Just a couple quick things. I love reading and figuring out small pieces of God’s character.

Genesis 16 is all about the conception of Ishmael, Abraham’s son via Sarah’s servant Hagar.

Hagar becomes pregnant and the when she does she lost respect for Sarah. Sarah then tells Hagar to leave.

The first thing I see here (and i had to re-read this passage to even understand this) is that God takes care of his own, and will bring about restoration.

God tells Hagar, yeah you’re pregnant, now what? you don’t have any where to go and the baby needs taken care of…go back to Sarah. I could give you examples out of my own life where i see this taking place either with me or others, and if you thought long enough I’m sure you could too. God brings about the restoration necessary for life to go on…did he fix the problem the way Hagar wanted it to be fixed? probably not, was the proclamation that Ishmael is going to be fighting for his entire life what she wanted for her son? doubtful, yet God worked. God restored Hagar to Sarah, maybe not under ideal circumstances, she was still pregnant you know, and she probably still didn’t see eye to eye with Sarah.

Secondly, the obvious statement is God is the one who sees me, he saw Hagar’s affliction, her pregnancy.

Although obvious it is incredibly powerful.

A little glimpse into the character of God, even when we’re not expecting it, even when we’re hiding, even when we don’t want to be found, God sees us. Then, we see God. We see God for who he truly is, we begin to see his plan, we begin to see that he’s always been there watching over us. Like Hagar we see God as the protector and restorer. It does not say here that God fixes everything just right with a cherry on top and everything is peachy keen, it just says that God saw, and in return she saw God.

That is actually a powerful statement…to see God…
just relish on that for a second.

are you seeing God? am I?
What am I burying myself under, trying to hide myself from God with?

I’m not going to write a ton on it here because I’ve written the process of the stage through the descriptions on Flickr. The challenge in this space is that there is not much stage depth and because the screens are over the stage I am very limited on where I can play height into any type of look. The original concept was to create some very large spheres in the vertical space, but that could have messed with more sight lines than the tree does (we did have to add some side TVs to cover our wing positions which had bad sight lines to begin with, this was talked about before the stage was even in design so it just sped up the install). I took the original concept and kept the winter theme but made it work for our space so it wasn’t quite so bulky and hid some of our unsightly stage floor mess. I wanted it to feel like winter, not Christmas so that it could squeeze past the holiday season and get some longevity out of the build.

As always you’re welcome to ask lots of questions! CLICK HERE for the flicker photos.

So that is who leads out in worship. Everyone.

So when you’re intentionally doing that whether as a paid team member or a non-paid why are you doing it?

Are you doing it because you are called to serve?

Are you doing it because you know what you’re doing?

Are you doing it because you think that is what you need to do?

Are you doing it to grow?

Are you doing it to prove something?

As a person on staff at a church I look around at my peers (tech world and non tech world) and I see a lot of burn out, a lot of people dropping off. So when I get approached by someone who wants to work in ministry i tell them to do anything they can but ministry, and only when you cannot do anything else because the calling that has been placed on you is so strong then go do it. Ministry is messy, it isn’t pretty, it is stressful on the family, it isn’t all lunch meetings and never being in the office.

As a volunteer it is a part of growth and discipleship. Where do I fit in? Where will I find maximum growth? What matches my gifts, talents and passions? All of these are important questions when you think about where to serve on a ministry team. I would have never found my calling in technical ministry had it not been for serving in that area, and the growth I experienced. I’m not saying God will always show you a need to work in ministry through service, but it will grow and stretch you.

We do what we do because we’re called to grow!

Jesus told the disciples when he was preparing to leave them that they would do greater things than he had done. The key was the future tense! Jesus said, you’re not there yet, you have some growth to do. Continue working hard, exceeding yourself constantly and you will do greater things than I have done. Work, and service is a process, just like your salvation. Part of that process is service and growth.

This is a gut check for myself,
Am I growing?
Am I serving because of my calling?
Am I serving selfishly?
Am I serving appropriately? (in the correct area)

IEM’s vs. Floor Wedges vs. Hearing Loss

Floor wedges were great when In Ears were not available. It was such a touring standard that even when everyone moved to In Ears that wedges are still put out too. So there are multiple noise floors to be overcome by the PA. This is great when a musician decides to pull his ears out, or one dislodges itself, or they want an SLP feel firing at them in addition to filling their ears.

Floor wedges are not good in small venues, it doesn’t matter whether you’re in a church or a tiny club.

IEMs are not a purely church world concept and it protects your hearing. Your’e not pounding your head with 100+ DB of sound for hours on end for days on end. You can control it and leave it nice and quiet and best of all for the mix engineers is you’re left with no noise floor to overcome from all of the wedges.

Why do people pull out an ear. There seems to be one thing no matter what is expressed that seems to cause a person to pull an ear out, room feel. Whether they feel isolated and naked without being able to hear the room, cannot feel response from the crowd or cannot hear any other number of elements they feel the need to pop one.

I get it, I really do…but you’re killing your hearing.

If you notice when you do that one of two things happen, (given a monitor engineer scenario) you ask for more output volume to compensate because you’re trying to overcome room volume. Or you crank your wireless pack up for more volume to compensate for the room. Either way you’re blowing your ear drum out because of how close the source is to your ear and as it becomes fatigued you have to crank it up louder, and louder.

Please put both ears in, encourage musicians to put both ears in, encourage subtractive mixing not additive mixing. If you need more vocals try pulling volume back over all to give you the boost, not adding more vocals to the mix.

Also try minimal mixing. You don’t need a full CD mix in your ears, only what will get the job done. Start out with a rhythm instrument or click and a pitch reference and then build from there.

Don’t take it from me…go talk to a hearing specialist!

I heard this tearm a lot in college in reference to media and the more and more I think about it the more I cringe. Christians think that in order for us to be able to utilize something in reference to the gospel we must try and redeem that medium.

What does that even mean?

I may not be popular with this statement and you don’t have to agree, but I don’t think it really should. So here are some thoughts on that.

Twitter uses 140 characters to hold a quick personal global conversation through sharing stories. Churches cannot tell a story in 140 characters (and if you’re tweeting multiple tweets to get a point across, send an email or write a blog instead).

It is all about brevity and conciseness. 

Persons within the church can use twitter all day, communicate, tell stories, connect with people on a personal level. Entities on twitter or most social networking platforms are impersonal, cold, and most times obnoxious. Links to awkward videos are fine from friends because I can actually reach out and smack them later. I can’t do that to the church.

The best representation I have for this are companies like AT&T and Comcast who are putting real people behind twitter accounts linked to their customer service and are relating well to people. These people are dealing with problems and bridging relationships with companies. Churches really don’t have the opportunity to deal with problems on twitter in a public venue, unless you want to hear about uncle Henry’s divorce, or Johnny’s drug addiction, which is not exactly appropriate.

So what do churches do wrong on twitter. 

They share too much, whether meaningful information or absolute junk (most falls into this category)

They share too little, some entities haven’t tweeted in 153 days…thats engaging….

They share only self promotion items, too much look at me and self pats on the back.

They promote every single thing that shows up on their calendar, I don’t care when Martha May’s birthday party is.

They don’t promote ANYTHING that the church is doing, which should be a primary use of this short burst medium.

What do some churches do well on twitter? 

They share short meaningful stories on twitter to encourage community.

They share meaningful promotional items on a regular basis (scheduled out so not to be obnoxiously frequent), important time changes, cancelations etc.

They share short exciting stories about how the church is impacting the community or the world.

How does the church engage on twitter? 

Use one concise voice for your social platform whether twitter, Facebook or some other site. And if it’s all of the above, assign a singular person this task to update so it all sounds the same. Create a unified strategy, usually spear-headed by whoever handles your PR .

Share information that is relevant to your group. Aka don’t post forwarded email junk, footprints in the sand, random you-tube posts (unless its a youth site…then maybe). Post great pictures from the recent fall festival you had on Facebook and cultivate conversations around those. Tell people your service times changed through twitter!

Use unique hash tags to create conversations about your church, your message series, your event. This bypasses the necessity for a church wide twitter account all together. Use a few strategic church staff members to cultivate these conversations, promote the use of the hash tags from stage, signage or print material.

Remember that twitter is still considered a fringe social media platform and it’s hitting a very small section of your congregation. Yes it’s growing, but it’s still not to the Facebook status, and google plus (that isn’t going any where fast). Many of these principles can be applied to Facebook too,  but dont expect a large group of your ministry to be active on fringe social platforms unless they’re nerds or early adopters.

Be careful when adopting social media. It is a personal story and conversation medium, not a mail chimp blast medium.

• Sales people and the vendor tech people need to figure out how to cross breed so that I can have a less obnoxious salesman that might know what he’s talking about.
• Shows like these are less about the show room floor, less about the conference aspect and more about the networking aspect. It is awesome to talk with like minded geeks who have different perspectives, budgets, goals, and mentalities of ministry that you do.
• What we do as techs and creatives isn’t about being the best at what we do, but investing and building into others and cultivating authentic relationships with each other.
• Church leaders have a hard time understanding, cultivating and leading techs and creatives because we have our own special language and needs that most don’t understand. You can’t throw us into the standard leadership structure.
• It can’t be about the gear, it has to be about the mission.
• How you handle yourself, crisis, events and interpersonal action show what we value (and most of the time it’s ourselves)
• No one has anything new or really spectacular out right now. Sound consoles haven’t been really updated in many years, video gear has come down in price but many times it’s just same stuff different body.
• If you don’t have anything new out YET tease me so I want to follow your product line more closely for announcements. Make me excited about what is to come, don’t tell me you’re going to loose your job for loosing secrets.
• People don’t go to sit through sessions, they go to connect, look, make decisions and decompress. Sessions are only valuable if they give me scalable insights on how to do meaningful things within my ministry.
• I wish there were more types of shoot outs happening among vendors. Let me see some lighting shoot outs, conventional vs. led technology. Lets see a projector shoot out in various scenarios (low light vs. high ambient light, high contrast screen, rear project screen). How about an audio console shoot out?! Side by side, Yamaha, avid, digico, soundcraft, Midas.
• Respect isn’t about your title or your church, it’s about how you lead.

First of all it was done poorly. Each manufacturer was allowed up to 100db of c weighted fast spl. Not every manufacturer decided to run that hot. Automatically not equal footing.

Each manufacturer was given 30 minutes or so to eq their rig to a nasty room. Some manufacturers didn’t eq their rig. Come on guys bring your A game. Make me salivate and want to buy your product.

Thirdly even with a few big hitters like Meijer and JBL missing, you still had some way over priced rigs in the room that didn’t do anything. These line arrays or point source boxes were also paired with the manufacturers subwoofer. If I manage to find a copy of the box numbers I’ll post those too (I tossed mine)

•  Bose line array, all highs and all lows. No mids. It’ll take your head off. It’s over sized and not something I’d want to see or hear in a house of worship,
•  The QSC KLA rig is a powered line array that sounds like a paper box and a hamster wheel squeal. Seriously, muddy, flappy, harsh. What were you thinking?
•  DB systems were a little nasal but not an awful sounding box. With proper tuning this box could be a good room solution for some people.
• L Acoustics is a rig that I’ve heard a lot about and I’m still trying to decide if I was impressed or not. It was incredibly smooth sounding but it was seriously flat. No sparkle or dynamics what so ever. The sub that was paired with it was sloppy sounding as well.
•  Renkus and Heins showed up with a box that just sounded wonky in the mids. I felt like I was listening to the rig through a wall.
•  Yamaha Nexo had a nice sound on the top boxes even though it wasn’t their traditional line array boxes, nor did they fly them. The low end was almost non existent from their subs.
•  Alcon Audio brought a sub compact line array that looked tiny and sounded tiny. The only application that I could see that being great for is a traditional cathedral style building where slim sight lines are a concern and it’s gonna sound like a big reverb chamber no matter what you do. It’s crunchy and harsh.
•  WorxAudio Technology had a weird crossover in their box. The highs sounded like they were coming distinctly out of the right side of the box and the mid lows from the left side.  Not a smooth sound at all.
•  ISP Technologies had a nice sounding top box, could be a little harsh if your not careful with your eq. The low end wasn’t really present.
•  Danley speakers were probably my high point. Their 118 sub filled the room and the sh96 had a nice full sound for a point source box, showing off that line arrays are not the only option. The 96 in a few of the song applications had some harsh tones but over all it had a nice round sound and had so much more dynamic range than the line arrays did.
•  Outline’s line array had an ok set of tops, not super impressive but not super embarrassing either. The low end was extremely sloppy though.
•  Sensey Electronics was a new company out of Mexico and they might want to take a look at their product again, it was super sloppy, muddy and just all around embarrassing for a loud speaker.

So over all I would say Danley came out on top and there wasn’t much of a close second for me. What was disappointing was the number of people who thought there were good things in that room.

If you’re looking for a speaker rig, please take the time to have a vendor court a few options for you, first in a virtual lay out so you can see how the boxes respond in your room and then actually bring in demo possibilities to see how the box sounds in your room. Every box can sound ok with an amount of work but you want the box that will sound the best with the least amount of tweaks in your space so you get the optimal sound space!

You know exactly what I’m talking about, that time you wish you could tell off the person that cut in line at the grocery, or took your seat in church? Yeah, then your filter kicks in. Some of us have a better filter than others.

A lot of people tend to think I don’t use mine enough, but if you actually heard what I wanted to say 99.9% of the time you might think otherwise. Whatever actually came out was severely governed, mainly because I’d like to have friends, keep a job, not be ostracized, thought a total freak, etc.

So I’d like to give you ten things tech guys wish they could just up and say to worship leaders, sans filter.
Some of these are mine, some of these are other peoples, some of these are other people’s or mine but edited for content (insert filter).  *disclaimer-I love worship leaders, and these are generalizations, in no specific order.

10) Put the mic at your mouth. As much as you think your belly button sings better, it doesn’t.

9) Be current, but most of all be real. I’ll take real over current any day. (and if you can’t be real should you be leading?)

8) Saturday is not an appropriate time to give out a set list.

7) Some instruments were not made to be used in worship. Mostly things that make jingle sounds.

6) Stop apologizing for asking us to do our job, that is why we’re here (at least most of us anyway).

5) You thought bad notes were distracting, so are tight pants, shirts, and elvis hip thrusts.

4) Lead your band or find someone who can lead your band!

3) Don’t default to blaming the tech guys! (at least not from the stage) Whatever culture you create from the stage will be reciprocated by the rest of the worship team.

2) To many cooks in the kitchen can kill a mix.

1) I can be your biggest fan and ally if you help me do my job, and set me up for success.

No? go ahead and hit the back button on your browser.

MagicQ by ChamSys (short for Chameleon Systems and is pronounced “cam” “sis”) is a full featured lighting software package that can get you where you need to go for practically nothing in hopes you’ll buy their hardware.

This is a software package built for lighting people used to traditional console programming. So unlike a piece of software like jands vista which is GUI based, there are a lot of numbers going on here.

Layout:
One thing I love about the software is the use of palettes. Big buttons to use for a touch screen, similar to a hog layout. So select your light groups, select your color, position or whatever else preset you have and you’re going. If you have the surface intensity is easy to control, but without a surface you’re looking at mouse click increments or snap on/off options. There are tons of layout options but you have to hunt and poke around to find things because menu functions aren’t exactly standard.

Programming:
Because of the palate selections it is really easy to get looks set up especially if you’re living in an only LED world like we are in our main room, so all you have to focus on is color. We put it in a secondary worship space with a few movers, and sans surface things get a little more difficult. Like intensity you have to incrementally click  pan and tilt to position the lights unless you have a surface connected. The biggest pain that we discovered was once you have a cue stack set up (cue list in other software, and probably other names in still others) it becomes difficult to edit. After you figure out how to load that particular cue into the programmer and either remove lights from it, or add lights, or turn lights off or on etc. you update the cue. Easy…but not really. In tracking mode, you can end up with a mess in your next cue if you don’t remember to fire it and update that one as well. It is also very simple to select to much, or mess something up, so you really have to pay attention and double check.

Set Up:
After you have set up the software once, its pretty simple to go and set it up in another venue when you learn how it treats fixture profiles and patching. While it’s lightyears ahead of the old floppy disk loading of fixture profiles it can still be a bit clunky actually patching your lights, so make sure you know where they go, and what profile you actually need. Being able to come out of the software into USB to DMX dongles, ARTnet adapters or any other choice of DMX protocol is pretty awesome considering that could be your only cost if you don’t need the actual surface. Be ready to spend a little time setting up your ARTnet devices.

Service Use:
Setting up a cue stack was pretty easy per service element, so all you have to do is hit go. The biggest issue is, unless you have faders set up for extra things you need, it’s a little hard to edit on the fly smoothly. There are ways to control intensity and pull things out in cues, but not in groups that I found. So if you’re wanting a lot of flexibility mid service and do not program for every contingency, then this may not be for you. You can add faders in on the fly if you’ve got it set to program override, but faders won’t override and pull the fixtures out of your cues.

Volunteer Thoughts:
We had two volunteers run the software this weekend and both of them loved it after one day. Now this could be the “anything is better than the ETC Expression 3″  feeling, but they ran it like champs.

So those are my thoughts on the software features. Over all it’s a great, powerful, cheap piece of software that has some great entry level options. Would i choose it over Jands in a no cost, no thought scenario? no but that is because I’m comfortable with the Jands software. I know Hog lovers love the hog and some how ETC lovers love the ETC consoles and software so its all subjective on that front. When you bring cost, expandability, cross training and features into it. I would have to say it’s a viable option especially when you’re looking at multi venue and multi campus.