BabuLife

Birthday Bash

Thank you to my friends for the surprise during rehearsal!  I had no idea what was coming.  Apparently my wife had been working on this for about a month.  Thanks to the McMahon's for the fantastic Star Wars cupcakes!  Awesome job!!! Thanks to Brian and Marie for making the following video...yes...I was tearing up.  It was awesome.  It's nice to be loved.  Here's to another 34 years!  Enjoy the video:

Bloggers I'd Like to Meet

I'm coming up this June on my third year of blogging.  Over that time I've met several different bloggers thru the web, followed different blogs, quit following blogs and continue to meet new bloggers online.  However, I've never met any face to face.  I've IM'd with a couple but never had the opportunity to meet any.  If I had the chance, I'd love to meet the following:

• Rick Kirkpatrick - I don't even remember how I ran across his site.  Probably thru clicking links on other people's sites.  He's a worship leader in California that I've had a few IM conversations with about worship teams and worship organization.  He's also a fellow Star Wars geek.
• Bobby Marchessault - A kindred worship spirit who I've followed for a couple of years.  Another California dude who I'd love to meet.  Plus I'm in his top 5 blogs!
• Jeff Miller - A Texas blogger who connected with me back in about February of '06.  He's got a great blog over at Consuming Worship and has a heart for helping connect worship leaders through the web.  It'll be interesting to see what he does in his desire to make it even easier for worship leads to network online.

These are just a few of the fellow bloggers I'd like to meet sometime. Go check 'em out!

Worship Confessional: 4/6/08

This is a quick one this week everyone. 

Great day!  Third week in a row with Lynnora on violin.  She plays that "Glory of it All" solo wonderfully!  Great job to the team this week.

Here's the worship set list:

• How Can I Keep From Singing? (Bb) by Chris Tomlin - I love this song. It'd been awhile since we have played this one.  I'm especially fond of the bridge " I can sing in the troubled times...sing when I win...I will sing with the angels and the saints around the throne"...Just awesome.
• Salvation is Here (B) by Hillsong United - I've been hearing from people in the church that this is their fave to sing right now.
• Glorious (D) by Chris Tomlin - It's been awhile for this one too.  I've often thought about lowering the key on this one as it might be a little high for the men folk.  However, they seem to do ok singing it an octive lower.  Great song.
• Hosanna (E) by Hillsong United - One of my current faves.  We rolled this out on Palm Sunday.  I love the bridge on this song.  "Heal my heart and make it clean, open up my eyes to the things unseen show me how to love like You have loved me..."
• The Glory of it All (B) by David Crowder - THIS is my current fave above all.  I love singing this, and love playing it.  I play my other guitar on this one since I tuned everything down a half step to get that ringing sound in the key of B while playing it in the C chord structure. Great lyrics and sound on this tune.

Quick notes about Sunday:

1. Jason Henderson - Gave a brief story about how God has been working in his life through reading the Bible daily.  Seriously...Jason did AWESOME.  I think he could be a preacher some day.   Thanks Jason for sharing your story!
2. Sam Albertson - Did you see that new guitar?  I have no idea what kind it is...so Sam...drop a comment and let me know what that's called.  It's dangerous. I need to snap a photo and post it here.
3. Scott Stanley - Utility man jumped on the guitar again.  Thanks dude!!! Great job!
4. Sequencing  - Chris did some of this on "The Glory of it All" which was great.  Playing to that keeps the band a little more precise.  Great job to Thunderfoot for keeping us there.
5. Week 2 of Indy - Tim had a great message on three important ways to read scripture. Looking thru the glasses of "Historical", "Doctrinal", and "Personal" applications.  If you've never heard this taught...you need to listen here.
6. Sickness - Once again, one of my daughters was sick in the night.  I was feeling it during first service worship.  A little dizzy while up there, but praise God we finished up without a hurl! :)
7. Video Doog - Came through again with a brand new bump for the series.  Awesome job!
8. Marie - Thanks for running for the pancakes that we ended up not using.  Grace staff...feel free to have frozen pancakes in the freezer!

BabuLife Cleaning

Lately my blog has been feeling a bit "over saturated" with content in my sidebars.  There are links to blogs where folks are no longer posting (Gracer blogs included), there are some things I added which really aren't necessary and have actually caused me to receive more spam from bloggers who really don't care about my content but want to just drive up their hits making me their "friend".  It's time to change.

Over the coming month I'll be revamping the side bars and possibly taking advantage of the Typepad page option so I can clean up the look of this site.  So here are my questions for you frequent readers of this blog:

• Blog rolls. If you haven't updated your blog in the past two months, I'm planning to remove your link.  If you want me to keep it, drop a comment and let me know.
• Blog Love. If you have this blog listed on a blog roll, please lemme know so I can check out your site and return the love on a future reciprocated blog roll.
• Content. What do you like most content-wise here on BabuLife?  Are you interested in more personal stories?  Are you a Worship Confessional only follower?  Pretty much whatever?  Just thinking about where I should spend more time on this site and what is more profitable apart from giving me a place to just write.

Thanks for reading!  Thanks for linking!

Babu

MuxTape.com

You remember them if you were a child of the 80's.  The classic mix tape with all your favorite tunes.  Check out MuxTape.com and get yours.  You can listen to my current online MuxTape at BabuLife.MuxTape.com.

Enjoy!

HT: MudPuppy

Sporty Gets Saved

Last night as I was putting the kids to bed, we sat on their bedroom floor reading a Disney story.  "Baby Spice" (that's what we call her on the web so you creepy people won't know our kids names) brought a Golden Book to me about the life of Jesus to read next.  When we got half way through the story, Sporty (my oldest at 8 years) asked if she could ask Jesus into her heart. Interesting moment.

She's asked this question in the past, but it always came after hearing one of her friends had done it.  When she would ask, I would always tell her that we can talk about it if she asked me another time.  If she would ask, I would give an answer and instantly the subject changed as if she didn't quite grasp it.  This time was different.

After IGNITE on Wednesday eve, she asked Addie if she could ask Jesus into her heart.  I was not home and Addie didn't want me to miss out on talking with her about it.  She told Sporty to ask me the next day.  So last night, she asked and I told her maybe we should wait until tomorrow...but no...she said it needed to happen now.  Much different response.

Last night my oldest prayed to receive Christ into her heart confessing that she knew and understood that she needed Him as her savior.  We got on our knees together and prayed...while her two younger sisters were also on their knees quietly listening.

It was an amazing moment that I don't think she'll ever forget...nor will I.

Tony Morgan's "Your Branding Sucks"

Tony Morgan's got my head spinning on some posts he's been doing on church marketing. The goal two years ago with the change in our Grace Church website was to carry the torch that our previous web designer initiated.  Molding the website from a "Grace member tool" to a "first time visitor front door" was the initial goal.  When we revamped the site, we took the next step gearing the site to communicate the answers to the questions every first time visitor wants to know.

1. What's going on this weekend when I visit?
2. What do you offer my kids?
3. What do you offer my youth?
4. What do you offer midweek?

When these questions were answered, we then took the menu options and created them to communicate the "next steps" at Grace.  If you're someone who wants to go beyond the weekend, what steps should you take?  The answer was our "Core Classes (called Cross Training)" then "Small Groups", "Volunteering" and "Events".  These are major connecting points to the church.

We've made in my opinion some great strides in focusing our communication from an individual ministry priority to more of a church-wide communication strategy, eliminating a "noisy" type of website.  But more needs to be done.  We need to be efficient and effective at meeting the web-site visitor where they are at.  A good website, and really communications in general, joins the conversation already taking place vs. creating one assuming that the community will want to join in.  What do people really care about when they visit a website?  And how do people prefer to see that info?  "Google" homepage (less clutter & noise) vs. "Yahoo" homepage (cram as much info on one page as possible).

Tony Morgan has a great post on not branding "sub-ministries" without making it clear they are ministries of the church. Some bold stuff here that rocks the world of ministry leaders.  Check out the snippet below then read the full post here:

In case you follow this blog in a feed reader, you may want to check out the comments on this post regarding branding. This is a great conversation. I'd like to go back and respond specifically to Jared's question. Jared, first of all, what you're witnessing is the freedom Perry has given me to shoot straight on this blog. You get my honest take of ministry and life. It isn't just the company line.

You'll never see me publicly question Perry's leadership or vision, but I will reveal, from time to time, some areas where we've acknowledged we need to improve. One of those areas is how we handle branding. Another example where I've admitted we have fallen short and need improvement is our web strategy. I'm not going to try to sugarcoat it--our web presence is poor right now, but we're taking steps to get it right.

Specifically, on the topic of branding, here are some additional thoughts to respond to your observations...

• It makes sense for us to brand a series over the church itself. That's no different than Fox branding American Idol ahead of the network. People are interested in following American Idol--they're not interested in following the Fox network. That's why we brand "The Man Series" ahead of NewSpring Church.
• It also makes sense to brand certain environments that reach unique target audiences like children and church leaders. Trying to encourage and equip leaders through the Unleash Conference attracts a larger audience than if we tried to promote the same experience under the umbrella of NewSpring Church. It's the same principle that has led some churches to drop denominational references in their name in order to reach a broader audience.
• We're making a concerted effort, though, to make sure we don't promote any sub-brands without making it clear that it's "a ministry of NewSpring Church." We haven't done a good job of that in the past.
• We're also trying to thin out all of the unique sub-brands we've used in the past. For example, we decided that "Fuse" and "Ignite" were meaningless to the students we're trying to reach, and, we didn't want to start branding those ministries ahead of NewSpring Church itself. With that in mind, you may have noticed that references to "Fuse" and "Ignite" have faded in recent months. (And, by the way, student ministry attendance is up.)

Read on . . .