Welcome to the blog, friends from the 2011 Inner Journey spiritual disciplines retreat! What a great time. I loved spending a weekend in worship with you all.

Below is the resource list I mentioned at the retreat for practicing prayer and the daily offices.

Click on any title to view that book at Amazon.

The Divine Hours: Prayers for Autumn & Wintertime	The Divine Hours: Prayers for Springtime
The Divine Hours: Prayers for Summertime	The Divine Hours: Pocket Edition
Celtic Daily Prayer	Prayers Across the Centuries
Mosaic Bible Imi. Leather	Mosaic Bible Hardcover

(click the pics for larger versions)

Especially if you aren’t used to working with lighting, it’s easy to default to traditional methods of changing the look of your stage. Don’t get me wrong; sometimes building a set, repainting walls, or working with huge yardages of fabric can be exactly the thing, and the result can look really cool. On the other hand, that can also cost a lot of money, require lots of shopping trips, and consume massive amounts of staff time & volunteer time. One of the best things about lighting is that it allows for major look changes at a fraction of the time and cost.

One of our lighting problems has been the cream-colored chancel wall that backs our stage. It’s roughly the same color as human skin, so when we tried to light up people’s faces with the par cars far above the stage, the light spill on the wall would work against us, making everyone’s faces blend in to a cream-colored mess. For us, the nontraditional answer was to light the chancel differently.

The patterns on the back wall in the pictures above (and in the previous post about Easter) were made by putting easily-changeable gobos (metal disc patterns) in two ellipsoidal lights mounted on our back wall. The colors you see in the pics are readily available gels inserted in frames mounted to the lights. Especially if you buy used equipment, it’s not particularly expensive or difficult to get looks like the ones above. If you want to give it a shot at your church, I’ll be glad to try to answer any questions you have about equipment, sources, etc.

Here is a straight-off-the-board, raw recording from Sunday:

…and here is a chord chart (PDF).

We used the title track from this album behind a video we made recently.  Our church just finished the series “Prodigal God” based on the book by Tim Keller. The final message in the series is both a celebration and an invitation: “Come to the Table”. It’s about how God rescued us and invited us to feast, just as the father did in Jesus’ parable.  He redeems our failures, turning our dust and ashes into beautiful things—an infinitely costly, divine alchemy. It has always been that way; from the moment he formed Adam from dust to the Great Redemption Of All Things at the end of time, what our God touches is transformed.  We showed this video just before we celebrated communion together.

Credit where credit is due: The sand artist footage is Mark Demel performing at Willow Creek; that footage is available here. The time-lapse flowers are courtesy of stopchiyski from this amazing youtube video. The music, as I said above, is “Beautiful Things” by Gungor. The main points of posting this are: 1) to get churches and creative arts folks thinking about creative ways to collage/reuse older material like we did with this sand painting footage, and 2) to convince you to go buy Gungor’s new album. :)