- Not preaching or speaking at all today so I’m live blogging the second Experience.
- Just got done baptizing over a dozen people!
- I’m coming in during the first song…”The Time Has Come”.
- 3 of the normal team members are gone, but the band still sounds awesome none the less.
- The 1st Experience was great. Everything went smoothly…Earl’s message was great and Brian did a very nice job with his remarks.
- More of that to come later.
- Just moved to the song, “Yours Forever”.
- So proud of the growth of Brian these past 3 years.
- Crowd is still coming in…the joint baptism service went long so people are late arriving.
- Last I saw Earl he still hadn’t changed clothes…he’s about 1 minute from having to be on stage.
- Maybe he’ll come out soaking wet. :)
- “We are yours forever, our lives won’t be the same…”
- Shouting and clapping…that would have never happened 3 years ago.
- Earl on stage doing announcements.
- Don’t forget that next week we WILL NOT change our clocks until after the Experience is over.
- Done this for 3 years now and everyone likes it…don’t lose an hours sleep.
- Don’t forget to let others know.
- Sign up to help with the Easter Egg Hunt. Last year we had over 1200 kids show up so we need your help. E-mail kristy@chambersburgfirstchurchofgod.com
- Earl asked not to do fist bumps today because he hurt his hand one time. Poor Earl.
- Back to music…”We Will Run”.
- Andrew getting his guitar groove on!
- Crowd’s a little dead.
- One last song…”Kingdom Come”.
- New song…love Brian’s lighting for this one.
- Just looked to my left and Tim, Jerry and Chris are all busy making the tech happen here in the back.
- Cressa giving some awesome harmony while Brett’s bass and Thom’s drumming are building…building…building….
- “Raise your hopeful voices, make a joyful noise and sing to the King of Glory”.
- Brian praying…please hold be right back.
- Earl in jeans and a nice looking shirt…using the table and stool. We’ll make him contemporary yet!
- “It’s ok to be disappointed that Gilbert’s leaving. But that leaves questions. I want to answer those today”.
- “I want to tell you a story”
- July 24th 2004: The first preview of United.
- Mike Schooley leading.
- Earl looked in that day. One person he saw was Adam Swisher who is still with us today.
- Mike’s vision was that United be like a bar where people would feel love and excited.
- “Under Mike’s leadership Chapter One of United had begun”.
- “At the beginning of 2006 Mike came to us and said God had called him to plant a church in his hometown of Horseheads, NY”.
- “In the spring of 2006 Mike left. Chapter One was done”
- “During that same time God brought Andy and Gayle Krull came to lead worship and up-grade our technology.”
- “Andy and Gayle said you need to talk to our friend Gilbert Thurston”.
- “Gilbert came on and things began to really grow”.
- “Gilbert really stressed excellence and evangelism”
- Fall 2007: A second Experience had to be started because of all the growth.
- “Last week you heard that like Mike, Gilbert is leaving to start a church in Harrisburg so chapter 2 will be coming to a close”.
- APPLAUSE for me. Thanks all!
- “The book is not done…chapter 3 is coming up and I can’t wait to see how God is going to work”!
- Ephesians 3:20-21
- “Mike laid the foundation, Gilbert added on, but the best is yet to come”.
- “Tuesday of this week an ad went out…so far over 50 people have applied. We will be seeking the right person to lead us in Chapter 3”.
- “We want to challenge you to pray…for search committee…for the right person…Gilbert…myself, staff and leadership…yourselves”.
- Ephesians 3:14-18
- Earl’s talking about Avatar and 3-D. “God is 4-dimensional”.
- “2nd challenge is to not fall away just because leadership is changing”.
- “Some leadership is not changing…one person is Brian Miller”.
- Brian now on stage.
- “Leading you in worship is amazing”.
- More applause for me…Oh stop. :)
- Brian is talking about praying after finding out I was leaving.
- “God slapped me across the face”.
- God spoke to him that it wasn’t Gilbert or Brian or the team that built this building, saved, hundred, etc. It was all God.
- AMEN Brian, good word!
- “God is not leaving us, nor are the 70,000 people in our community who don’t yet know Christ”.
- Brian is having people yell, “I’m excited”.
- Earl speaking again…”Don’t stop inviting people, Gilbert will still be here for a few months and then the next person will come on to start chapter 3…again the best is yet to come.”
- “We also want you serve so the next person coming on can say ‘wow'”.
- “Gilbert and Mike are two completely different people yet their passion was the same. The new person will be different than Gilbert, but the passion and vision will be the same. Don’t miss Chapter 3”.
- Earl praying.
- Brian and team back on stage finishing out with “The Time Has Come”.
- Well that was fun…have a great week everyone!
Inside Today’s Experiences
- Another awesome day!
- 5 more people gave their lives to Christ!
- The day got started a little earlier than normal since we launched Fellowship One officially today.
- I’ve been working on this project since last June so it was good to have another big part of it roll out.
- For a few weeks lines will be long as people get used to checking in their kids, but for the most part everything went smoothly and I didn’t hear any complaints.
- As for the Experience itself, it was a really smooth day.
- Brian and Thom did a great job of re-deploying some of our lighting and it added for some neat new effects.
- Aaron and Adam also did a great job with the graphics and video packages.
- I really like how Aaron put together video backgrounds for each song that were series specific.
- As I said last week, there is an incredible team that works behind the scenes that make each Experience so memorable.
- Thanks to everyone who serves…it was great being back to normal today.
- Nice big crowds in both Experiences and full of energy…especially the 9:45.
- As I said all day…I’m really excited about this series on love.
- Don’t forget this week to keep reading Philippians 2:3-8 and to find practical ways each day to make love a verb.
- Next week we’ll find out how to take these verses and apply them to your marriage.
- Go ahead and invite someone…they’ll be glad you did.
- Time for a nap…see you next week!
Inside Today’s Experiences
- Two words….Brilliantly Atrocious.
- For those who weren’t able to be with us, the whole day was called No Show Sunday. (pics below to help you get a feel)
- Basically we allowed people to experience what it would be like if no volunteers showed up and everything was just dependent on Brian and I.
- So we had no greeters, ushers, band, lighting, projection, etc.
- We set up a tiny stage on the gym floor, Brian played a few songs on acoustic guitar, while I ran back and forth between putting the lyrics up on an old overhead projector and handing out “bulletins” in the back.
- It was nice being able to sleep in this morning because there wasn’t anything to do.
- The look on people’s faces when they came to the door and Brian and I were greeting and they noticed no chairs were set-up was awesome!
- All week long we had wondered where people would put chairs. The 9:15 was just a blob of chairs everywhere…it was incredibly hard for me to take the offering. The 10:45 was a bit more organized.
- We have no real idea of how many were in attendance today because it’s hard to count when people are all over the place and there is no rhyme nor reason for it.
- The funniest thing might have been me doing the countdown with my fingers as shadows on the overhead projector.
- Brian and I were obviously exaggerating some things to make them worse than they needed to be but it was funny during the 2nd Experience when my mic did start to feedback and he was no where to be found. I had to go into the back room and fix it myself. I’m guessing people thought it was part of the plan but it wasn’t.
- I talked to quite a few first time guests who were impressed by the creativity of doing something like this and understood that what they saw is not how things usually are.
- As I had hoped, the Experience was so bad that it actually turned out to be good because it so beautifully made the point of how important our volunteers are.
- If you get a chance to listen to the message on the web-site, I left in me taking the offering by myself…funny stuff.
- The best part of the day was the dozens of new volunteers that signed up at the end of each Experience to serve in some way.
- Guess all that hard work making things bad was worth it!
- Getting ready to leave with the rest of the staff for a couple day get-away where we’ll brainstorm ideas for 2010. Should be fun!
Inside Today’s Experiences
- That was weird.
- I was just telling someone yesterday that we do a good job of covering everything that we know to do, but occasionally the unexpected happens.
- Today the unexpected happened multiple times.
- It started this morning with breakers blowing in the gym.
- Guessing as cold as it we were using extra juice.
- Speaking of cold, I was making the long walk in from the furthest parts of the parking lot this morning and my hand froze to my water bottle…wish I was kidding.
- More to come on the water bottle later.
- At the end of the 1st Experience the band was singing and then all the sudden you could hear Brian singing another song…What?!
- Our sound board has a USB port to plug a thumb drive into. We record everything directly to it, but it filled up and apparently the default is to automatically start playing the files on it.
- So you we hearing not only Brian live but also from a few weeks back.
- Memo to self: Check the space on the thumb drive each week.
- The next weird thing happened after I came off the stage from doing the announcements in the 2nd Experience.
- I grabbed my water bottle from backstage and was walking down the hallway so I could watch the rest of the music from the back of the gym before then heading back to the stage to preach the message.
- As I was walking I took a big swig and swallow of water….one problem…it wasn’t my water bottle…in fact it wasn’t anybody’s water bottle from today.
- Very rancid water that burned all the way down.
- Immediately my throat was burning which made it hard to preach then…also as the sermon kept going on I felt my stomach getting more and more upset.
- Needless to say I’ve spent some quality time this afternoon catching up on some reading. :)
- Oh but we’re not done…one more weird thing happened.
- After the bumper video in the 2nd Experience I walked out on stage and…nothing…no lights…waiting…waiting….I think it was probably no more than 20 seconds but it seemed like forever.
- Our light operator accidentally hit a quick launch key that starts a DVD player on the laptop.
- Apparently it’s not so quick and froze our lighting program until it opened.
- In the words of the great theologian Bart Simpson….”Aye Carumba”.
- Some weeks I don’t have much to report from behind the scenes…today…too much.
- Other than those blips though, I was happy with both of the Experiences.
- I think the chairs on stage were a cool visual.
- Brian brought in a lawn chair from home that was hilarious…it was about 2 inches off the ground.
- I asked him if was custom built for Vern Troyer.
- Andrea kept saying she was going to sit on one for the whole Experience and I’d never know, but she chickened out.
- Looking forward to next week…get to do the same message again 3 more times in the sanctuary.
- Have a great week and don’t forget to invite someone to come with you!
Inside Today’s Experiences
- Now that was fun!
- For those of you not with us, we recapped every series from 2009.
- That’s 52 hours worth of content that we condensed into an hour’s worth of highlights.
- I figured this was going to be one of those hit or miss type of things.
- Luckily it was a hit…I’m not sure I’ve ever had this much feedback so soon after an Experience.
- One of my big fears was whether it would translate to people who were guests.
- I had one lady come up afterwards who was from North Carolina and she said the format helped it all to make sense and she was wishing she lived close so she could attend all the time.
- The other cool part was the number of people who shared with me how it brought back memories to the week/series which they got saved or for some it was a reminder of when they first started attending.
- I was so excited for today that I was wide awake at 5am and ready to go.
- Set-up and the warm-up time were super easy today!
- That’s a good thing because the tech for today was crazy.
- Great job by Chris, Andy and Crissy making things happen behind the scenes exactly when they should have!
- Also I’ve got to give a big thank you to the band.
- In the midst of Christmas and everything else, they have spent 20+ hours at the church in the last week getting ready for and playing in Experiences.
- If you haven’t thanked them in awhile for what they do, please be sure to do so soon.
- In fact, I thought the standing ovation you gave them Christmas Eve after the Trans Siberian song was cool and I know they appreciated it.
- Back to today…it was strange for both me and the band because we were basically doing something the entire Experience…usually it’s one or the other at a time so you get a bit of a break. Not complaining, just different.
- It would be hard to post the audio online for today, but I am going to try to put together a video at some point in my “free” time.
- So in the meantime take the outline from today and go through each of the application questions so you see your growth from 2009 and evaluate in what ways you need to grow in 2010.
- The funniest/most painful moment of the day occurred backstage during the 2nd Experience during the 1970’s medley. Andrew wasn’t playing but was watching from the side wing. He got excited and went to do an “Elvis like” windmill with his arm, but didn’t realize I had come up and was standing behind him. When his arm came (rather hard and fast I might add) it grazed me in the face then hit me squarely in the upper chest. I t hurt but we had a quick laugh about it.
- He wasn’t laughing though when he then went back on stage and dropped his guitar, breaking a part of it.
- I guess that’s what God does to people who punch the pastor. :)
- All in all a very good day and hopefully an inspiring look back at all that God has done in 2009.
- Enjoy the pics below.