worship team follow-up

So we did two services this morning after the great WT practice on Wednesday, and the services went really well, too. Nice to be back in the groove. I did an Andrew Peterson song for the offertory: Faith to be Strong. I think it was well-received.

worship team stuff

We had our first WT practice in about a month on Wednesday night. It was good to get back to it. I don’t know what was up on Wednesday, whether I turned the monitors up higher than usual, or what, but we sounded really good vocally. Harmonies were tight. Everybody sounded nice and even and balanced. What a nice sound. I’m looking forward to Sunday… hopefully we accomplish something similar then. Hate to leave your best stuff on the bullpen mound in warmups. But the glory goes to God either way.

One of the good things that’s come out of my sickness over Christmas and my efforts to weed out my schedule has been several people coming forward to help out with leading the worship team. For much of the six years I’ve led the team, it’s been hard to line someone up for just the occasional Sunday I had to be gone. (Just a few times a year!) But things are changing. One woman who has attended for a long while and has led worship other places in the past wanted to start participating. So we got her involved. Now the gal who volunteered at a moment’s notice when I was sick back in December has indicated she’d like to be available to fill in from time to time. And then earlier this week our bass player (a phenomenal all-around musician) said he’d really like to lead some services and he could do that playing either the bass or the piano. Praise God for his supply!

I distributed a WT schedule for the next two months that includes me having one Sunday off each month and another Sunday where we are more informal and don’t have a WT. (That was the pastor’s idea, not mine… but I don’t mind it.) We’ll see how it plays out, but I think this is the start of some easing off of my WT load… and that will be very nice.

Noelridge Park Church

So, after months of planning, debating, and voting, we finally have a new name for our church. Formerly Noelridge Baptist Church, we are now Noelridge Park Church. We will be implementing the change as quickly as possible.

I think it’s a good choice. People wanted to keep the Noelridge name. (it’s the name of the surrounding neighborhood.) They had discussed Community or Bible as words to go in the name, but those are so common as to be kind of “blah”. “Park” is good since we’re right across the street from the park, and it also has a bit of a stately feel to it.

I’ve got the domain name registered (www.noelridgeparkchurch.org), and as soon as I can get a few pictures taken we’ll have a new website up. We’re still in need of a logo, so if any of my loyal readers happen to have mad talents with graphic design and want to do some pro bono work, leave a comment and let me know.

It’s fun to see things moving in this direction. I am excited as I look forward to what the Lord will do in the coming months.

The church name is changing!

After months of prayer, planning, and discussion, we took a congregational vote last night of intent to change the church name. The question wasn’t one of voting for a specific new name; rather, in this step, we indicated our decision that we want the name to change. Next up is to pick a specific name. We’ll meet again in a couple weeks to do that.

Our hope in this whole thing is that our church name would not be an impediment to the gospel. I think it’s a good step.

Worship Team changes...

We had our first worship team practice using individual microphones last night.

Currently, we just have one condenser mic on each side of the stage and 3 or 4 people gather around it. The sound quality is terrible. Thanks to Nate Hines who graciously loaned us 4 SM-58’s, we now can practice using individual mics. We’re going to split into two worship teams, each with 3 vocalists and some instrumentalists. The start date is Sept 11, so we’ve got some work to do pretty quickly. I think it’ll turn out OK, though.

Practice last night went about as well as it possibly could have; the singers really noticed how much better things were with handheld mics - better sound, you can hear everybody… good stuff. It was kinda funny - I told Janice “sing louder, we can’t hear you”… and her reply: “I thought if I can hear myself then I’m singing too loud…” Welcome to real sound with monitors! :-) It’ll take some ironing out, but in the end it will be a huge improvement over our current configuration.

nothing is constant except change

It has been one of those summers at church. We had a leadership meeting last night (to review: I am the worship leader and an elder apprentice) where we started through everything… it went all evening. Just a thumbnail sketch:

  1. We’re going to a two service format starting in September. This will of course require extra organization and willingness to change from everyone involved.
  2. We’re eliminating our adult Sunday School classes in favor of 8-week weeknight courses to be held off-campus, at coffeeshops and the like. The goal is to get folks to bring unbelieving friends, and for the unbelievers to have a more comfortable place to come and discuss the Bible. Adult SS attendance has been waning, so it’s a good time to change.
  3. We’re starting up a ministry with a focus on the arts - drama, music, film, etc. Fortunately I’ve managed to stay out of any responsibilities with this one so far. Hope it stays that way - I just don’t have the time.
  4. Our youth pastor is moving from full-time youth pastor to part-time associate pastor. He has sensed a calling away from youth ministry, but wants to stay on somehow, and we want to keep him. To go along with that…
  5. We’re going to hire a new part-time youth pastor. At the moment, our #1 candidate is the senior pastor’s son. We’re hoping this doesn’t cause too much controversy. I think personally he’s the right man for the job.
  6. We’re going to change the name of the church. I’ve talked about this before. We know we should change to remove any hindrance that the word ‘Baptist’ causes… but it’s hard for some of the old-timers to want to change.

I have to remember in the end that ultimately, it’s God’s church, and He will have to work His will in everything we do. He will get done exactly what He wants to get done… we just have to make sure we don’t make hindrances and slip the schedule by months or years. Such is the lesson for today. :-)

What's in a name?

We’re holding some church leadership strategy meetings this summer, and one of the big topics is the proposal that we change the name of our church. It’s a big step - we’ve been Noelridge Baptist Church for almost 50 years. But the times, they are a-changin’. The denomination with which we’re loosely affiliated (Conservative Baptist Int’l, ‘CBI’) has mulled over a name change for the last year or so and settled on WorldVenture. The rationale for the name change is that when you poll the population at large and ask for church-name-type words with bad connotations, right at the top of the list are both “conservative” and “baptist”. Two strikes against you before you even get started. We have discussed it for a while and decided that Baptist has got to go. But what will we change it to?

Our leadership group at these meetings is comprised of eight of us: our four elders (two of whom are the staff pastors), two elder apprentices (of which I am one), the chair of the deacons (my friend Steve), and the chair of the deaconesses (my wife). (Did I mention we’re a little bit involved in our church? :-) ) Anyhow, our group is pretty well split on naming philosophies right now. Our senior pastor (by far the dynamic leader of the group) is in favor of something more seeker-friendly, and is a big fan of something perhaps in Latin that will pique the interest of seekers. (Think of Imago Dei in Portland, for an example.) I think that both of us apprentices and probably the elder chair would go for that.

But then there’s the other side. Steve and John (the youth pastor) and Becky are all on the opposite side, thinking that a “foreign-sounding” name will just turn people off; that they’ll go “huh? what’s that? can’t even pronounce it!” and that’ll be it. John (I love ya’, bro) likes to play the stupid card: “well you guys may be rocket scientists, but I’m just a simple guy and I wouldn’t even know how to spell it if you told it to me…” It drives me nuts sometimes. He’s not that simple. :-) Anyway, their vote would be for something simpler, like “Peace Church” or “Potter’s Clay Community”. Sure, the names are simpler, but to me they don’t inspire the awe or interest that some other type of name would.

So there’s our dilemma. We will be making a change, but to what? Do you, the reader, have any ideas? Here’s the list of everything that was proposed yesterday at our meeting.

  • Peace Church
  • Peace Community
  • All Souls Church
  • All Souls Community Church
  • Last Baptist Church
  • Community of Faith
  • Glory of God Community
  • Image of God Community
  • Potter’s Clay Community
  • Last Chance Church
  • Last Stop Church
  • Noelridge Church
  • Gratia Dei Church
  • Charis Deo Church
  • Pax Dei Community
  • Imago Christi Community

Do any of them strike you as good or bad? I’ll take all of the input I can get.

Mr. Murphy works on Sundays

Mr. Murphy and his dang-blasted law were working busily yesterday. It was certainly one of those mornings.

It started off innocently enough, just another Sunday morning, with its usual hassles. It didn’t really start to go downhill until about 10:15, when I was trying to fit the pastor with the new earpiece microphone. It’s supposed to bend to fit to your ear. It bent just a little, and then… *snap*. It just broke in two. We’re talking a $400 microphone here. It’s still under warranty, so I’m hopefully they’ll replace it. It shouldn’t just snap like that. We switched the pastor to the regular lapel mic and that went OK.

So then I ran back into the sanctuary to hook up the laptop to the new projector (which we used for the first time last week) to show some announcements before the service started and then to run the slides for our song lyrics. First, I couldn’t turn on the projector until Sunday School (which meets in the sanctuary during the summer) was over… and it ran late, didn’t end until 10:28 for a 10:30 service. So finally I turn it on, only to read with with horrified eyes, “NO VIDEO SIGNAL DETECTED”. Arrrgh. No time to debug, gotta switch to plan B. Fortunately the old overhead projector was still sitting in the back of the room, under the coat rack.

Sam was kind enough to grab it for me so I could go start my piano prelude. He also pulled the overheads for the songs we were singing. Becky agreed to run the overheads for me. We got the service started about 5 minutes late. When we finally got to the singing portion, the second song was supposed to be Open the Eyes of my Heart. I’m in my usual tuned-out, eyes-closed mode. After singing the first couple lines, I look up at the screen to see it… blank. I look over at Becky and see a helpless look on her face - Sam had mistakenly pulled the overhead for Open Our Eyes instead of Open the eyes…. I kinda stopped mid-song and apologized. But folks know the song, and were singing pretty well, so we just continued sans lyrics. I think it ended up working OK but I was so dang frustrated it didn’t really matter to me at that point.

I pulled out the ladder afterwards to check out the projector and I still don’t know why it’s not working. I tried a different laptop, but still no signal detected. Today I’m going to try a different monitor cable and see if that’s the issue. There’s not that many links in the chain, so I should be able to localize it…

…oh, and next time, Mr. Murphy? Take Sunday off.

I've been replaced by a machine!

At least for Sunday, that is… I was unable to wrangle up a musician for the Sunday service, so my next option is to record my piano-playing on the electronic keyboard, so they can just play it back on Sunday. How lame is that? (I am humongously opposed to using recorded music in a church service, pretty much just because it can cause so much trouble for anyone who loses their place, it seems artificial, etc. Live accompaniment is always better.) Anyhow, it’s a nice Roland keyboard with a disk drive built in, so I’ll be recording the tracks and then they can play them back live… it’s at least better than recording on audio tape and playing it back. :-)

I’m sure it’ll end up uncoordinated and kind of lame on Sunday, but unfortunately I can’t really help that. We need more musicians!

I need a musician...

…any musician. One of the downsides of being the music leader at a small church is that it’s hard to find a replacement when you’re going to be gone. I have a couple people who are on the usual list to back me up… one guitarist and one pianist. Usually at least one of them will be available. Well, I’m out of town this weekend for my sister’s graduation. The guitarist is also out of town this weekend. The pianist is watching 4 of her grandkids all weekend and doesn’t have the time she needs to practice. Our bass player who might be able to fill in on guitar in a pinch is also out of town. I’m not quite sure what I’m going to do… they may be singing a capella on Sunday.

There’s one other possibility that someone mentioned - a recent attender who is rumored to be a piano teacher. However, I’ve never talked to her about playing for a service, and I’m not sure of her skill level, (or even if she’s actually a piano teacher). So, I’m fairly uncomfortable making a phone call that will go something like this: “Hi, I’m Chris from Noelridge, remember me? I know you haven’t been to church in a couple weeks, but I heard a rumor you might be a piano teacher and so I’m wondering if you’d like to play the piano for church this week and by the way practice is tomorrow night…” Not a real good option in my book. Well, it’ll work out somehow. I will get out of town this weekend.