Greg Atkinson

This weekend was good and I enjoyed the opportunity to not think about our building project for a couple of days. Friday night I took my son to his first ever football game. It was a local high school and they are very good (I try to see them play a few times each year). They were winning 42 to 0 at halftime, which was a good time to leave and get my son to bed. He thought he had seen an entire game. His eyes were wide the whole time and it was a true joy for me to hold his hand and walk him into the stadium.

Saturday, my oldest daughter went ice skating for the first time with her mom and I stayed home to watch the other 2 kids. Saturday night we had a special dinner at my church to give core people an update on our building project. Several building tours went on and there was a lot of excitement about this special season we’re in. Also, our worship pastor (Scott), returned from leading worship at a Willow Creek conference in Germany. I hadn’t seen him in 2 weeks, so it was good to have him back home. We have a lot of catching up to do!

Sunday was a different kind of day for our church. We had an abbreviated service – in the service we gave everyone a sneak peek at what a typical Sunday will be like in the new reality. Not only are we building 3 new buildings, but as soon as we move into them, we start a huge renovation of our current worship space, which will be an amazing kids’ theater (like KidStuff at North Point), plus 2 other smaller kids’ theaters. We did a short music and preaching set, then played a video of KidStuff at North Point to cast the vision, heard from our Kids Pastor, then had our new FX Live (FX is for Family Experience) team do a short portion of a typical family production service with a host, actors, singing and dancing. It was a ton of fun and well received.

After that, we had a huge tent set up in the parking lot and after a challenge “to get plugged in and serve” from our pastor, we ended the service early to allow our people to go out to the tent, fellowship, eat (we had great snacks/food), sign up to serve (we had every ministry represented at different tables) and just have fun (we had a DJ playing music the whole time).

In between the morning and evening services I came home and we had a 7 year old birthday party for my oldest daughter. It was a fairy party and my wife did a great job decorating the house and making fairy wings for all the girls. I went back to church later on that afternoon for our night service and then came home to catch the last 2 minutes of the Cowboys game – which they won! (That’s right: the Cowboys are 8-1).

I get some air miles this week as my Audio Coordinator and I go to Atlanta this Tuesday for a full/intense day of meetings with Clark ProMedia. We leave at 5:15 and return at 10pm. Then Friday and Saturday, I’ll be consulting with a church in Phoenix. Pray for me.

We recently made a great purchase at my church. One of our electric guitar players had played at another church and used a product called Axe Trak. He’s a very good musician and picky about gear, so he was skeptical at first, but after playing through it, he had to admit he thought it worked great. He came back and told me about it. We bought one the next week, loved it and bought a second one this week (we often have 2 electric guitars).

What does an Axe Trak do? It allows your electric guitar player to have their amp beside them on the stage, but via the Axe Trak, there is no stage volume. We had been putting our electric guitar player’s amps in holes we built into our stage. The holes (with the lids on them) reduced the stage volume, but were a pain to set up, mic and needed a fan constantly blowing on the amp, which means we had to crack the lid open and caused a danger on our stage (one of our vocalist fell in one of the holes while walking backstage and hurt her leg pretty bad). We’ve had several other people (including myself) that almost fell in the hole, when the lid was left open or not fully closed. With the Axe Trak, we have closed the lids for good.

Here’s some more info from the Axe Trak website: “The warm sound desired by most guitarists can only be created by the speaker of a good sounding guitar amp being mic’d in the right environment. Direct amplifier outputs sound fake, fuzzy and extremely harsh. The AxeTrak® alleviates this problem by allowing the user to connect directly from the speaker jack of their guitar amp to the input jack of the AxeTrak®. The output of the AxeTrak® is then plugged into a recording console, mixing board or computer soundcard using a standard low impedance microphone cable. This method of recording allows you to get a direct signal that includes the preamp tubes as well as the power tubes if using a tube amp. This is very important if you are a tone freak like most guitarists.” Check it out HERE.

Yesterday I experienced one of the most satisfying and joyous days at my church. You’ve got to realize that I’m in a tough season at my church. We are coming down the home stretch of a 28 million dollar building project (the plan is to move in debt-free). I make trips out to the new worship center everyday. I have meetings and conferences calls constantly to talk about all the upcoming changes and the huge transition. Next week I fly to Atlanta (again) to meet with ClarkPro Media, so my new Audio Coordinator can get an overview of the entire project and be caught up to speed.

My office is a wreck – with a hardhat on my desk, boots to wear out to the site, blueprints all over my office and a Bill of Materials list as big as a dictionary. Mind you, that’s all on top of my full-time job as the Technical Arts Director and making Sunday happen on the technical side each week.

All that to say, yesterday I had the privilege of meeting with, counseling and praying with one of my tech volunteers for 3 hours. I got to sit and listen, minister and encourage and it was awesome. I’ve been so entrenched with new building stuff that it’s all I can think about. When this team member called and said he needed a pastor (that’s what we are) to talk to and that he wanted it to be me – I was thrilled.

You see, I often tell my entire tech team (via email) that I want them to share prayer requests with me and that it would be my honor to pray for them. Some have taken me up on it and I have enjoyed praying for them and checking in with them from time to time. Many have not taken me up on it – YET, but they will eventually. My team went through 2 other Technical Directors before me in a short period of time and I think they are starting to realize that I’m here and I’m not going anywhere. I love it when they take me up on my offer to pray for them.

So yesterday, as I sat across from one of my tech tech members and listened to him share, I was humbled, honored and excited that he would trust me enough to come to me and share openly and honestly with me about a tough situation he’s going through. The reason I titled this blog simply “Ministry” is because that’s what we are to be about. Too many church staff members would see his coming in as an interruption and a distraction from their job. My heart cries out: this IS my job! He apologized for taking up 3 hours in my day and I told him, “Dude, this is why I’m here. My door is always open.”

I bring this up to encourage, challenge and stretch all of you. Do you see people popping in as distractions and interruptions or as opportunities for ministry? Do you see something like this as keeping you from your job or is this your job?

I’ve got to be real, honest, and bold with my Media Minister/Technical Director friends for a moment: There are far too many techies, gear-heads and button pushers in the Church today. You might be skilled in those areas, but if you’re the leader of your tech team or an area of it, your calling and duty is to lead, shepherd and equip those under your authority. This is the area that the majority of my consulting with churches deals with. More on the “equip” part in a future blog. I’ve preached enough for today. I’m stepping down off my soapbox.

ON A PERSONAL NOTE:

My sister had her second child yesterday, so I’m an uncle again. All is well with mom and baby. God is good.

This past Sunday, my church beta-tested the unreleased Igniter Track: “Here Is Our King” by David Crowder. Igniter Media Group (one of my favorite church media producers) is coming out with a new line of products called: “Igniter Tracks“. They’ll be starting with 2 very cool volumes, which include some great songs and good song arrangements recorded professionally by Igniter.

As I mentioned, we used the “Here Is Our King” Igniter Track in our services this past weekend and it went very well. Our congregation was singing along to the video created by Igniter and our band was playing the song live with a click-track in their ear (all our band and singers where in-ear monitors).

This is like an iWorship video on crack. Every conference I do I hear from people that are tired of the same ‘ol, same ‘ol iWorship videos with stock aerial footage. Igniter Tracks offers cutting edge, creative, cool looking video tracks to play and/or sing along with. It’s truly taking the iWorship concept to the next level. If you haven’t already, you can pre-order both volumes now HERE. You can preview a video HERE.

In our world (meaning the worship/ministry world) Sunday is a big and very full day. We start early in the morning and we go until nighttime (we have an evening service until we get into our new worship center). Every week, I grow more proud and thankful for my Tech Arts team of volunteers. It is this precious group of dedicated servants that makes it happen behind-the-scenes.

Then comes Monday… I’m always tired, groggy and a little sleepy all morning. I usually need a shot of caffeine to get to our staff prayer each Monday morning. I try my best to participate and then walk around in a fog for a few hours, still drained from Sunday. You know, it’s amazing: Sunday comes every week! We give all we got and then wipe the dry erase board and start all over planning for the next Sunday.

This Monday is a little different as we have some projects that we’re working on, including switching out our Front of House sound board and prepping to sale 2 Mackie 56 channel boards (if anyone knows someone that’s interested). I’m enjoying the addition to my team of our new full-time Audio Coordinator. He’s dived in head first and has already made several improvements. I look forward to our projects this week. We also have a special dinner tonight and Saturday night for our building program/expansion project.

I’m curious as to what a Monday is like for you in your world.

That is the question and the topic of my weekly column on Monday Morning Insight. Go HERE to read this week’s article.

I was recently contacted by Albert Martin, a tech staff member at Granger Community Church. He told me that they used to use another presentation software at GCC for their lyric presentation, but between the quirky behavior and crashing, it became really frustrating for both he and the volunteers that run the program most of the time.

As a result, Albert has been developing a brand new piece of worship software from the ground up that “has proved to be both extremely stable and incredibly easy for our volunteers to learn and use” (he said he has trained volunteers in 15 minutes for what used to take at least twice as long). GCC has been using this every week since early this year.

The software is just wrapping up development and he’s released a FREE public beta for other churches to use and test. He currently has a very brief website up during the public beta period that gives a brief overview of iWorship along with several screenshots. A more thorough website is being prepared for the final release. Check it out HERE.