Pop Goes The Church

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Post Easter Reflection

After all the build up, work, and effort put into Easter services you hope and pray that people come back the next week. It looks like we had a lot of people back this week at all our campuses. Most notable is our new Firewheel campus. We built a 500 seat room and our church leaders had hoped that we would have 400 at 2 services the first week. We had a core group of about 250 that we knew would be helping to give the new church some momentum. The first week there were over 800 people. Certainly, a number of people from our other campuses adventured over to Firewheel to check it out but that was a big number. The next week there were 755. Ok, now we have the start of a trend. As you can imagine our tech team was scrambling to get video setup in some other rooms to provide overflow space. We added cameras, which we had not planned to do for a long time, and made 2 other rooms ready for more people. Week 3 saw another week of over 750 and Easter is only one more week away.

A quick decision was made to add a 3rd service on Saturday night before Easter, but we only told those who were in attendance the week before. It was not on our website or advertised anywhere. Saturday night there were 595 people at the service. When the weekend of Easter was over, more than 1800 people and several hundred more children had attended services at our new campus. We have kept the 3rd service for this week and had over 1000 people. This church is only 5 weeks old! God is moving in big ways in that community. It is so obvious that our church leaders were listening to God in planting that church. Its a good problem to have, busting at the seams, and honestly I think we have handled it about as well as could be expected. What's next? More space, more services? There, I'm not sure, but one thing I do know is God is leading us to reach an entire community that is need of Jesus and that makes all the hard work more than worth the effort.

Easter Services

What a great weekend we had across all our campuses. There were a total of over 18,700 people that attended services with Lake Pointe this weekend. Pastor Steve spoke about the redemptive power of Jesus that was very moving. In order to support this message we used two songs from Daniel Kirkley. We invited Daniel to come and sing those songs himself which he was glad to do for us. I put my camera in the booth to get a large stage shot. In addtion to our regular band, there were 22 string players on the stage.
[RSS readers flash video posted here]

All the on screen graphics were created by one of our video guys, Cameron Schmucker. You can see the full screen video, and you really want to see it to get how cool it is, along with several other video segments from our service over on Wes Hartley's blog. The team really hit a home run all the way around. There were a number of people who came to know Jesus for the first time this past weekend. It makes all the hard work so worth it. I'm proud to be a part of the team.

Twittering

I've succumbed to the temptation of Twitter. You can follow me here or check the sidebar for updates.

My iPhone is bigger than your iPhone

We wrapped up our series called iGod this week where we taught about the Trinity. As a part of the series we built a giant iPhone for our pastors to interact with as a part of their teaching. Here is what it looked like.

The iGod phone is actually a 50" plasma with a frame built around it to look like the iPhone. The entire thing is mounted on a mobile plasma stand we rolled out during a sermon intro. The graphics were all created to closely match what you might see on a real iPhone. The first time it was used in a service there were audible "oohs" and "ahhs" in the room. I think people had no idea it was a screen behind it that would change and be interactive. I love to see people connect when we use some pop culture to help illustrate God's Word.

I'll get to some regular posting since our new campus is up and running. Its kept all of the team running hard for weeks. Seems there is always tons to do when you open a new place.