We've been talking a lot about sacrifice over the past couple of weeks here at Schweitzer as we explore what it is God would have us do to support the growth of the church in our current stewardship focus, Growing God's Church. I'm amazed by the level of sacrifice we're hearing from members of the church. Every weekend Bob has …
Schweitzer Community Outreach Center
This past weekend we gathered people together to do the first project in the newly named Schweitzer Community Outreach Center. The building just to the west of the church that used to house luxury cars is already being used to make an impact in the community. Over the course of a couple of hours we packaged 400 hygiene kits for …
Haiti Click Track Video
We made a spur of the moment decision to put together a video to tie in the devastation in Haiti with worship this weekend. You can watch the video from youtube below (SUMC folks saw it tonight at 5 and will see it tomorrow at 9:45 and 11, sorry 8:20 – you’ll get live musicians and no click). This is …
Christmas Worship Projection Sample
Saturday night I took a little bit of footage with the Flip cam during worship. Here's a sample from a few songs. The audio quality is really bad, the microphone on the flip really picks up the drums above everything else. It's also a bit shaky from being handheld. Next time we do this we'll need to setup a real …
Christmas Music Celebration
This weekend we celebrated Christmas in music. There was an amazing diversity in worship as our traditional services featured the annual choir cantata with an orchestra and the modern services featured our praise band, the story of Christmas told through Isaiah in video, lighting and architectural projection. I'm incredibly impressed with how well all of the teams worked to accomplish …
Writing For Five Generations
I've spent most of the morning working on a sermon for the weekend after Christmas. I've come to a realization that should be absolutely obvious, but presents a challenge for those of us in a multigenerational church. Sermon writing and preaching is a fairly comfortable endeavor for me – I've had the opportunity preach more than 30 times this past …
#cultivate09 and #story09 initial thoughts
This week I attended to brand new conferences, Cultivate and Story. I can only say the teams in charge of both events did an exceptional job. I was especially happy with Cultivate because it was a format I'd never seen before. It was driven almost completely by conversation – presenters shared for a brief amount of time and the rest …
Outward Focused Ministry
I spent yesterday with a small group of youth leaders, pastors, and Bishop Schnase (the Bishop of the Missouri Annual Conference) discussing the conference role in helping youth ministry. I wasn't quite sure why I was invited as I have very little involvement in youth ministry (other than I used to be a youth leader). One thing I do know …
Texting and Worship
Last night we made our first foray into texting during worship. We had a panel discussion answering questions that focused on how faith impacts life as a college student. I thought the questions were very good and the panel did an excellent job dealing with them. We did have a few issues in the moderation process, which is something we'll …
40 Days of Prayer for College Ministry
NOTE: I'd written this a couple of weeks ago, right before the 40 days started, but it didn't get posted. It's a bit dated, but I logged into write a new post today and saw that this was unpublished, enjoy. Starting August 17th my friends Creighton Alexander and Ashlee Alley and the team at College Union are calling all of …
Theology of Technology Conversations
I'm spending this week in Kentucky at the Asbury campus in a class about the web in ministry. The primary purpose of the class is to familiarize students with the Internet and the web with each of us in the class completing some sort of a final web project. For my project I'm not building a web site, instead I'm …
One Prayer Starts Tonight
During the summer we're going to be experimenting with a variety of different Wednesday night opportunities. Starting tonight we're kicking off the month-long One Prayer series. One Prayer is a gathering of more than a thousand churches across the world coming together to worship, serve and grow. Last year our college ministry participated in One Prayer and I'm excited that …