Sunday, August 16, 2009

Video this weekend

This weekend's celebration was a great celebration. One thing in particular stood out to me of which I think the whole tech team should be aware. We played a video of a personal testimony of Stephanie K. She tells a story of finding peace in her relationship with Jesus, through her participation here at the Vineyard. And she came to the Vineyard after watching a celebration on line. Not only that, the person who brought her attention to VCC celebrations online also had not attended here, but came here with Stephanie. How cool is that?!

Maybe it's me, but sometimes it is easy to get wrapped up in the technical specifics of each Celebration and lose sight of what our ultimate purpose is.

In general, I know that people watch the webcasts on line, but this brought it home to my heart, specifically and put a face and a personal testimony to it. Just think....We got to play a small part in changing Stephanie K.'s life. It is just exciting to know that he lets us in the game.

Friday, August 7, 2009

New Celebrations Times

We have had a great problem for the last year or so, crowded celebrations at the 10 and 11:40 times on Sunday. As you probably know, VCC Leadership has been looking at a lot of different possible solutions to help accommodate all of these folks, especially in Discoveryland. We tried adding a service on Saturday at 5 in the spring and that had mixed results to say the least. Anyway, leadership has decided to try another approach changing the celebrations times and structure on Sundays to

Sunday 9:00AM
Sunday 10:15AM
Sunday 11:45AM

The goal is to make 8:30am more attractive to people who attend the 10am and 11:40am so that maybe 9am doesn’t sound so EARLYJ Consequently this makes us have to shift the other celebrations accordingly, and to keep us from going to late into the afternoon, celebrations must be shaved to 55 minutes. Dave and Joe will shoot for a 25 minute message, the worship team will shoot for 18 minutes(which they already do), and we’ll have be sure transitions are tight. That gives us a little slack in case some part does go long, and Dave and Joe really can’t afford to go long because of the short turn-around between services.

Additionally the series starting in September is all about inviting people to church and we hope this change will help make some room for folks. And it gives the Tech Team and Worship team an extra half-hour to sleep inJ

Anyway, in the coming weeks we will be plugging the time change without really mentioning the shortening of the celebrations. It will kick off for Team 1 in September on the weekend of the 5th and 6th.