FIELD TRIPS TO JOURNEY CHURCH
One fun and insightful thing we got to do is take the Hannaford Praise Team (musicians and techs) on a field trip to Journey Church, a couple year old church plant in Bozeman, Montana. Journey has been very effective at reaching people in Bozeman so we wanted to find out what the buzz was all about.We took two trips and attended their Saturday evening services. Their worship guy, Brandon Edwards was gracious to set up meetings after the services to let our people ask questions and interact with theirs. It was pretty cool. Journey does a great job creating environments that make people actually "want" to go to church.
NATIONAL DAY OF PRAYER
On May 1, the National Day of Prayer, we were invited to provide music for the city-wide prayer event on the Montana Capitol Building steps. We assembled a small team of musicians and singers and did about four songs including my favorite, Chris Tomlin's America. It was a very moving event.BATTLE CRY CONFERENCE
In the beginning of May, I was part of the Battle Cry conference held at the Helena Civic Center. I was the worship team leader of a group comprised of guys from five different churches. Battle Cry was put on by the local Promise Keepers group, LCMI, with help from the Promise Keepers organization.It was awesome worship. Hearing hundreds of men sing worship songs is quite a different experience than your usual Sunday morning church worship. Andrik came, too, and did an excellent job running the video. In addition, the entire conference was video taped and was aired on the local PBS station. DVDs can be ordered here.
MONTANA FAMILY FOUNDATION WEBSITES
I've also been very busy using some new web skills for the Montana Family Foundation (MFF), a para-church org that is like Focus on the Family, but for Montana. One of the things they do is create those voter guides that report how candidates stand on different issues. What's new for me is that I've had to learn ASP, a web programming language that can dynamically generate pages from databases. Whew! I never thought I'd be doing something like this. MFF has three websites that I've been working on, you can check them out here:• Montana Family Foundation • Montana Voter Guide • Montana Family Action
MOTHER'S DAY
For Mother's Day, we mixed things up a bit and moved things around on the stage. We put the singers up front and the ladies led the worship with Andrea as the main singer. We did a pretty funky version of Israel Houghton's "You Are Good." Okay, compared to Israel Houghton and New Breed, our version was rather vanilla, but it was pretty funky for us. I actually enjoyed this movie honoring moms - it make me laugh.
ANDRIK WINS MEDIA AWARD
Andrik created a poster for a club he co-founded at his middle school. The poster was entered in the M.Gen Fest here in Helena. The M.Gen Fest was "designed as part of the media literacy curriculum recently implemented into middle- and high-school classrooms throughout Helena. This interactive event will highlight how students have learned to critically analyze and understand media messages and techniques that impact all of us." Andrik's poster won 3rd place. Whoo-hoo!
