I’m gone at Hume this week… and I’m loving it. This morning I got to go out and have a quiet time here and then video chat with my fam over iChat right from this spot. I love it. See ya lates

Mushy dad and husband stuff Alert: (You’ve been warned)

oh and Kim, Matthew, Rachel and Emily… I miss you guys… I wish you were here. I can’t wait to see you when I get back. I love you guys

Keep your ears open… Jesus is my friend.

Tina Fey for Veep?

[HT: The Tone Guru]

It’s that time again, time to take a look back at what we did and how it went this Sunday in the Elevation Service here at Calvary Church Santa Ana. So to start off I’ll start by telling you all that we had Bob Vernon as a guest speaker this week (For those of you who don’t know who Bob Vernon is click here to find out). We had him come in to cap off our three week series on leadership (Lead, Follow, and Get Out Of The Way) and the topic this week was Lead. So with that said, here are the songs that I planned to do this week:

• Galaxy - Something Like Silas
• Everlasting God - Brenton Brown
• Take My Life - Chris Tomlin Arrangement
• Only You - David Crowder Band
• The Stand - Hillsong United

So, any time we have a guest speaker I always plan on them going over their time so that means that I always have to cut a song in our response set on the back end. And, well, Mr. Vernon lived up to the expectations and so we had to cut Only You… and even with that we went a big chunk over time. Oh well.

There where a couple of awesome things about this Sunday that I’d love to mention too. 1) My band and my vocalists were right on this week. We had a great sound and a cool flow through the songs which all tied back to the message. 2) People were worshiping the Lord and singing out and clapping and allowing the Holy Spirit to engage them. Especially in the last song, the Stand, our congregation sang out and sang out loud. It was cool.

So this Sunday was great for us as a band and as a congregation. I will say though that I was exhausted going into the morning and didn’t really know what to expect but the Holy Spirit totally took over and ushered us into God’s presence and he used me, a tired worship pastor to do it. What a privilege that is.

Oh and by the way, this post is part of a Sunday Setlist blog carnival that is being hosted by Mr. Fred McKinnon

He is like a Mounty, he always gets his man and he’ll zap you anyway he can… Zap!

So now it’s your turn. Take a camera and upload something so we can all see and then let us all know. So, who’s gonna post something?

Do you think that I’ll have to report dance moves to CCLI when we do this at Calvary?

I’ve heard alot of people that were around when Pearl Harbor happened say that they’ll never forget where they were when Japan attacked. I think we can all say the same thing for when the two planes smashed into the Twin Towers in New York. I know I’ll never forget where I was…

September 11, 2001. I was sitting at home eating a bowl of cereal getting ready to head to class…. where were you?

(RSS’ers there’s a flash video below so if you wanna see it you can click here)

As you can see we’re busy writing at our house. Who else out there has got the songwriting bug?

I was just sitting here looking at my iPhone trying to figure out what to blog about and thought it would be fun to tell you all what my five favorite websites are that I have to look at every day… I’m not joking, I’m on these sites all the time, there’s links, bookmarks, iphone shortcuts…. the whole nine. So I’ll tell you mine and I thought it would be cool if you came up with your own Fave 5…. here are mine:

• Bwack’s Forum - This is probably my favorite forum of all. It’s got a ton of the stuff that I’m interested from gear, to stage, to just random stuff. It’s a great community of musicians and gearheads that was started by Bwack of the David Crowder Band. If I have questions about gear this is where I go to ask it.
• Craig’s List Orange County - What’s not to love about Craig’s list? My favorite thing to do here is just to hop on over to the Musical Instruments for sale section and scour all the gear. Call me weird but it’s fun.
• Drudge Report - News, news, news. I like trying to stay informed on things that are going on in the world and Drudge seems to have a great mix of all kinds of stuff from politics to pop culture.
• Planning Center Online - My most recent favorite. I don’t know how I got along without this just a few months ago.
• Facebook - Connection. I love Facebook for just general catching up with people and sending messages. If you’re not my friend then hit me up. My favorite thing is just going down the list of all my friends status updates and getting a glimpse of all that is going on in everyone’s lives. It’s cool

Anyway, those are my fav 5… now it’s your turn. Who’s in your Fav 5?

So, ya know how a bunch of people (including me) do those worship? Well, this is mine only I’m changing the name of mine to THE NOISE just cause I feel like it. So there you go. Anyway, in worship confessional fashion I guess I’ll go through the songs that we played then let you know what worked and how everything went for us this Sunday. Here goes….

This Sunday in Elevation at Calvary Church we played the following:

• The Time Has Come (w/ An Introduction) - Hillsong United
• From The Inside Out - Hillsong United
• Nothing But The Blood - Matt Redman
• How Great Is Our God w/ How Great Thou Art - Chris Tomlin

So thats what we sang this Sunday. And with that being said… SUNDAY MORNING WAS AMAZING!!! I can honestly say that I was super excited to lead worship this past Sunday morning. I’m not talking about just regular plain ol’ excited… oh, no my friend, I’m talking about COME ON EVERYONE LETS GET ON OUR FEET AND WORSHIP OUR LORD JESUS CHRIST BECAUSE HE IS SO SO SO WORTHY OF OUR PRAISE excited… yeah, I know. I’m always excited to lead but for some reason this Sunday was special for me, nothing really about it was different just God gave me joy for it. Anyway, now you all at Calvary can correct me if I’m wrong but I think not only was I ready to worship but I really feel like people came ready to sing that morning. It was awesome! I loved hearing people singing… and thats not an easy thing to do in a room the size of ours (we have a auditorium that fits about 2500 people) with it only about half full and monitor blaring. It was so sweet. Anyway, all that to say that This Sunday blessed me as a worship leader and as a pastor at Calvary Church. Calvary peeps, it was awesome worshiping with you this past Sunday. I’m looking forward to this next week.

Anyway, enough about me… how was your Sunday and what did you play?

PSALTY, COLBY, CHARITY CHURCH MOUSE!!! Those are the names I grew up with as a kid. I, probably like a nice big chunk of you, grew up in the golden era of the Christian musical days when Maranatha Music ruled. One of their creations was a big blue singing songbook who had a dog, a family, and not to mention a worship workshop. So classic, this guy and the music he brought of his bright red tapes helped define me and who I am today.

Anyway, So the other day I was talking to some people in the young adult group here at church and for some reason the topic of Psalty the singing songbook came up in our conversation (If you don’t still don’t know who Psalty is then you need to go over here to Wikipedia and read this article on him). We started talking about how much we loved Psalty and all those old tapes and songs and all that good stuff. So I tell them that I wish I had some of those tapes so I can introduce my kids to them and all the heavenly goodness that is Psalty the Singing SongBook. Then they look at me and tell me that they still have a bunch of the tapes at home and they still listen to them. So to make a long story short…..

…. it’s time for me to make some CD’s and get myself and my kids rockin’ a giant blue singing songbook. HEHE!!! I’m giddy right now…. TESTIFY!!!!

This one is for all you guitar players out there and for those who have always wanted to to play the guitar. I recently found this site a few weeks ago and have been looking through it and it’s fantastic. The guy who runs it, Justin, is a great teacher and explains things in a very easy way through the stuff he’s written on his site and through the videos that he puts on there for many of the lessons. So if you always wanted to learn the guitar or if you just wanna get better, do yourself a favor and check out this site… www.JustinGuitar.com

Check it out and let me know what you think…..who’s gonna go by?