bWsWorld

Every Tuesday I post a list of my top 10 favorite things. This Tuesday is my top 10 churches that inspire me. I though about naming this blog the top 10 churches I steal ideas from but I thought that was taking it too far. If a graphic artist makes graphics for a sermon series at their church those graphics belong to that church. Unless that church freely distributes those graphics I won’t touch them or will I copy them. To me that’s stealing. On the other hand if church has a great idea for a sermon series I will take the idea and make it our own. Not copy it but add our graphics and our media to it. We are a rather small church who’s staff is all bi-vocational (we all work other jobs outside of the church) so we have to find ideas where we can. Meaning I take what is put out there to take and I get inspired by the rest.

1. North Point Community Church- Alpharetta Ga

2. Granger Community Church- Granger Indiana

3. Buckhead Church- Buckhead Ga

4. Elevation Church Charlotte NC

5. Life Church.TV Oklahoma City

6. Oak Leaf Church Cartersville Ga

7. Mountain Lake Cumming Ga

8. New Spring- Anderson SC

9. Journey Church- New York

10. Avalon Church- McDonough Ga

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1. David is amazing consistent as a worship leader with his lyrics. He I can over how he plans to sing the songs and sticks to it every week. It makes the computer techs job so easy and the worship experience so much better.

2. James Greene, who is our new talent on the key board. He has done a great job adding to the music each week he has played.

3. The band always impresses me. Even on a week where they came in cold they still did a good job.

4. Perry Noble is a trip and he know s how to connect with people on their level. If you ever make it to Anderson SC, Make sure to stop by New Spring and hear him speak live.

5. This was the last week of our video series next week Philip will speak on “God is Grace” I am sure he has a lot of pimped up preaching energy he is ready to let loose on you guys.

6. “How great is our God is still one of my favorite worship songs after all of these years.

7. We had a few minor production hiccups that we recovered from but that just means we still have work to do. The production team did a great jobs for me this week.

8. Lots of visitors. Great job to everyone out in the lobby being friendly and comforting. We are doing a great job on Sunday mornings. Keep it up!

9. Never be satisfied Never

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I think I am weird in the fact that I use 4 different browsers depending on what project I working on. When I am social networking I use FireFox and Flock. Never heard of Flock? I suggest you you go to there web site and check them out. Flock is basically Firefox built for social networking. It brings everything together and makes it easy for you to share pictures, videos, blogs on all of your networks. I really like the picture sharing feature! It has a great side bar that links everything together. If you are serious about social networking and want to save time the Flock browser maybe the solution for you!

Features I like about Flock

1. The web Clipboard: Easily Drag and drop text into the clip to save and post somewhere else latter

2. Drag and Drop Pictures: Easy upload photos to services like Flickr and Photobucket from the side bar and then drag and drop them to share with Friends or post to a blog.

3. Side bar that puts it all together: View all of your feeds from one place within your browser while browsing other sites.

There are several other features that you will find useful and time Saving in Flock. Again if Social networking is taking too much effort to keep up with try Flock.

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I love to read blogs! I read them all of the time and when I find a cool one I share it with my friends on Facebook simply using google reader and Facebook’s share tool.

1. Set up a Google reader account and add some feeds to you account

2. Under an article that you like click the share button.

3. On the left hand side of Google reader there is a shared items link click it

4. In the shared item view there is a link to “see your shared items in another window” click it

5. In the new window copy the URL of the new page you created

6. Go to Facebook and sign in. Then go to your profile

7. Under the text box that says “whats on your mind” there is a button that says settings. Click it

8. Then click the option for Blog/RSS

9. Past the link you just copied and click import.

It is that easy! Now you can Share your favorite blogs with your Facebook friends

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This is continued from last week’s Production blog you can read it here

Sometimes I think we think that everyone knows what we know. That everyone thinks how we think. This could not be further from the truth.

Some people don’t know the songs we sing. Some people don’t know who we are singing to. Its is important that we spend the time during the worship service trying to connect people to God. If they don’t know how, who is going to teach them. This can’t be done over 1 week or 1 month or even a year. It is done by consistently communicating the “why” and the “who” of worship. Now I am not a worship leader (and I never will be) but over the past 2 months I have spend a lot of time studying worship leaders from all over via the internet. I have seen many styles but 1 thing that all of the good ones do is communicate. They have a planned clear message on stage. They don’t ramble, they don’t make it up as they go, they have a message and they know exactly what they want to say. They know exactly what they are trying to communicate. Communication in worship is vital to connecting people in worship. I also think it is important how worship leaders communicate. You get up on stage and start using “church words” that only people who have been in church for over 10 years can understand to communicate with people, then you have still not successfully communicated.

The last thing I want to write about here is Presentation. The other week we had a guest band (which was made up of members of our band) Standby (check them out at standbyband.com)and they did a version of old rugged cross that rocked! That is just as much worship to me as singing the hymn out of a hymnal. The plus side of the song was it rocked and it was so well done that it connected with not only Christ followers but with people who had never been to church before. Another thing about presentation to me is it has to be distraction free. If your production team and your worship leader are not in sync with each other it can turn people off. If your lighting guy goes nuts and decides to strobe multicolor light during a slow moment it can be disastrous. If your computer tech does not know the song well enough to follow along or if your worship leader ad libs too much it can be distracting.

Please understand me, I want to see people come to Christ. I think the way we present worship has a huge part in whether or not they feel connected at a church. Some people will not connect at your church and that’s okay. The point is in all we do in our services we have to find a way to connect to people who have yet to develop a relationship with Jesus and yet not get away from worshiping our God. Please let me know what you think.

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Every Tuesday I try to list my top 10 favorite things. I am going to try and be more useful with this portion of my blog. I am going to try and list things that I use that are helpful. So no more top ten favorite movies or TV shows just useful stuff from now on (I hope). Today is my top 10 favorite search sites. Some are specialized some are not.

10. Google Blog Search- Finds me new blogs to read or useful content on obscure blogs

9. Foodieview- Recipe Search engine that I love. Looking for a good recipe try them out.

8. Yahoo- My 3rd back up search engine.

7. Compfight- Flickr search tool that searches not only by content but by tags and other things. It helps me find the photos I need fast.

6. Digg.com- Packed full of interesting links to cool stuff. I can view what my Friends find interesting too, which is always fun!

5. Reddit- See Digg.com

4. Deliscious- See Reddit

3. Twitter- Really great search engine that hasn’t got a lot of Press until now. There is a lot of current info on topics out on twitter and it is easy to find.

2. Bing- New kid on the block and despite it being a Microsoft project I really like it!

1. Google- Old Faithful. I know they want to take over the world blah blah blah, let them so far all they have done is made my web experience better.

Well there you have it. Please let me know if this was useful and what Top 10 list you would like to see!

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1. Another year of being a father. It only gets better!

2. On the Production side: I got some of the robotic lights back and trained Rusty how to use them. They are so much fun and add a lot to the service. I wish I had more but I am thankful for what I have to work with.

3. “Freedom is Here” by Hillsong went off great!

4. Added 2 new band members this week James Greene on the keyboard and our summer intern Daniel McCullers on the electric. I was impressed!

5. I think this is the first time I have ever heard David Collinsworth play the Bass guitar. For our size we are very blessed to have the level of talent in our musicians that we have

6. “God is Father” was amazing and refreshing!

7. Spoke with a guy trying to get his church more savvy in the media presentation world. I love to help people but I am a terrible teacher.

8. Added 2 new volunteers to the Production Team!

9. Next week should be another great week at DP!!!

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I am going to get off topic today for a minute to explain how to link My Blog, Facebook and Twitter. My friend David Collinsworth ask me how to do this yesterday and I thought it would make an interesting blog post. There are several ways to do this my way may or may not be the best way for you.

You will need

1. A blog with an RSS feed

2. A facebook account

3. A twitter Account

Steps are as follows

1. Find the RSS feed of your blog. I use blogger and run it thought feedburner (to keep up with my stats) but where to find your feed will very from site to site.

2. Go to Twitterfeed.com set up an account and then set up your feeds to be updated to twitter.

3. Twitter feed is cool tool that allows you to post all of your Blog post (or any other RSS feed) to twitter. The tweet will include a link back to your Blog.

4. Go to facebook and set up the Twiter app. Allow the twitter app to update your facebook page. Every time you tweet it will show up on your facebook stream.

5. You can also post from the twitter app within Facebook to Twitter.

You can do only do a facebook to twitter conection or just a Blog to twitter connection it is totally up to you. There is also a blog app in facebook where you can link your blog directly to Facebook.

So please let me know if this was helpful at all. If you have any questions please feel free to leave a comment I will answer as soon as possible I am considering doing a Q&A Post on Thursdays so if you have any questions leave a comment and I will consider them for a future post.

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There has been a huge stink about this lately in the bloggosphere. Is it a concert or worship service. Are we there to Entertain people or connect with God? Apparently Sunday morning is either a worship service or a concert. From everything that I read there is no room for middle ground in some people minds. Look my pastor’s heart is for us to be a church that is comfortable enough so that people who have never been to church or people who have been burned by church can come in and feel welcome and connected from the second they step into the door. I also know that he wants to see people who are seasoned followers able to worship their Lord in our services. I know that our Creative Arts Pastor wants to teach new Christ followers how to worship. We are not big enough yet to have more than one service a week, so how do you do all three of those things in one worship service? I think it all has to do with balance, presentation and communication. I pray with my production team before every service and every time I pray that we focus less on what we are doing and more on worshiping God (and hopefully we are good enough to not screw it up). There is nothing wrong (in my opinion) with playing a tasteful main stream song in a service (if it has a point). Even if that point is just to connect with someone. You just have to be sure that it is in the right place in your service. The way I see it you play a secular song or an up beat song first. Get people clapping, having a good time, feeling connected and then you ease them into the slower, more thought provoking songs. That is what I mean by balance. You start with a song that connects with a wide range of people and ease it down form there. So it is not a shock to the system or a complete turn off to those new to your crowd. Let me stop here and say that if everything leading up to that first song is not set up to make the person feel welcome and comfortable then you have already lost the battle, no matter what music you play.

Next week I will discuss what I think about communication and presentation.

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Below is my every Tuesday (sometimes Wed) list of my top 10 favorite things in a particular subject. Today my list consist of my top 10 favorite MAC only apps. I think Most of these are MAC only.

10. Smultron My Text editor of Choice

9. Rootkit Hunter- Find all of your Rootkits easily

8. Camio Browser- Great back-up browser for a MAC

7. App Cleaner- Easy way to remove an application from your MAC completely

6. Font Explorer X- Helps me find, view and test fonts.

5. App Fresh- I never download the updates when I open up a program. App Fresh checks for updates on all of my apps at once and allows me to down them on my time.

4. Name Mangler- Allows me to re-name all the files in a folder at once

3. Under Cover- Basically top notch security for your MAC. Mac.appstorm.com did a great article on it yesterday check it out here.

2. Hand Break- DVD/Video converter. Really great video converter for FREE!

1. POD to MAC- Easily move anyone’s Ipod items to your Itunes.

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