The youth that prepared the PowerPoint presentation had a previous engagement so I ran the presentation on Sunday. Once again there were pictures of the renovation to add to the presentation so that they could the congregation could be kept up to date on the progress. I think that it is a great idea to keep everyone informed, I just wish that I did not have to get the pictures in the presentation 10 minutes before the service started. I guess I will just have to get there sooner.

We had another guest speaker on Sunday, keeping with the "Getting to Know our Neighbours in Christ" theme while our minister is taking a well deserved vacation. The speaker was from Youth With A Mission (YWAM) Victoria. He had spoken at the Friday rally of Love Your City, and he covered some of the same material (the new Church paradigm) that he did at the rally. I do think it was good for those who were not at the Love Your City rally to hear his remarks.

One thing that just struck me is that I did not realize until just now how difficult it is to get into the flow of things when you sing a song then you sit down and then you stand up and sing another song. I am beginning to see the merit of stringing songs together to really get into the flow of things.

God Bless You!

I have been sitting in front of the computer for the last hour trying to come up with something to write. I was going to write about the fact that I have been finding myself wanting to go back to New Life Community Fellowship. Which of course brought forth the question of why. I obviously liked the service; but is it because the format and content appealed to me or is it because I had no part to play in the service save the part of a person attending the service? That is a question to which I will have to give some serious thought.

If it is the format, I seem to remember that our minister is willing to move towards something similar - I think. I say I think because, as I mentioned in my last entry, I seem to have blocked most of that conversation from my mind.

God Bless You!

Despite the heat, the service this morning at New Life Community Fellowship was very interesting and I enjoyed it very much.

Our guide called ahead of time to let us know he was delivering the message this morning and could not show us the audio-video system at work during the service. We decided to go ahead anyway. He was able to give us a quick run through before the service and then answered any questions we had afterwards. That gave us quite a few ideas that we will be going over in the next few days and weeks.

Our minister outlined a possible way for the church service to proceed in the fall, but I guess my inner child was doing his "lalalalalalala" posturing as I seem to have forgotten most of it. I will have to ask for a rerun...

God Bless You!

Update: changed having forgiven to have forgotten in the last paragraph - now that should make sense...

Tomorrow should be an interesting experience. I have agreed to go with our vacationing minister to visit New Life Community Fellowship. One of their members did the video for the last two years, and he also did the sound set up for that church. We are going to see what their sound set up is like. We are also going to stay for the service; that is the part that should be interesting as I have not really been to any other church for worship (except for Christmas and Love Your City) since I joined Esquimalt United Church over 16 years ago. I therefore do not have much of an idea as to what to expect, although the fact that they are a Charismatic church does give you somewhat of a hint.

God Bless You!

A few months ago, I took a picture of the pews at the church. I liked that picture and when I was playing with the application on my new computer that lets you easily create web sites that picture came to my mind.

I have therefore cobbled together a couple of pages that I think might be of some interest for people who would like to keep track of the changes at church. So for the adventurous in all of you I give you The Empty Pew.

Right now it is basically just the pictures that were shown at church on Sunday plus a couple of blog entries. I will still keep this blog as the one to talk about my Christian Life and Work but The Empty Pew will allow me to be more visual in what takes place at the church.

God Bless You!

Well it all started with confusion. The youth that had been doing the PowerPoint presentations came through this week; but she actually made the presentation for next week. It was a blessing in disguise however, as I will not be going to our church next Sunday. I feel better knowing that it has been taken care of.

I had assumed that the presentation that had been sent to me was for today so I had not really looked at it. It was therefore around 11pm Saturday night that I started doing the one for this Sunday. I had to stay up for work, so it was not as if I stayed up specifically for that purpose.

Then this morning when I got to church, I was handed a ThumbDrive and asked to add 15 pictures to the presentation so that the congregation could be made aware of the changes being done in what used to be the chapel as well as downstairs. I got them added just in the nick of time but would have appreciated a little more notice. Oh well, the fact that I got to church 10 minutes later than usual since I did not have to do the singsong might have had something to do with it; although if I had done the singsong, there would have been even less time to do it. Whatever....

On the plus side, the Pastor from Harbour View Alliance church was the first to come and speak to us while our Minister is away on vacation. The speaking series, called "Getting to know your neighbours in Christ", is off to a great start. I had been looking forward to his visit, and I am happy to say that he was every bit as good as I had expected. I guess the only bad thing is that I will miss the Pastor from Harvest church next week.

God Bless You!

I have been doing very little regarding my church life these last few days; I guess you could call that taking it easy. It just does not feel right to me somehow. I am enjoying the time off, but I still think I should be doing more.

Maybe some of it has to do with the fact that I am currently reading "God Songs" by Paul Baloche and friends. Since the book talks about creating/choosing worship music that will touch people, I guess I want to be doing some of that. Hey, that could be part of recharging my batteries...

Oh right, it turns out that there is a special Official Board meeting on July 18th at 7pm at the HomePort to deal with expenses being made for the renovations being done at church this summer. Which of course reminds me that I need to send the information about the Unified Board to one of the members of the Official Board that missed the last meeting. I better make myself a note before I forget again.

God Bless You!

I wanted to be sure to thank my wife again for coming with me to church even though she had not slept well last night so she could help me with the presentation during the singsong and also during the service. I would not have been able to do those things had she not been there. So a great big thank you for coming even though she did not feel like it at all.

I used my new MacBook to do the presentations at church today. It was the first time I had not used my office laptop. It went very well, and being able to see on my laptop screen the coming slide is a nice bonus. To do the presentation I used the Keynote software from Apple. While I did not make use of the fancy transition features of Keynote for the service presentation, I did use some of them for the singsong. They looked really good when I put them in, and at least my wife said they looked really good on the overhead screen.

Today was the last Sunday for me to do the singsong for the foreseeable future. I did receive some nice compliments (relayed to me) about people enjoying the songs I have chosen. I am very glad that I was able to touch people with songs.

We had a guest organist as our music director had a previous engagement and took one of his Sunday vacations. He did a decent job of playing the hymns and we appreciated him covering for Brooke.

God Bless You!

I did not think of any other songs for the singsong, so the list I gave in yesterday's entry is still valid. One of the songs did not have chords in Voices United, but fortunately I have another hymn book that did which means I did not have to either figure them out myself or even change song. So these are the songs, in the order they will be sung:

"I Heard the Voice of Jesus" VU626
"Just as I Am" VU508
"Bread of Life" MVS5

MVS stands for More Voices Sampler. The United Church of Canada will be publishing late this year an addendum to the Voices United hymnal called More Voices. A sampler of about 20 of the songs that will be used in More Voices was produced and that last song comes from the sampler.

I have been asked, in the absence of our music director, to lead the singing of "Blessed Be Your Name". I have sung it before in the singsong (on June 11th actually) so it should not be too different than when Brooke does it.

God Bless You!

"Come, all you who are thirsty,
come to the waters;
and you who have no money,
come, buy and eat!
Come, buy wine and milk
without money and without cost." -- Isaiah 55:1 [NIV]

Perhaps not surprisingly, most of the hymn suggestions I have found come from the Isaiah passage. I still have some more thinking to do, but if I were to decide right at this moment, the following three songs would be the ones I would sing:

"I Heard the Voice of Jesus" VU626
"Just as I Am" VU508
"Bread of Life" Stephen Spencer

The third song is there, not because it was suggested, but rather because this Sunday is communion and it is a communion hymn and it just so happens that it kind of fits with the Isaiah quote at the top of this entry (the lyrics can be accessed by clicking on the hymn title).

God Bless You!

"give thanks in all circumstances, for this is God's will for you in Christ Jesus." -- 1 Thessalonians 5:18 [NIV]

I spent some time this evening reading the Bible passages for next Sunday:

Nehemiah 8:1-12
Isaiah 55:1-13
1 Thessalonians 5:15-18

and I must say I cannot wait to hear our minister on Sunday (particularly about the Nehemiah reading). By the way, you can read the passages above online; one of the sites where you can do that is BibleGateway. Admittedly, I did not give the readings the time required to really "stand under" those passages, so it is no wonder that I am having trouble wrapping my thoughts around them.

The devotional I read this morning was familiar to me which can only mean that I have now reached the part where I started reading last year. I was thinking about trying out the suggestion from the book "God Songs", namely to sing the bible passage instead of just reading it. I would have to change the time where I do my devotional/Bible reading as everyone is still sleeping then. I will have to think on this some more.

God Bless You!

I find it interesting that what has to be my favourite communion hymn, I Come With Joy (VU477), is also one of two songs (the other song is We Are Pilgrims (VU595)) the Discernment committee chose to best represent the ideas of the Vision, Mission, and Core Values statements. I usually use I Come With Joy during the singsong whenever we have communion, but since it is already being used in the service I will have to come up with something else.

I have just begun to think about what I will do for the last singsong before the summer; whatever it is I do, I will try to keep it relevant to the theme just as I do any other Sunday. The thought did cross my mind to just do stuff I really like, but since the singsong is not about me that is not going to happen.

I have finally gotten back to reading a book a bought a few months ago: "God Songs" by Paul Baloche and friends. It is a book about how to write (and/or pick) good worship songs. I am once again excited to be reading it. Since it had been a while, I have started the book over but I had only read about 20 pages so it is not a great hardship.

I am still reading the daily devotional from my Bible. One of the things I am looking forward to doing is researching more worship songs. Someone mentioned that good worship songs are like daily devotional, but you get to sing it! And since I really like to sing...

God Bless You!

I was looking back at the first posts I made in my blog here on Blogger, and the very first post mentions that we had just completed the first church service using PowerPoint (which you can read here). It is hard to believe that it has been a year since we started using PowerPoint for the service. I am not sure that we would be able to easily do without it now as it has become second nature to make use of it. In this short period of time, we have obtained a proper screen (the first presentation was done on a bed sheet!), and a proper stand for the projector (we used a plant stand). And soon the church will be getting a projector and laptop so it does not have to depend on church members for those pieces of equipment.

The singsong went pretty well this morning; many thanks to the young woman who graciously accepted, at the last minute, the job of running the PowerPoint while I sang. It could not have happened without her. I still find it hard to believe that I will be taking a break from doing the singsong, next week will be my last Sunday. I get the feeling that when Fall comes the singsong will morph into something different. Of course I may be totally wrong about this.

God Bless You!

I think I mentioned yesterday that one of the songs for the Sunday service did not look familiar. After a closer look that is indeed the case. So I will be doing that song during the singsong tomorrow. And since I received the other Bible readings for the service, I was able to come up with another couple of songs for the singsong. The order of songs now looks like this:

"Make a Joyful Noise" VU820
"All Things Bright and Beautiful" VU291
"Heaven is Singing for Joy" VU230

Now that I have chosen the songs, all that remains is to prepare the PowerPoint slides.

God Bless You!