ProPresenter

ProPresenter is the presentation software we use on Sundays at R2. Essentially everything that's shown on the screens on stage (and in the cafeteria) and all music you hear (that doesnt come from the band) comes through ProPresenter. ProPresenter is honestly the sole reason I switched to a Mac. I've always liked it, but since a crash we had on Sunday and the resulting tech support experience, I have to admit that now I totally love it. Great service, prompt response, and the right answer the first time - for FREE.

Kudos guys.

The Birth of Legend

It's amazing what some people can be talked into.

Cafe Music - January 4th

I'm a little late getting this one posted. Here's the rundown of the cafe music from yesterday's service. Hope you enjoyed it.

iContact - Group 1 Crew
Streetcorner Symphony - Rob Thomas
Give Me Your Eyes - Brandon Heath
Cantaloop (Flip Fantasia) - US3
Let Go - BarlowGirl
Brown Eyed Girl - Van Morrison
Prayer '94 - Bon Jovi
3 Minute Song - Josh Wilson
What a Wonderful World - Art Garfunkle with James Taylor & Paul Simon
On the Radio - Regina Spektor
If I Had $1000000 - Barenaked Ladies
Joy to the World - Three Dog Night

Happy EVOLUTION!!!!!

Been a while since my last blog (I mean, c'mon, it was last year!) but here's why... all my free time as been dumped into this project, a video promoting the goals of our Evolution series - a series that will outline all of 2009 at R2.

This vid took me about 40 hours to produce. This is also the first videos that R2 has produced that's made entirely of R2 generated materials. Everything from the car trip background (notice that it's the drive from I-40 at Windover in GSO all the way to the front doors of SW Guilford) to the text, to even the background music was created by us for this video. I think it's by far our most sophisticated production yet. Hope you enjoy, and more importantly, hope you enjoy 2009 - the year of Evolution!

Cafe Music 12-28

Here's a rundown of the cafe music from today:

Feel Good Inc. - The Gorillaz
Killing the Blues - Robert Plant & Allison Krauss
Babylon II - David Gray
Love Rollercoaster - Red Hot Chili Peppers
Man In the Mirror - Rhymefest/Mark Ronson/Michael Jackson
Triple Skinny - TobyMac
SRV Shuffle - Various Artists
Amazing Grace - Willie Nelson

Cafe Music

So it's December at R2, which means Christmas music in the Cafe. For those interested in what's being played, here's the rundown of the cafe music for December 7th:

So This is Christmas - The Beatles
Baby It's Cold Outside - Ray Charles
You're a Mean One, Mr. Grinch
God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen - Barenaked Ladies & Sarah McGlocklin
Merry Christmas From the Family - Robert Earl Keen
Feliz Navidad - Los Lonely Boys
All I Want for Christmas is You - Mariah Carey
Oh Come Let Us Adore Him - TobyMac

For our countdown we're playing "Prime Audio Soup" by Meat Beat Manifesto.

Hope you enjoyed it!

Legacy

Today Jason spoke on the importance of leaving a legacy - that our dreams aren't realy God dreams, unless they continue on without us. It reminded me of the clip I had seen of Martin Luther King's last speech, given just hours before he was assasinated. Now this is a man who is most famously known for his dream, and who obviously had a firm grasp on his legacy.

Touching God

Sneak peek time. Here's the teaser for our next sermon series "Touching God". It'll debut tomorrow morning and the new series will beging next week, Dec 7th.

Friends

So Jason's message this morning was all about surounding yourself with the right kinds of friends. Not in the exclusive "don't hang out with THOSE kind of people" way, but more in the iron sharpens iron", have people that you can lean on sort of way. For me it was a really timely message, and one that really hit home.

I've been doing a lot of thinking recently about how blessed I am to be surrounded with the people that God has put me around. I'm the only child of a single mother and I don't have any cousins, so all my life my friends have been as close to me as my family. In a very literal sense, my friendships are responsible for where I am today. Let me give you an example:

In the summer before 8th grade, my mom and I moved from Morganton to Statesville and I started going to East Iredell Elementary (they called it elementary, but it was 3rd-8th). I went out for the football team, but since I hadnt played on that team the previous season, I didn't have the seniority of the other 8th graders, so I got last pick of the pads and helmets.

Now lemme tell ya, in 8th grade I was a big boy - the biggest on the team - and the biggest part of me was my GIANT melon. Kids, I'm tellin ya - I had a HUGE head. And to top if off - I had this funky bowl-cut/mullet combo of hair (yeah, I had hair once). I tell you this because by the time it came around for me to pick out a helmet, there werent any left big enough for me. For the first week of pactice I played in was essentially was a yamikah with a punter's facemast on it. It gave me migranes, my chin was getting blown up - I was miserable. It was so bad, I decided to quit the team. When I told my coach, Mr. Johnson, I was quitting he said - no son - you're my starting LT, and if you quit, Jamie Dew will get murdered. So he called up the dad of one of the other guys on our team for a favor. This guy's dad just happened to be Charlie Love, the head coach of North Iredell's football team, and he was kind enough to send down a helmet from the high school for me to wear that season. It was a white helmet (like everyone else's on the team), but it had a red facemask. I stood out, and I loved it.

Now, at that time, the house we were living in was in a kind of no man's land as far as school districts go, so when I graduated from East (pink painted toenails and all) I could choose whether I wanted to be a Greyhound at Statesville HS or a Raider at North Iredell HS. Don't know that I've ever really admitted this before, but I chose North based on one thing alone - that helmet with the red facemask. I felt like I was already a Raider.

Now, that's a long, drawn out (and likely boring) story that I just tell to show how random it was that I ended up meeting the people I did (or at least it seemed random at the time). At North I met people that for the first time were true friends (not just people to play or hang out with) - people I could confide in, have thir back and know they had mine, people I loved. People I still love and know I will love forever. And through these friends I've met other people that have become just as dear to me.

Looking back over the past 15 years or so (man, I'm old) I've had lots of "friends": co-workers, awuaintences, roommates, crushes, drinking buddies... but it's this core of true friends that has gotten me to where I am today. Their encouragement, love, compassion, nagging, help and support have guided me through some pretty rough times: times when I didn't deserve the love they showed me. Like I said, I've never had siblings, but I can't fathom that a person could love a sibling any more than I love these people. Don't get me wrong, I love my family so incredibly much, but I can honestly say that I have many friends that I love just as much.

One of those people I met my first year at North was Kelley Turner. When Kelley married Jason Goins, I gained another dear friend. One day Jason and Kelley decided to invite me to come to their church in High Point. I was in a place where I had fallen out of church and was honestly just wandering through life with no real purpose - but they didn't give up on me. After a few weeks of their asking, I finally gave in. Jason and Kelley were so excited about their youth group there, and one of the first few Sundays I was there, the pastor got up and told the congregation that they were looking for some volunteers. I didn't know what it was at the time, but I heard God's voice that day, and He told me to step up and help.

It was in those youth group meetings that I met some of the other great people who I now consider dear friends. And when Jason started telling me about his vision for a new church, I think it was my involvement with that youth group that got him to ask me to come along. Several months later on a Saturday night at the Chop House, I feel like I really became a part of something special. R2 is now nearing becoming a year old - and I feel so blessed to be surrounded by so many wonderful, strong, kind, giving and spiritual people that I can call friends. I'm at the same time humbled to be with them and supported by them. I feel like I truely am standing on the shoulders of giants.

The thing I love so much about surrounding yourself with these true, dear friends is that they always multiply. A few become many, and as these groups of friends become communities, everyone in them reaps the benefit. It gets better all the time.

I know this has been by far my most long winded entry, but it's probably because it's something that so important to me. I can't express enough how much God has blessed me by putting the network of friends around me that I have. The example I gave was the people at R2, but there are other networks of people I have the same level of love for: My dear friends from The Cullowhee Experience, the LA girls I met through Lisa and Carrie, and of course the girls of Davis 104, among others. I know I don't say it as much as I should, but I love you all more than I'll ever be able to show.

Food Drive Promo Video

Here's a special gift to anyone who's bored enough to be checking my blog at 12:20 am on Saturday Night. Here's a video we shot as a promo for our food drive for R2 in November. Nick, Marty, Jace and I went to a local Food Lion and went all guerilla sytle, so the rough cuts are intentional. hope you enjoy!

Choices

So I'm kicking back at the house of some friends from R2 and mom is talking to her child about what he learned in the children's ministry (Destiny Drive) this morning - and reading along with the handy dandy ciriculum "cheat sheet" that she got from the teacher. He said, "We learned about promises, and when people make promises, you can either choose to believe them or not. And God promises us that He loves us and that he'll give us eternal life, but we choose whether we want to believe that, too."

I know that a big criticism of people who don't believe is that Christians only believe because they were raised that way and have no choice. I think it's really really cool that even at such a young age that we're teaching our kids that believing is a choice that we make.

One of the many reasons I love R2.

Reflections

I've got a surprise for all of you in R2 land tonight...   we've got a little something special whipped up for this coming Sunday.  We call it "Reflections".  I won't tell you what it is, but I can assure you it's not to be missed.  It's not like anything you've seen before at R2 (and certainly something I've never seen or heard of at another church).  

Anyway, to celebrate, I'm going to give you a sneak peek at the logo we created for it.  It's a smidge cliche, but we wanted something simpler that a lot of the things we've been doing recently.  It's pretty "stripped down" (although not as stripped down as Jace was last sunday) while still being a little elegant.

Hope you enjoy, and I'd love to hear your thoughts.

"Beyond" Preview

Tomorrow starts R2's new sermon series, "Beyond" which is all about dreams.  Here's a sneak peak at the cover of the worship guide which uses the imagry of the open door, something we're using throughout the materials for this series.

Be sure to check it out in the morning and be sure to bring someone.

For Future Reference: R2's "Digital Assets"

I just finished organizing all of R2's "digital assets" on a new external hard drive.  By digital assets I mean all the images, videos, music, etc we've either created, assembled or bought to enhance the R2 worship experience.  These things may end up being shown on the screens, printed as signs or worship guides or even end up as t-shirts (shameless plug time: visit the R2Online Merch Table ).  No doubt there are churches out there with servers full of this kind of stuff, but since we're just getting started our assets take up a measly 22.4 GB.  It'll be interesting one day in the future to look back and remember our humble beginnings.

Along those same lines, here's a rundown of the equipment we use to make the Sunday Worship Experiences happen:

To run the screens and the cafe monitor (21", running on the same feed as the main screens), edit video and a few other things we're using a MacBook 3.1 with 2.2 Core Duo Processor and 2GB of RAM.   The software we use is ProPresenter 3 to run screens and sound, Photoshop Elements 4 to create images, iMovie and Final Cut Express to create images, and a little help from Live Type.  I'm sure there's better applications out there, but right now with our budget and skill set, we're making due with these.

Most of our content is assembled/created on my personal Dell desktop running Windows XP with a 3.sGHZ Core Duo processor with 4 GB RAM.  On it I'm running Photoshop Elements 5 (in which I create slide shows with the Organizer function).  Again, I'm sure one day not too far down the road I'll look back and laugh at how unsophisticated and cheesy all the things I'm doing now are, but for the time being, I'm going to enjoy learning on the fly.