Worship & Production

W&P All Team

 

If you've served in the W&P community, you may know what we're talking about when we say "All Team."  If you're new to serving, if you just signed up at All Access, or if you've just never attended an All Team, you may wonder what all the fuss is about.

All Team is our monthly ministry gathering.  Each campus' All Team looks a little different, but essentially it's a chance for all of our serving teams (hence the name!) to get together, enjoy some community, catch some vision, and get to know each other.  (There's usually food involved, too!)

Because W&P requires  something more than a "show-up-and-serve" committment, and because it's so vital that our tech and worship volunteers operate as one team on a weekend, we really need you to be part of the W&P community.  All Team is one important way we do that.

Depending on your campus, you may find yourself serving a meal, being asked to teach a lesson or write an article for our Inspired Wednesday's here on the blog, or grilling for the rest of the teams.  Sometimes we just hang out and have a good time!

If you're a current or prospective volunteer, please make every effort to attend your campus' All Team this month!  You'll find a place to connect, a place where you can learn, and a place where your artistic or technical expertise will be developed and applauded.

Contact your worship leader or tech director for more information about times and dates at your campus!

Monday Soup

 

Another one bites the dust, huh?  I can't believe that before the week is out, we'll be in February!  My mom always told me that time moves quickly, but it still never ceases to amaze me how quick "quickly" really is!

Here are some recent finds for your creative brains.  Enjoy!

• A great article at Relevant about whether there is a place for creative Christians.  Loved the interviews.
• One of my favorite blogs of all time.  Parker Young is a photographer in NYC and sees the world through a beautiful lens.  
• Great infographic on color!Courtesy of NowSourcing, Inc Great infographic!
• And an album I've very much enjoyed in the last few weeks.

More than just background music

by Jeremy 'JJ' Johnson

It's interesting to see the huge effect the arts play on our lives.  They express who we are and what we believe.  It’s like a backdrop that adds that little something to a Broadway musical.  Imagine a huge blockbuster movie without background music...the last scene of Terminator 2 without the epic score in the background as the hero, played by Arnold, is lowered into the vat of molten metal, or how about a huge concert without the lights and video?  Check out a concert video of Trans-Siberian Orchestra and imagine it without the lights and haze.  What are your fries without ketchup?  They're ok but... The arts add flavor!  They add emotion to God's story and to our story.  The arts make these stories more real and make us more human. 

Take some time and listen to an audio Bible or 'Bible on tape'.  Listen to a chapter, book or a few verses.  If it’s one with music and/or sound effects, great!  Now, listen to the same passage without the music or sound effects and vice versa.  The musical background and added effects seem to put you right there.  They help bring God's story and our story to life!  

What's your story?

by Abby Stevens

“There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.”
Maya Angelou

There is a story being told.  From the time before there was time, there has been a story unfolding.  Each moment, each event, each birth, each dream . . . the Author of Life has been weaving a grand narrative that tells his story.  We are woven in and out, characters who sometimes walk and often fall, protagonists and antagonists, heroes and villains, all of us playing some role in the conflict and rising action of the story he’s telling.

This is why we love stories.  Take a look back through the history of humanity.  Story is how we understand our lives.  It’s how we make sense of things.  Stories are the things we carry home with us at the end of our day to share with our wives and husbands and kids.  Stories move us to action or to tears they inspire us or defeat us.  Stories help us to understand ourselves in light of some greater truth.  Jesus used stories to speak truths that his followers – and by extension, we, ourselves – could not have otherwise understood.

Hollywood makes millions upon millions of dollars every year, because the human race is uniquely wired to understand and seek out stories.  They entertain us, they help us define who we are and what we’re about, they can move us to great courage or great fear, and they give us a glimpse of life both as it is, and as we know it should be.  Stories give us hope that we are not alone, that others have travelled this road long before us, and that perhaps the stories we leave behind us that litter this well-worn road might help some other poor soul following behind.

Life happens to us in narrative.

As an artistic community, these stories play an incredibly important part in what we do.  Every weekend, we are handed these stories – the story that God has been telling since he jump-started history, and the stories that are gathered in our Worship Centers each weekend.  These two stories intertwine and intermix and the goal is that at the end of our lives, we can’t tell where one begins and the other leaves off.  That’s how deeply he wants to be part of our stories.

So, we take out our magic lassos of music, art, words, images, time, and space, and we attempt to wrestle these two stories to the ground.  We do this so we can help people understand the story that God is telling, and help them understand the ways he is inviting them to let him take over the writing of their story to make it part of his.  He is constantly adding characters and conflict and resolving this part of the story only to open up and unfold another part on a different page . . . He’s a master author, with every part in play and every character being developed, and he won’t stop writing until the story is told.

So we keep gathering these stories.  We sing them and we sing about them, we use a musical journey to capture the way our lives move from places of intense praise and joy to deep places of meditation and reflection.  We capture these stories inside of cameras and screens and we see how the story of one person is reflected in his word, or how my story is reflected in yours, and we see how God has left no part of these stories to chance.  We write about them, we draw them and we see just a moment of the story, paused for all time on a canvas or screen.

There is a story being told, from the time before there was time.  It’s a story of redemption and grace, a story of justice and mercy, a story of love and rebellion.  And we’ve been invited to help in the telling of this story. 

All art tells a story.  In the coming months, we’re going to talk about how to become faithful storytellers. We’re going to explore the stories we’re telling, the ways we think about our audiences in our telling and the parts to our stories that we, in order to be honorable narrators, must not shirk from or shrink from telling.

Until then, though, I have a question for you: is he inviting you into a unique story?  Is it one of new risks and adventures?  Is it a love story?  Is he bringing a chapter in your story to a close?  Is he beginning a new one? 

Tell us your story.

All Access and All Team

ALL ACCESS
This weekend, across all three campuses, we'll get to look at the current volunteer opportunities in and outside our church.  So, if you've got a friend or family member who's interested in serving, this is a great chance for them to speak with ministry leaders and take next steps into exploring a serving role at PLC.Here's the link to our website that lists each campus' serving opportunities: http://www.prairielakeschurch.org/next-steps/serve-at-plc.aspx 

ALL TEAM MEETING
All Team Meetings are our chance to gather once a month [2nd Thursday of the month] as a Campus, share a meal and build community with our teams.  If you're a rotation team member, alternate or just interested in this ministry... this invite is to you! 

Mark your calendars!  February's All Team [Thursday, Feb 9th, 6:30-8:00 PM] will hopefully have some new folks who signed up at All Access weekend, so you won't want to miss it!  If you serve at the Cedar Falls Campus, meet in the Lobby at the Cedar Falls Campus.  If you serve at the Waterloo Campus, meet at First Lutheran Church.

 

Monday Soup

I hope everyone has had a lovely Christmas and New Year!  With the rush over and some time spent reflecting on 2011, I've realized that feeding my creativity is key to being a useful, productive person. Here are some links to things that have helped me to do that.  Enjoy!

• If you're a creative or an artist (and yes, those are two different things!) you should be an avid reader of Stephen Brewster's blog.  This recent blog post is one of many reasons why.   
• How amazing is the new technology that's out there?   
• If you know me well, you know that Queen is one of my all-time favorite bands.  And this guy (who also happens to be the lead singer for the band Downhere) sounds JUST like Freddie Mercury!  Say hello to Marc Martel. 
• Behance is a great place for creatives and artists and entreprenuers alike to find tips, help, and ideas.  Their blog, 99%, is also chock full of videos, articles, and images.  If you don't already Behance, you should!  This particular entry is their "best of" for 2011.  
• Another post from Behance -- captivating.  Check out these photos of light. (Literally!)
• And last, but not least this week, is this commerical.  It's been around awhile, but if you haven't already seen it, you're going to want to.  Perhaps the most creative commerical I've ever seen.  If I didn't want a Lexus before seeing it, I do now!   

Telling Stories Artistically

by Ken Bauer

To use artistic, creative ways to communicate God’s story and our story, one of the first things we need to do is to have a very good understanding of each one so we can use different words, analogies and metaphors in our communication so people look at God’s truth in different ways so they can’t say “I’ve heard it all before.” We also need to express artistic creativity using multimedia because that is what speaks to the generation we are now trying to reach. It must be artistic and creative enough to stand out from all the lies the world is trying to convey.

2012 and January All Team!

Hello all and Happy 2012!  I'm truly looking forward to this year and all that the Lord has for us!

I wanted to give a quick reminder for our January All Team Meeting.  It is next Thursday, January 12th 6:30-8:00 PM.  If you serve at the Cedar Falls Campus, meet in the Lobby at the Cedar Falls Campus.  If you serve at the Waterloo Campus, meet at First Lutheran Church.

All Team Meetings are our chance to gather once a month as a Campus, share a meal and build community with our teams.  So, if you're a rotation team member, alternate or just interested in this ministry... this invite is to you!

A note from Abby

by Abby Stevens

Friends –

January has arrived!  Can you believe how quickly last year passed?

We’ve seen a lot of change in the last year, and 2012 is shaping up in some similar ways.  As a church and as a ministry, we’re gearing up to launch our 4^th Campus.  The search is on for the staff who will lead the Prairie Lakes Church Grinnell Campus into the future, and we’re busy as proverbial bees around here, adjusting and planning for the on-boarding of new staff and for the adjustments we’ll need to make to accommodate new people and new processes.  We’re also having lots of good conversations about the best way for W&P to support all the change that’s coming down the chute. 

Can I be honest?  There are days when I think, “Enough!  Enough with all the changes!  Just when I think we’re starting to get something figured out . . . bam, change!”  But let’s be totally honest – change is always just around the corner. 

The older I get, the more I find myself living in a love/hate relationship with change.  I’m more aware now than I’ve ever been that change is not just inevitable – it’s truly one of the few constants in life.  But I also find that I’m more set in my ways and resistant to change as I get older and the desire for security and settledness becomes stronger.  Anyone else know what I’m talking about?

But change will find us, and bucking against it or fighting it only hurts us in the end.  I think of the words of the Lord to his people in Isaiah 43: “Forget the former things; do not dwell on the past.  See, I am doing a new thing!  Now it springs up; do you not perceive it?  I am making a way in the wilderness and streams in the wasteland.”  How precious and beautiful those words are to me.

He is doing a new thing.  We can count on that.  Corrie ten Boom once said, “Never be afraid to trust an unknown future to a known God.”  And then there’s the old, beautiful hymn . . . “Many things about tomorrow, I don’t seem to understand.  But I know who holds tomorrow, and I know who holds my hand.”

Such wisdom. 

Along with tomorrow, change will come.  But when we surrender ourselves to the understanding that change is necessary and an anticipated part of all aspects of life – and that includes ministry – we can begin to step out of fear and hesitation and lean into trust and positive action.

I remember once or twice when I was a little girl, my parents bundling us up, sticking us in the car, and not telling us where we were going.  All our questions were answered with an excited, “It’s a surprise!”  We were squirmy with anticipation – we trusted Mom and Dad to take us someplace amazing.  We didn’t question the route they’d take to get us there we didn’t feel the need to become back-seat drivers we just stared out the windows, trying to figure out where we were going.  We enjoyed the ride.

Faith like a child is really all that’s needed most of the time, isn’t it?

I’m excited about the things we’re looking forward to.  I feel a great sense of anticipation for what God is doing and the new things that will spring up in front of us in 2012, both as a church and as a ministry.  I have no doubt that we’ll struggle, that we’ll have difficult moments, that we’ll want to stop or quit or go back to the way things used to be . . . but I also have no doubt that God’s name will be made famous in 2012.  And we get to be part of that, whatever it may look like or wherever it may take us.

Let’s enjoy the ride, friends!