"Books, Movie Clips, and Planning Sheets" - a most eclectic title to a blog post, but it best describes my day yesterday - a day that started early and didn't finish until 8:30 last night. I didn't even stop for supper - Mary Kay said she could see I was "in a zone" and didn't want to disturb me. I suppose after 31 years together, she knows me pretty well.
First, let me tell you about the books. Steve Thoman, one of our leaders, came up with this great idea for a Church Requel mobile bookstore. We purchased and Steve assembled a four-sided, black metal, book display case on wheels. We'll be able to roll it out into our lobby on Sunday nights.
Our first thought was that it would be a great place to display our past sermon series on CD. But when we put up the sermon CD kits on the display, it was obvious that we needed lots more resources.
So yesterday I sat down at the Amazon storefront and thought through all the important books in my own life. We ordered 25 different books, including several Bibles, a Bible handbook, and many Christian discipleship and Christian living titles. The cost was over $300. I kept telling myself that we would eventually recoup this from people buying the books. And I thought of the joy and growth that our parishioners would be able to experience as a result of reading this outstanding works.
I showed the list to my youngest daughter, Jillian, thinking it would be good to get both a younger perspective as well as a female perspective. I'm so glad I did. She gave me 5 more titles I hadn't thought about. (What would a Christian bookstore be without Brennan Manning's Ragamuffin Gospel?)
After working on the weekend program I began working on the
July Planning Sheets - a job that would take another seven hours. Nate Williams, our worship leader, and I have been working on trying to get ahead in our thinking and planning. I know this begins with me and getting my sermon outlines together weeks ahead of time. This, in theory, would give Nate time to think through the music that we will use in our services.
Nate has done a really great job of organizing the Music Ministry group in our Online Community. We have a dozen people now who are part of the Praise Team. They can now log in to their online group and see their worship music schedules - both the songs as well as who is scheduled for the weekend - for the next four weeks. Not only that, but Nate has embedded YouTube videos of each song so that musicians know the arrangements. In many cases Nate and Dave Johnson - another one of our guitarists - have recorded and uploaded their own videos complete with special chord instructions! (Check out the RequelPractice channel on YouTube!)
So what, you may ask, took me seven hours yesterday? I took Nate's online work and my sermon outlines and wrote out our sermon planning sheet - as best I could think it through - for each of the 4 weekend services in July. Along the way I emailed people asking them if they would like to participate in various ways on the tech team, praying, and reading Scripture. And now each service is pre-programmed into our ProPresenter software, the program we use for all the video and some of the audio for our services.
I also went shopping for our videos. One of my resource websites is the awesome Worship House Media store. I'm not sure how many people know about this, but every three or four weeks Collide Magazine and Worship House partner up to create a video podcast, and near the end they provide a discount code - usually 30% off! Needless to say, I watch this video podcast faithfully and write down the code. It can only be used once. So, the more I can plan ahead our video needs, the more our church can save. Yesterday this code was worth $23 to us!
By the time I turned off the computer I had exhausted my brain cells and was really hungry! But I felt like we were more on top of things than we've been for a very long time. This is a great feeling since we're just one week into our new location. So much of my time and effort this past month has been focused on the move. It was wonderful to get back to the creative side of my pastoral job.
