, if you're taking a poll my vote is to keep the moving scenes. I liked them.

Amy L...the other one :)

Anonymous said...

Amy, thanks for the worship background feedback! yeah, i think the rain one maybe worked best, as it was the most subtle. the stars one was supposed to be all about "turn your ear to heaven..." but maybe it didn't quite work :) we'll experiment with some more subtle ones, too, and see how those work.

Pete, i'd be flattered in the emergent missional church conversation considered our church a part of it. i'd be just as happy if others just saw us as a church being faithful to Jesus. in terms of thoughts about the movement, that's (as you'll discover if you continue exploring) probably too large a question to anwer, mainly because it's so loosely defined and diverse and "emerging". but i find many of the ideas and passions of people who identify with the emergent-missional church to be inspiring, challenging, and admirable. see Rob Bell's "Velvet Elvis", Donald Miller's "Blue Like Jazz", Brian McLaren's "A Generous Orthodoxy" (or his trilogy, "A New Kind of Christian", "The Story We Find Ourselves In", and "The Word after the Last Word"), and Dallas Willard's "Divine Conspiracy" for books that many in the emergent missional community would be engaging in conversation about. for a voice that is challenging both the emergent missional community and the more established church community to engage deeply in a fresh way with the coherent, whole message of the new testament, read N.T. Wright, a theologian who has been especially influential in shaping the language i use.