First of all, many thanks to the Worship Central team for compiling and making this course available to everyone.  I can see us running this periodically with each batch of new volunteers.

Our team just completed the second session “Encountering God” on Monday past.

Here are some of my thoughts so far on the course:

• I love our team getting together outside of rehearsals and Sunday mornings and just getting to know each other better.
• It is great to worship together in song.  Most other times we are focused on the arrangement, or a vocal part, or whatever.  Not at these sessions.  We just play the song and worship God together.
• I am loving the discussions that are birthed out of the course material.  It’s really making us think deeply about what we do and why we do it.
• I love (ok, maybe not ‘love’) being challenged to personalize areas of the talk by sharing a story that will help re-enforce a point.  This stretches me, but also gives my team a glimpse into my heart and vision.
• Praying together is awesome – not just a prayer at the end, but opening the room up and having our team pray together.

Here are some things I think would make the course even better:

• Each session of the Worship Central course is overflowing with information, but I think the main talk is a little long.  For future sessions I will be trying to relay the same information in a shorter time.
• Indications in the notes when to change the slide would be useful (although in fairness, I could probably do it myself if I spent more time prepping!)
• I know DVDs  for this course are planned.  I think this would be perfect and look forward to seeing (and using) those.

We use ProPresenter 4 at Story Church.  The song slides are created on different computers and emailed during the week.

I have just recently discovered a ProPresenter feature that allows you to sync your library with a folder on your computer.  This is great if you have multiple computers on a local network, but make this folder a dropbox folder and you have instant library synchronization with anyone you share that dropbox folder with!  Nerds rejoice everywhere!

This is perfect for me, as I can create slides on different computers while always having the latest library to start off from.

To set it up:

1. Sign up to dropbox (yes, that’s an affiliate link – click here if you prefer not to give me extra space!) if you haven’t already and install the client on your computer.
2. Create a folder within your dropbox account where your library files will be stored.  This new folder will be replicated to your computer.
3. In ProPresenter, go to preferences and the Sync tab.  Select the folder from your dropbox and the sync type you need.  I went with Bidirectional as changes can be made to the library from any computer.
4. If you need your media guy also to access the library, share out the dropbox folder with them first of all (using the dropbox website), and then ask them to perform step 3 above.

Continue Reading…

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?

Check out this new Worship Tutorials web site from my pal, and Raleigh Worship Leader, Brian Wahl.  On the site you’ll find instructional videos, chord charts and even online guitar lessons!  The site is designed with a snazzy navigation system to help you find what you are looking for very quickly.

Recently at Story Church we started a weekly program called Growth Track.  There are four parts to it, and at the start of each month we return to the beginning and host parts 1-4 all over again.

The fourth part of the Growth Track is designed to train new volunteers for their chosen serving area within Story Church.  The document I have attached here (in both PDF and Word) is what I use to talk through with new Worship Team volunteers during this training session.

The document starts off with our mission statement, and delves a little the vision for Worship within Story Church.  After that I talk through some (mostly common sense) guidelines.

Feel free to download, modify and use within your own churches.

I’d love to hear feedback on anything I may have missed, or suggestions on how to better this document.

It’s deliberately kept sparse.  In fact, I generated a more concise version of this for people to take away with them as a reminder of the key points.  As discussed in a previous post, I want a lot of our team behavior to stem from knowing our church vision more than remembering a set a rules.

• Worship Team Training Word Document
• Worship Team Training PDF Document

What’s Next

I want to tell you about a new blog from Bobby & Kristen Gilles called My Song In The Night.  Bobby and Kristen attend Sojourn Community Church in Louisville, Kentucky.

As well as a good source for Bobby’s and Kristen’s music , the site aims to do the following:

My old church, New Horizon Church in Durham NC, is throwing a Worship Night on September 30th at 7pm. You will be led in worship by Jon Keaton and band.  It should be an awesome night and is open to everyone!

I’m heading to a conference at the end of September called The Forge Conference which takes place in Ocean Grove, NJ.

The following is a message from Joel Klampert about the conference.  We’d really love to see you there.

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This may or may not be some kind of setup but it is packed full of goodness.