The Last Couple of days . . . .

So this Yesterday at church was pretty awesome. We did a cover song by Flyleaf called Fully Alive. Allison, one of the students lead the song and she did an amazing Job. A lot of the students gave many compliments, it was cool. It's also cool that we've been starting to do cover songs each. Next week, Jay, another student and I are doing Crazy by Gnarles Barkley. He's singing it and I'm just playing guitar for it. It's going to be awesome. The Flyleaf song was the Drop D and that's the first time I've ever played a song in that tuning, not to mention that much distortion, I borrow Brad's guitar and amp. I would love to buy it's pretty awesome stuff and it's pretty expensive. Plus it's a lot to carry around. I thought since I'm not playing drums all that much anymore I wouldn't have to be carrying around 70 cases weighing 400 pounds each. But yeah, It went really cool. This picture is actually from the week before when it was an all student lead service. They did awesome. The slide on the screens is from a game we played called Russian Roul-EGG. Some of the eggs were hard boiled and some were raw. We had the students pick an egg and smash it over their head. haha. You can imagine the rest. I told Brad it would be funny to not even hard boil some, just make them all raw, but that would be mean. The winner, who didn't crack the raw egg over their head, won a StuCo T-shirt. Let's back up a little while to Thursday. Thursday is our staff meeting day at the office. Normally it lasts a couple of hours but since we've been working on AA, it's been lasting a lot longer. I must say, I came on this internship at an amazing time. I am learning SO much. SO MUCH. I can't even begin to tell you. I'm sitting in a room of amazing leaders and church planters, who have done it before, and hearing them vision cast and plan and work on marketing strategies and ideas and money and what if's and on and on and on and on. I'm so pumped because this is information I'll know for the next church plant. I'm seeing it from the inside, and it's amazing. Thursdays have quickly become one of my favorite days, if not my favorite day. So this thursday after the meeting we went down to Ann Arbor to go to a PACT meeting, this is a meeting where a lot of the pastors and leaders in Ann Arbor meet to pray and encourage each other. They meet regularly and it was really encouraging. We met at Kirk Schneeman's (sp? Sorry Kirk!) church. He's pastor of a church called frontline that meets in his building which is called the Boardwalk Creative Center. It's a center of creativity that businesses from across the country use to come up with ideas for products and basically, the community uses it for a lot of other events. It's a really cool place. We had the last AA service fest "concert" in this building. Anywho, Kirk's a really cool guy and it's been a pleasure to get to know him. At the meeting some of the pastors stood up and told about what God is doing in AA and there was even an Messianic Jew stand up and give a short message, that was powerful!
This is some of the bullentins we had made up for this meeting and for the future meetings. We forgot them and had to go back to get them. They weren't folded so we had to fold them on the way done. That's Dave driving and I love his minivan. It's got leather and has a lot of room. Steve is sitting next to him, Joy is in front of me and Jeff is sitting next to me in the back. He was AIMing Dave Webber the whole time about the website. I love iPhones. Period. Sue also went too but she must of drove herself. I'm watching Jurassic park right now as I blog. I'm pretty sure I watched this last week at the same
time when I was blogging. It's the first one, it's a great movie. Definitely going to be a classic. "Spared no expense!" This is a picture of the meeting at the Boardwalk Creative Center. The food they had was catered and it was mexican food and it was pretty good. If you want to know anymore information about PACT just shoot me an email and I'll be glad to give you more information. After the meeting we helped Kirk tear down and then started on our way home. I had band practice for StuCo that night so I just basically worked more on the fully alive song and the worship song and
Getting used to an electric guitar, I primarily played acoustic on Sundays, and working on the worship songs. If I don't know them, how can I lead them?? At 5 I taught Jordan drums right up until back practice. That kid has some skills and a work ethic. I showed him some pretty complicated stuff last week and but this thursday he had it down. Really impressive. He kind of reminds me of myself when I was his age. His dad is a pastor and church planter, and so is my dad. Ricky was playing drums that week, Zack was playing bass and brought Kim, and I was leading and playing electric. Also, Allison came and so did her new Boyfriend, oh crap I forgot his name. I was to say Mike? Anyways, he's a really sharp kid and very polite. I'm proud of her. Practice went well and after Jordan and I (he stayed for rehersal) went to White Castle. If you haven't had their breakfast, STOP WHAT YOU ARE DOING AND GO GET SOME. RIGHT NOW. They serve it all day long now and it's amazing. They use real eggs, not the junk beaters kind of whatever that is. It's so good. Then I went home. Thursdays are always long days. On friday Jeff and I had an appointment in AA with New Life church to check out their sound equipment and stage set up for Sunday night. This was to make sure everything would run smoothly for the Discovery Meeting Sunday night. The picture is of the driveway next to the church, I took it because of the trees. The building is the brick building on the right. Their sound board is a digital sound board, which we've never really worked with and for the most part is pretty rare, I would say. Basically, instead of knobs and sliders and faders, it's digital, it's a touch screen. Sure, they have some knobs and faders but they only control that which is on your screen. In a regular sound board the signal flow comes in the channel insert then is affected as it goes through the channel. it's hands on, very easy to effect the sound, eq it, etc... With a digital sound board, The volume fader, for example can control a million different things. It's a "matrix." It can be programmed to whatever you want it to do. Basically, they're a waste of time and super expensive and other than the infinite possibilites of options and customization, It's not very good. Also, for our church, we have a lot of different volunteers running sound each week, not to mention it's stored in the trailor all week long so that would be such a headache training people on it and it would last about 3 weeks being in the trailor with our -130 degree winters. It was cool, the New Life staff (New Life is a college aged church in AA that has about 600-800 students each week come, their church is in an old sorority house right on U of M's campus. They recently just converted the house and they have amazing space and equipement. They have a very open hand and are helping us greatly with our new church plant. New Life really doesn't have a children's ministry or HS ministry or a lot of ministries for the non College student so they happy we're coming along side them to reach the demographic that really they aren't reaching. Like wise, we're not eagle eying UM students so we would point them to New Life if our church didn't really meet their needs at the time.) I went to New Life for about 6 months a couple of years a go when I went to school in Ann Arbor and 242 really didn't have a lot of college students going, and I must stay, it's an amazing church. We met with their arts guy and he showed us a lot of what the sound board can do. It's pretty impressive. After that we helped them pack up for their fall retreat, they basically cleared the stage and put it all in a trailor. They were saying it was so much work, and we were like, "We do this every week, and we have 3 freaking huge trailers!!" It was pretty funny. They're cool people. After that we went to Briarwood mall to eat chipotle and get a new iphone power cord, apparently they catch fire and Apple recalled all of them. It was free so whatever. When we were standing in the line of Chipotle Jeff and I saw the California Pizza company across the way and he treated me because I've never been there before. Surprisingly, it was amazing. Jeff got some sausage one and I got the shrimp scampi pizza. It was amazing. Check out these pictures. . . .














After that I went back to the office and programmed the service in Media
shout and printed off all the cue sheets for Sunday. I actually stayed at the office until about 7pm. Then I just went home and chilled for a while. Saturday, well, see the last post. That's the trailer fiasco. Then on Saturday night I went out with people from our Cell group and we went down to Ann Arbor and ate at Mongolian BBQ. I've never eaten there before and it was really good. It was for Stephanie's birthday. Tim Stockdale and I rode down there together and got to know each other more. On Sunday night was the AA discovery meeting. We all got there around 3:30 and starting setting up our equipment. I was playing drums that night and the rest of the adult band was playing as well. Jason, Jim, Jeff, and Ashley played Keys. The sound board caused a lot of sound issues, I couldn't really hear anything and I didn't use a click track, because they couldn't patch it into my monitors, and they couldn't even find my monitor. Stupid board. But for the most part, you didn't even notice. We all have played in places a lot worse than that. It went awesome and we had a pretty good turn out. I'm terrible at estimations so I'm not even going to begin to say. I'll find out later. Here's a picture of Dave vision casting. Alright, I'm going to cook some food and
take some aspirin, my head is killing me. I can no idea why this is now blue and underlined, anywho, I have financial peace university tonight with Tara and I actually look forward to it. I've already taken it but Tara hasn't so we're going together. Until the next blog. . . .