Story Church Set List – 22 Jan 2012 #sundaysetlists

January 26, 2012 in Set Lists with 2 Comments

Jesus Does Maths
Creative Commons License photo credit: LivingOS

Wow!  It was such a powerful morning on Sunday.  The core of the message was the Parable of the Unforgiving Servant.  You can read the whole story in Matthew 18:21-35.  Our Heavenly King paid our debt.  He wiped the slate clean.

Because of that we’re expected to forgive others who may wrong us.  The debt we think we’re owed does not even start to compare to the debt Jesus paid on our behalf.  If you read the parable, you can understand why the king was pretty miffed.  After the king showed the servant so much mercy, the servant went out immediately to chase some insignificant debt that was owed to him.

How could his heart not have been overflowing with gratitude for the huge burden he had just been freed from?

On Sunday, after the sermon, we gave an opportunity to the congregation to forgive someone in their lives.  We laid out some cards at the front for them to fill in with some details and ink stamps to stamp “PAID” over it.  The response was really great and people were deeply affected by taking part.

  • Everlasting God – Brenton Brown (A)
  • Our God – Chris Tomlin (A)
  • You Are My King (Amazing Love) – Billy Foote (D)
  • Beautiful Things – Gungor (D)
  • Great I Am – New Life Worship (D)

While I listened to the sermon on Sunday, I couldn’t help be reminded of how the Queen talked about forgiveness in her Christmas speech.

Story Church Set List – 15 Jan 2012 #sundaysetlists

January 16, 2012 in Set Lists with 0 Comments

  • Your Grace Is Enough (G) – Chris Tomlin
  • Your Love Never Fails (G) – Chris McClarney
  • God With Us (G) – Mercy Me
  • Came To My Rescue (G) – Hillsong
  • How Great Is Our God (G) – Chris Tomlin

Story Church Set List – 08 Jan 2012 #sundaysetlists

January 16, 2012 in Set Lists with 0 Comments

  • Forever  - Chris Tomlin (A)
  • Like A Lion – Daniel Bashta (A)
  • God Is Able – Hillsong (B)
  • Never Once – Matt Redman (B)
  • Great I Am – New Life Worship (D)

God Is In This Place and I Didn’t Even Know It

January 13, 2012 in Thoughts with 0 Comments

Sometimes (ok, a lot of the time) us worship leaders can come away thinking there wasn’t much evidence of God moving/working through the set list or service.

It doesn’t matter what we think.

I was gently reminded this morning, from reading Genesis 28:16, God can be at work in a big way and I could be totally unaware.

My God Is So Great

January 5, 2012 in Random with 2 Comments

My God is so great, so strong and so mighty, there’s nothing my God cannot do.

Something great happened today. It’s funny that the first song to pop into my head was a kid’s song. Maybe I should introduce it on Sunday and get somebody up to ‘do the actions’?

YouTube Preview Image

Download the mp3 here.

Video: Create In Me A Clean Heart – Keith Green (Cover)

link January 5, 2012 in Music with 5 Comments

snowjunkie.wordpress.com is dead

January 4, 2012 in Random with 1 Comment

It’s been probably two years now since moving to alastairvance.com and all this time, my old blog was still up and running.  During the move a lot of old posts were still pointing back to snowjunkie.wordpress.com for images, etc.  Well, no more.  I found a handy wordpress plugin for replacing text and with one (or two) sweeps, all ties were cut and the blog is gone.

 

My Favorite iPhone Photo Apps in 2011

January 2, 2012 in Resources with 3 Comments

I love taking photos on my iPhone. It’s always there, enabling me to capture any event, planned or unplanned. This post is about the iPhone apps I use to edit and share the photos online.

QuadCamera
QuadCamera was one of the first photo apps I purchased.  It was pretty cool at the time and allowed to take a quick succession of photos and arrange them 2×2 or 4×1, etc.  I don’t use it any more at all.  I prefer to have more control over the individual photos and arrange them with another app instead.

Flickr
Any photos I post via Instagram goes straight on to Flickr.  I like to keep a copy of photos on Flickr because of all the neat Flickr plugins you get for WordPress.  My photos page is simply a plugin pointed at my Flickr account and displays my last 100 or so images.  Maintenance free!

Hipstamatic
Hipstamatic is a cool app.  I used to use it constantly.  You select a film type and a lens type before you take a shot.  One of it’s great features is also one of it’s drawbacks.  When you capture an image, although it’s usually a work of art, you are never quite sure what you’re going to get.  This is so good if you are trying to create a certain feel for your image.  Another drawback for me is that you can not load external images in and process them.

Camera+
This app is seriously the elephant’s danglies.  I love Camera+.  If you pick up any of applications mentioned here, make it this one.  You won’t regret it.  This replaced Hipstamatic for me.  It’s worth the price alone for their clarity filter.  There are plenty more cool photo filters to pick from.  You can take photos with the app, or load in photos from your photo library.  I use Camera+ with almost every photo I take on my iPhone.  If there was one improvement I would make it would be more control over the tilt-shift and depth of field filters.

Pro HDR
You don’t know what HDR is?  Check out this Wikipedia article. I bought this app when I had the iPhone 3GS.  Since owning the iPhone 4S which has a built-in HDR option I have not used Pro HDR.  It’s still a great app and I have been really happy with some of the results.  It works great as the sun is going down.  The iPhone 4S HDR option is a lot faster when processing than Pro HDR.

PhotoShake
Don’t need QuadCamera any more when you have an app like PhotoShake.  Load in photos from your photo library and arrange them in many different layouts and save as one image.  I normally edit the photos and apply filters before loading into PhotoShake, but it has it’s own range of photo editing options as well.  I often use PhotoShake to prepare photos for publishing to Instagram.

ColorSplash
There’s a couple of apps that do what ColorSplash does, but I think this app is one of the better ones.  You can take a photo and make only parts of it in color.  You can get really cool results with this effect.  One of my favorite images I made with it is Noah with a pair of googles on.  A few apps were involved in making the finished image, but ColorSplash was used to put color back in his googles.

AutoStitch
Panoramas! Everyone loves a panorama.  Back in the late 90′s, I worked in website design and everyone had to have a 360 panorama.  I mean everyone!  They are not as popular anymore, but AutoStitch still makes a great addition to my photo app collection.  I don’t make many complete 360s, but if I want to make a wider, or taller shot then AutoStitch comes in very useful indeed.

ToonPaint
This app was free when I picked it up.  It loads a photo from your photo library and cartoon-izes it.  I was quite impressed with the results, I loved it.  I used it with pictures of my wife and my daughter.  I have not tried it with any other type of photo, but I think it does portrait type photos very well.  See the photo of Liz here – isn’t she lovely? ( <- brownie points).

 

Luminance
Another app I picked up for free.  It has quite a few filters available, but it doesn’t really replace Camera+ for me.

Photogene
I like Photogene.  I bought it specifically for it’s ability to apply filters/effects to certain parts of the image.  For example, in Noah’s Googles picture, I was able to load it in and apply a blur in the background only.  I hadn’t seen that in other apps before.  Photogene is pretty comprehensive and I believe the iPad version is pretty cool.  The user interface is very slick, but may take a while to get used to.  There are a lot of filter options for your photos, including frame styles.

Instagram
If you like taking photos on your iPhone you need to be on Instagram if you’re not already!  It’s social networking for photos.  Post your artwork online and communicate with other users by posting comments on their photos.  I’ve been using Instagram for a while now and absolutely love it.  I wish it had a web interface to browse the photos – if anyone knows of one, let me know.

 

Any Missing?
Have I missed any must have iPhone photo app?  What are your favorites?

What Was Your Favorite Worship Song of 2011?

January 1, 2012 in Music with 4 Comments

I think mine has to be “Like A Lion” by Daniel Bashta - who by the way, has a free download on NoiseTrade at the moment.

Change, the catalyst for Change

January 1, 2012 in Thoughts with 2 Comments

Sometimes it takes a change to occur before I make a change.  The latter change is usually one I should have made long ago.

When I was at high school I wasn’t as open about being a Christian as I should have been. After graduating from High School I moved to another school to do my A-Level examinations. I decided to use the fresh start to be more open about my beliefs.

Back in 2006 I let myself get too busy with work and other tasks. It was affecting my health and my family. Again change came – an opportunity to work in the United States. I used the move to help me re-prioritize and put family first again.

I’m sure there are many more examples in the past, but once again, now in the present, I’m faced with change. We’re moving to a new neighborhood in a couple of weeks.

In my current neighborhood I have not made enough effort to build proper relationships. I have not made enough effort to share Jesus with others. Sure, I stick a Story Church sign in my lawn once in a while and just hope one of my neighbors ask me about it. I’m not particularly happy about that approach – nor has it seemed to be successful so far.

So, I hope to use this change, this move, to be a better neighbor – to socialize and get to know the people around us on our street – to represent Jesus well.

Our God is all about second chances and God knows I’ve had plenty of them.

Have you any examples of where you have taken advantage of change in the past?  Do you have change ahead of you right now?  How are you going to make the most of it?

Have you just moved to a new area and know it’s time to check out a church?  Maybe it’s a while since you attended church but have made a new year resolution to come back?  Or have you just changed jobs and know it’s time to be a better example of Jesus in the workplace?

Embrace the God given opportunities.

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