Growing

Hi Y’all,
I’ve got some exciting news to pass along. Our attendance each weekend continues to swell our ranks. The auditorium is abuzz with a full house each weekend, most notably at 10am and at 11:40am, but even the Saturday night has been filling up. This is a very exciting time, although busting at the seams presents us with some great challenges, especially in the parking lot, and in Children’s ministry.

Leadership has brainstormed for the past few months on ways to tackle this challenge. A number of solutions were looked at, but they have landed on one that we can experiment with fairly easily. We are adding a celebration on Saturday night at 5pm. This will begin at Easter, April 12th and will continue for the following 6 weeks, at which point, we will go back to our standard 4 celebration-weekend. Over the summer months leadership will evaluate this 6 week experiment to see if it solved our capacity issues, or if another solution should be pursued.

I pass this along to the team to seek your feedback. What do you think of it? It obviously changes things for us, especially Saturday rehearsals. We have a couple of ideas on how to approach rehearsal but one idea has emerged as the front runner:

Thursday night tech rehearsal. - The band and Front of House are already rehearsing on Thursday nights at 7pm, so this would mean bringing in the whole Tech Team: Director, Switcher, Tape Op, Powerpoint, Lights, Robo Cams, and Cameras in around 8:15 to rehearse at 8:30 or so. Rehearsal would go from 30 to 45 minutes or so.

There are a lot of logistics to discuss with this plan, so we need your feedback.

First, is it doable for you?
Second, how do you feel about it?
Third, do you have any ideas that we may have not considered?

I would love to get a response from everyone. As we want to consider how this effects everyone. Let me know what you think by next Friday 2/13, because we’ll begin discussing specific strategies how to deal with this issue.

Your Brother in Christ,

Bryan

Happy New Year!

2009 just doesn’t sound right but here it is anyway. And with the new year is the perfect time to reflect on the past year and look to 2009 with anticipation.

2008 highlights for me personally include: Stephanie finishing her Master’s degree, Family Force Five during SOS, the Awe series in August, learning about the Lord’s Prayer during Kingdom’s Cliff Notes, Dave Ramsey’s Financial Peace University, The Regifter Show and finding out that I’m going to be a dad.

Most recently the Vineyard was staring at a shortfall of $1.2 million and possible staff cutbacks. But God provided through Year End giving which totaled $1.22 million!

I can't express the awe I've had over this year, how God is complete control. Even in the face of tragedy, God still has been speaking to me about His love for all of us, including me. In May, I received prophetic prayer from Karin Maney and other members of the prayer team at a team retreat. That prayer just blew me away and really assured me that He loves me like a son, and I'll leave it at that, but it touched my heart in such a way that I can't even talk about it:) If you ask me about it, I will likely change the subject with a joke or some otherwise glib comment:)

I'm extremely excited about the coming year. New tech team volunteers have been coming out of the woodwork, and we have been cross training folks every weekend. It is my goal to get all volunteers trained at every role except director and FOH. We will be an extremely flexible team able to adapt to any situation then.

But my main goal for 2009 is for tech team to grow closer in fellowship with the goal of each of us strengthening our relationships with Christ.

And of course, the main change for me in 2009 is becoming a father. I will go ahead ask for your prayers, in advance, and I'll pray for you all throughout 2009. Deal?:)

Christmas Experience begins production

Tuesday November 18, production began on the Vineyard's Christmas Experience, which is now officially called "The {Re}Gifter Show", which will include elements of live drama performed on the stage, but also mixed in with video roll ins, much like last years drama "A Cat Named Bruce", however, The {Re}Gifter relies much more heavily on the preproduced video parts. I actually hesitate to call the roll ins, video, because they are being produced film style, which is much more painstaking.

We completed 3 scenes in the same location yesterday. Actually they are quite short scenes. We put about 9 hours worth of work which resulted in about 4 minutes of The Regifter, but those 4 minutes look phenomenal.

How was it? We shot in an unheated garage so it was cold, really cold but they fed us and gave us hot chocolate so that helped. We cleaned out the garage of 90% of it's stuff to make room for crew, camera, production monitor, lights, props. The second challenge is finding power for heaters, lights and production stuff. The ceramic heaters kept tripping breakers so eventually we had to turn off all heaters.

We probably had 30 people working on that shoot at one time or another. We have a Director (Brad Wise), Director of Photography(Mark Denny), Gaffers, Grips, Production assistants, prop masters, wardrobe etc etc etc. It is amazing to see how much work goes into something that will, in the end, look like 4 minutes of a guy in a garage.

It is exciting to be a part of, i can't wait to see this stuff edited together.

Tech Team Pics

Hey Y'all!

A while back Jim Keller(Front of House, Team 2 and Team 4) suggested that we have a picture board somewhere with all tech team members pictured with their names, so that we all can recognize some of the other team members that we may not get a chance to work with as much. I thought it was a great idea, but I wasn't sure how to go about starting. I think it could be a great tool in helping us interact as a team closer, not to mention that it is great to document as much stuff as we can. But I can't figure out where physically to post all those pics besides online. So we're are trying to get pics of all team members right now. I'm thinking Yearbook style, and for now we'll just post them on this blog, (look to the right), but eventually maybe a website. So for the next couple of weeks someone we'll be trying to get pics of each team and of each individual. Let me know if you don't want to be on the web for any reason, and we'll work around that. Special Thanks goes out to Christina Wan, Vicki Gabriel and Baron Youn for being our photogs.

Thanks!

Bryan

Thanks!