Eric's Eddyfications

Sunday Morning at DT Napes

This morning I had a sentimental exprience at church, at my home campus in downtown Naperville. First of all, most all of my small group that we birthed last year was in attendance, which is always awesome.
Jon Ferguson delivered the message, which was excellent. A well told story about how money can be thought of for us as a tool, a test, and a trademark. Great stuff delivered well.
But then there were the artists. Doug White was leading the band, with fellow 'old timer' Pat Fosnacht on bass. But the thing that stood out to me were some of the other key contributing artists.
Lindsay Malcolm-Williams sang the special, Carrie Underwood's song "Change." it was awesome. Jeremiah Higgins played electric guitar and led us in a reflective communion moment with a slowed down rendition of "Grace Like Rain," and Ryan Sudol was serving at the sound board.
All three are adults, some married, some with kids, but all three "grew up" in this church. Ryan as an elementary school kid appeared in some of our earliest attempts at original videos. Lindsay babysat for our Sadie when she was a baby, I remember having to drive her home because she wasn't old enough to drive herself. And Jeremiah has been playing every instrument his dad Dylan would let him since as long as I can remember. Drums were first for him though, I remember trying to guide him in how you don't have to fill every sixteenth note with a drum fill. Good stuff.
Last week at "the Green Room" Rod Parsley talked about the need for multigenerational worship, and I was happy to see it playing out this morning at Community. Because, you see, the generations were playing alongside each other: it wasn't ushering out the old folks, nor was it excluding the younger ones because they hadn't "paid their dues." They were all up onstage together, worshiping, serving, using their gifts.
But most importantly, to the attenders around and all the artists, it just seemed normal. Like something we would do naturally. And I love being a part of a community like that.
They didn't know why I took their pictures this morning, but they smiled nonetheless...

Shawn's Bringing It

Check out Shawn Lovejoy's recent post about worship leaders. Shawn's a good friend who has a heart for church planting and makes it happen in Hotlanta. I think that his take, coming from the lead pastor p.o.v., is very interesting. What do you think?

Willow Creek's service builder

I had the honor this month of writing an article for Willow Creek Association's "Service Builder" e-newsletter. It comes out every so often with thoughts on art by people like me. It starts with the clever teaser line "My brother can be annoying sometimes."

Don't worry. It ends well... Enjoy the "pearl of awesomeness." And comment at the bottom of the page too!

Click on it here.

Troy's Swan Song

Well, Jon mentioned it, as did Troy. Sunday marked Troy's last performance as a worship leader and campus pastor for CCC, as he is off to launch a brand new church in Kansas City. Here is an excerpt of the last song at the 11am service. We called an audible and played "We Will Dance." - an oldie but a goodie, for us anyway. If there was ever a "Troy McMahon Worship Leading Theme Song", this was it. Hope you enjoy it as much as we did - a lot easier to sing than "Point of Difference", anyway...

The Big Idea at work

Many people ask how this whole Big Idea thing works with communicating the same Big Idea to adults, students and kids. Well, this past weekend we had a really good example of how it works, particularly for the adults and kids large group services. I thought I'd share. Here is the video we showed to adults on the topic of a "Lost World" - and the need to tell the lost about church, and invite them. We called it "Baptism by the Water Cooler."

And now, here is the video for Kids' City, on the same topic, "Lost", and virtually the same video sketch, though shot differently with different actors. We called it "Baptism by the Drinking Fountain."

Make sense? That's one example of how the Big Idea works... What do you think?

The Big Idea Mediablitz

The mediablitz continues for The Big Idea, thanks to Leadership Network, whose book blog interviewed me for the book while I was at the Coast to Coast Multisite conference in San Diego. You can hear the interview here. Thanks to DJ - he'll apparently be posting a later interview with Dave Ferguson... I guess people want to talk to him about this book too...

Bublitz Rocks

Sean Bublitz rocks, and while it is something that I have known for a long time, now I have the post to prove it.

Of course, this post centers around the book "The Big Idea" which we are currently pushing pretty hard, mainly because baby needs some new shoes. Seriously though, we've asked our staff and others to blog about the book and let their circles know what they think of it.

Sean's post about the book is exactly why we do what we do, a first hand experience with The Big Idea. A lot of times, I worry when we bring someone in who is new, and "immerse" them in the experience of doing arts at CCC. His narrative of his own experience is worth reading, and very affirming of the process.

Because we plan 9 weeks in advance, I often tell the newcomers that it will take them a couple of months for them to get "acclimated" to the Big Idea. This is because when you arrive, nine weeks are already planned. So for quite some time, you are working on projects that were brainstormed nine weeks ago. It can be very confusing. But once you arrive to the weekend that you planned nine weeks ago, the "aha" goes on like a light bulb. It's one big "I remember that" moment.

Check it out, and comment if you want about the madness... have you read the book yet?

Orlando: Part Three and Final

Orlando: Arts Gathering Part Three (and Final):

Friday morning, got to have breakfast with Rory Noland, who is the author of “The Heart of the Artist” which, if you’re a Christian Artist who cares about your spiritual journey, and you haven’t read that book, then obviously, you don’t really care too much. It’s kind of like a manual for how artists are wired up, and it’s become so much a part of the Christian Artist 101 culture, that now Rory spends most of his time roaming the country conducting workshops and groups sessions with churches to give them further insights. I found out that right now he’s just around the corner doing some consulting at Evangelical Free Church of Naperville, and we’re going to be connecting further in the next couple of months since, you know, he’s just around the corner.

The last session was focused around how we can help create a buzz and begin putting into practice this concept of bringing artists together into the arts conference to begin truly sharing best practices. One of the biggest challenges in that department is this: most of the challenges in a lot of churches comes from a lack of connection between the lead artist and the senior pastor. We need to do a better job of convincing senior pastors out there that if they want to see more results from their artists and their services, they need to be on the same page with their lead artist, and walk a mile in their shoes. Hopefully that will happen this year. I know that my job would have been so much harder did I not have the trust and platform to risk that Dave Ferguson provided early on in our working relationship, which even more fortunately developed into a great friendship. You can read about it, actually, in one of the chapters of our new forthcoming book, The Big Idea. We’re in the process of talking with Nancy and the Arts Conference peeps about offering a workshop based on the book and focusing on that relationship at the Arts Conference. Looking forward to it… June 13-15, 2007. Mark your calendars!

Got to end the day with some more connection-making. Talked to Greg Bowman who runs the conferences that WC creates for Promiseland and their Student Ministries. He asked me if they could show the Mac/PC videos at the Student Ministry Conference. So it looks like there will be one more place in which that market will be saturated. It makes sense though – we showed them at StuCo back in October, and they were a huge hit for the StuCo’s as they were for the adults. We may even be shooting some… new ones… teaser, teaser teaser…

Orlando: Part Two

Orlando: Arts Champions Gathering: Part Two
Kristi got to sleep in on Thursday morning, while I went to an early breakfast. In the morning, Nancy informed me that she forgot to talk about the Mac and PC parody videos that we created when she was interviewing me. So then during the morning session, when we were focusing on the goal of infiltrating our communities with art, she remembered. That was a funny moment. After having their brains hurt from listening to my job description, now the gaggle of artists were doing double takes having seen the parody videos on YouTube. One of the arts directors at my table said “We’ve shown your videos at our church!” I was secretly glad that they didn’t recognize me up against my “Nerdy Christian” character. Several others had not seen them, but lucky me, I had them on my laptop, and would later truly do a “show and tell” moment showing them all those great videos…

Kristi had a massage appointment in the morning (and by morning, I mean 11am, so just barely), and while she was there, the arts champions left for Cirque de Soleil. Because of the connections of one of our arts champions (Gary in Seattle), we were afforded a rare tour of the space where they stage the show “La Nouba”. It was great – the set was amazing, and the tour was extensive. It was funny because our group was led by the tech director, who was clearly not well versed in the art of the tour guide. You had to watch his lips just to make sure what you were hearing was talking and not some kind of low hum feedback from a 30 year old speaker. Nonetheless, he knew his stuff, and when prompted, was able to give us all the details on this bizarre collaboration between the circus/street performer world and the theatre world, and of course, Disney.

The session following the tour was one of the more rewarding, because we got to see a sneak peek of the schedule and line up for this year’s Willow Creek arts conference. It’s going to be a doozy y’all. I don’t want to be the one who gets busted for promoting the guest artists before we’re supposed to, so I’ll leave it at that. Let’s just say that you need to make a point of attending, if you want to know what’s going on in the arts church world. And heck, just in the arts world. Why stay locked in our little box, right?

After that, Kristi got to join us as we went to see the show (which was good, but also odd. It was kind of like Moulin Rouge running 60 mph into a Ringling Brothers circus), and then dinner at Wolfgang Pucks. Had a great time connecting with more of the artists, or “artisans” as David at Mosaic likes to say.

Speaking of David, he, Kristi and I hung out for a while at Downtown Disney while David and I talked about the challenges of working with actors and directors, and while Kristi shopped. As we were getting ready to leave, an older woman got right behind David, and stood right behind him, uncomfortably close. Of course, we didn’t recognize her, and for a second, I was trying to figure out if she was in our artist group. (you always have to question that when artists and crazy people are in the same place.) Well, he turned, she continued to hide from him, he finally jumped around to look at her, which made her scream, and then she just stared at us for a while, muttering a couple of things here and there, before she finally walked away. It was a moment. I remember someone sometime saying that you’re close to Jesus when the freaks are drawn near to you... I guess David is really, really close to Jesus.

More to come…

Orlando: Post the First

Orlando: Arts Champions gathering, for Willow Creek Association: Part One.

There were 34 of us or so – a few churches were noted but without attenders. But even without those few, twas a great spread of influential and innovative churches arts directors. And since CCC is both influential and innovative, it was a pleasure to be there representing CCC. I got a few double takes from some people when I first got in. Turns out that a few had attended NewThing Practicums in the past, which was cool.

Nancy Beach led us with giving us some overall direction for where we were headed. The concept: we are the champions. But not the Queen kind. Now that she has moved out of her week-to-week building services role at WC, she is working for the Association to build experiences, create resources, and find and cultivate best practices in the arts for all of us. She talked about how conferences for the first ten years at Willow were more about “Here’s Willow, here’s how we do it.” And that her goal was now to be a host for best practices, period – regardless of what church it came from. That was refreshing to hear, and sounds like the future could be very bright for more diverse church involvement in the arts movement via Willow.

Nancy and I had met and had lunch a couple of weeks prior, so I guess my story was fresh in her mind. She picked me and a couple of others to do a “pseudo-interview” with her for the rest of the group – kind of a “show and tell” but without any props. I talked about what we do, with a smile on my face. I could tell that people were starting to have “brain freeze” moments as I talked about 8 locations, one Big Idea, Adults-Students-Kids on thar same big idea, planning nine weeks out, teaching is one of the arts, etc. etc… Heads were spinning big time. But my smile was genuine – I love doing what I’m doing and don’t apologize for it even when it sounds clinically insane.

We spend the rest of the night doing the “touchy feely” stuff where we talk about highs and lows in our ministry at our tables of six. It was really cool to get to know some people whose work I’ve admired from afar, but generally speaking, that kind of stuff is not for me. That being said, a member of our group was going through some serious family difficulty this year, and he couldn’t not mention it as a low for 06. It was good then to be able to pray for that person and their family.

And for those of you keeping score at home: I brought my wife to Orlando – Willow put us up at the Grand Floridian, which doesn't suck. On the property is its own totally boss spa and health club, and Kristi spent that evening in the spa getting a facial and enjoying the sauna. Thanks to Carrie and Elic and others who helped take care of our kids while we “vacated.” Literally. More to come…