I was on the road (or “in the air” would be more appropriate) the past 2 weeks. It’s so good to be back home with my family after 2 trips back to back.

1. Two weeks ago I taught some classes at Church Music Oklahoma, which takes place in Oklahoma City. Like I did last year when I taught at the same conference, I stayed over to visit LifeChurch.tv on Saturday night and Charlie Hall’s church, Bridgeway, on Sunday morning.

  • My friend, Don Chapman (www.WorshipIdeas.com) was with me and got to join me on our whirlwind tour of churches. On Saturday night, we attended LifeChuches’s South Oklahoma City campus for their first Saturday night service, then went to the main OKC campus for their 2nd Saturday night service. They both have 4 services on Sunday, too – keep in mind that LifeChurch.tv has 9 campuses, including an “Internet Campus”. Sunday morning we saw Charlie Hall (not leading worship, but he was there) at Bridgeway, the church he helped plant. Their service lasted ’til noon and wouldn’t you know it – we had enough time to make it back to the main LifeChurch.tv campus to catch a little of their 1pm service.
  • We drove from OKC back to Dallas from 1:30pm to 4:45pm, so Don could experience Irving Bible Church’s 5pm service. We had hung out earlier in the week with Russ Ware, worship pastor at IBC, so Don really wanted to attend one of their 4 services. We made it just in time to be there for the entire 5pm service and then went home exhausted. Don went back to his home in Greenville, SC and blogged about his experience at LifeChurch.tv (including pictures).

2. This past week I spoke at the Christian Supply Choral Festival in SC, which brought together over 1200 worship leaders from around the country. The cool thing for me is that the conference takes place about 10 minutes from my family/where I grew up, so I got to see my mom and sister and her family. Two things worth mention from this conference (I didn’t get to visit any churches on this trip – I left Saturday afternoon, so I could attend my home church with my family on Sunday):

  • The first thing to mention from this 2nd conference is the new movie “Facing the Giants“, which hits theaters next month. Back in February I sat on a panel at NRB with Alex Kendrick, Media Pastor at Sherwood Baptist in Albany, GA. Alex is the writer, director and lead actor in “Facing the Giants”. You may recognize the name from all the media hype. “Facing the Giants” is the movie that the Motion Picture Association rated PG instead of G, because it is so evangelistic. Personally, I’m glad that it got a PG rating (I think more people will attend the movie), but I don’t agree with the reasoning behind the decision.
  • When I was with Alex back in February he was discussing a movie that his church had produced called “Flywheel“, which Blockbuster picked up and carries nation-wide!
  • At this conference they showed a powerfully moving promo and teaser produced for Church leaders about their new movie, “Facing the Giants”. Now I love sports movies anyway, so I was getting pretty pumped up just watching it. What do you need to know? Go see this movie and tell others to see it. Besides being produced and shot very impressively, it represents Christ and His Church very well.
  • The second thing to mention from the SC conference was a 2 hour conversation I had with Rick Muchow, worship pastor at Saddleback. We discused media in worship, my class on multi-sensory worship and a city-wide worship project that I’m currently working on and you’ll hear more about soon. I was surprised to learn that Saddleback has multiple venues and worship styles on their campus. I was intrigued and fascinated as he was telling me about them. Keep in mind, these are all on the same campus. They are also launching their first off-site video venue and are pretty excited about it’s potential.
  • For me (and I told him this), it was extremely encouraging to hear one of the main leaders at the 2nd largest church in the country talking about how they can improve and what they think they can do better and more effectively. There’s a lesson there for us all.

Well, that was my most recent roadtrip. Next month I’m teaching at the National MinistyCOM conference in Phoenix. If you haven’t already, sign up and plan on attending this event. I’ve invited 2 friends of mine to share in my class with me on “Creative Synergy”. Shawn Wood, Communications Pastor at Seacoast Church and Anthony Coppedge from Anthony Coppedge Consulting will be around and sharing in our discussion of creative synergy, which, by the way, is the name of my new weekly podcast “Creative Synergy“, featuring Anthony Coppedge and myself (more to come on that in the near future).