What a great, worshipful, wonderful, experience this past weekend, November 19 & 20. Our church hosted our first annual worship conference on Saturday. We hope and pray that it will be the first of many to come. The turn out was light but what do you expect in the heart of USC Gamecock and Clemson Tiger land on the day these two rivals met. People have their priorities and for many it seemed to be football over conference. But God still loves them all and so do we. Next year I think we will plan a more open date.Our keynote speaker for the conference was Travis Cottrell. Travis is best known for being the worship leader for the Beth Moore conferences. Naturally I had never been to a Beth Moore conference so to be honest I do not believe that I had heard of Travis Cottrell until our Worship Pastor told us who was going to be the keynote speaker. After an opening song by our own Surrender, Travis spoke to the group in the first session. One of the major points that spoke to me was when Travis said “Worship is what we offer God with our lives”. That is absolutely true. Our worship is not in song alone or prayer or listening to a sermon. Those are elements of corporate worship, yes, but how we live our lives and how we offer of ourselves is our true worship to God. A key passage of scripture is Romans 12:1,2. I do not recall what version that Travis used but I have decided to use the English Standard Version here;
Romans 12:1,2 1I appeal to you therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship. 2Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.
We are to present ourselves as a living sacrifice. I believe that means that we sacrifice any of our own desires to live as God wants us. We are to surrender to His will so that we may be holy and acceptable. That is accomplished in part by the renewal of our minds. We renew our minds by reading, studying and meditating on the Word of God. Also by spending time with God in prayer and listening. We also renew our minds by lifting up praise and thanksgiving to our Heavenly Father in personal time and corporately.
Our breakout sessions consisted of the Theology of Worship, The Arts as Worship, and the Philosophy of Using Media in Worship. I, of course, attended the latter. We invited Mark Rodenhauser of Digital Lighthouse Media to speak. Mark has had an interesting life including 12 years playing in the NFL and then after retiring he started producing professional media content for Fortune 500 companies. He is now obeying the call of the Lord on his life to teach, train, equip and enhance the body of Christ by enabling churches, ministries, organizations and Christian businesses to communicate more clearly and effectively. Mark is a no nonsense, tell it like it is, kind of guy. I like that. He speaks from his heart and his heart is for the Lord. Thanks Mark!
Let’s face it; society is not turning back from the technological advances it has made. People are becoming more visual and kinesthetic learners than ever before. That is a major reason for using media in our worship services and throughout the church. But Mark made an excellent point when he said “No media at all is better than bad media”. I agree. If you can’t do something well for the glory of God then you should not do it all. The Lord deserves our very best in all that we do.
The final session of our worship conference was once again led by Travis Cottrell. Travis challenged worship leaders to be real and made some great points about how to build a worship team consisting of choir, musicians and vocalist. As I listened I realized that most of the points he was making should be the criteria for any team’s ministry partners. Like, ongoing relationship with Christ, willingness to serve or servant’s heart, joyful attitude and desire to learn to share the vision; to name a few.
Overall, I believe the conference was very beneficial to all that attended. We had a great time of fellowship and it was a good networking event also. I met others that are involved in media ministry and what they are facing in their churches. It renewed in me a desire to develop a technical fellowship in this area so that all of us involved in a technical ministry can learn from each other, train together and share resources when applicable. I’m really starting to see a coming together of churches in this area to do Kingdom work instead of denominational work. I pray that we will become the body of Christ instead of different congregations of worshipers. A technical fellowship could be a step in that direction.
Saturday night we offered a FREE concert to the community in the local school district auditorium featuring Travis Cottrell. I set up video over there and then had to take care of family business so I was unable to attend. I heard that it was a great time of worship and that everyone enjoyed it immensely.
Sunday morning we combined our morning services into one. Unfortunately our sanctuary is not large enough to accommodate having both groups there at the same time. That is why we have two morning worship services of course. We had to use our gymatorium venue. It is a very acoustically live space. It took me a couple of years to work out all of the equipment issues and learn how to mix in that room. Now it sounds great. Travis was our guest worship leader and was absolutely phenomenal. His voice was weakened from the concert the night before in which he must have really let it loose. He still sounded awesome. I learned that day that Travis Cottrell is of the same ilk as Chris Tomlin, Matt Redman and Paul Baloche. As he said after one of the songs we “almost got our praise groove on”. The house was rocking to say the least. That is saying something for this fairly conservative Southern Baptist church. I haven’t received any complaints yet. The week is still young though. 
I’m glad that I had purchased all new Shure SM58 & 57s microphones a couple of weeks ago. What a difference in the vocals from last time we used this venue. These microphones are a vast improvement over the Behringer mics that I had inherited. The frequency response was outstanding. The fidelity was astonishing and gain before feedback was maximized tremendously. I’m still amazed at how well some of the other equipment is still operating. God wants to use it and that is all there is to it.
Sunday night we baptized two young ladies and praised God for bringing them into the body of Christ. We also were thrilled to hear a mission report from one of our own. A couple that we have come to love and admire. They put everything down in their lives to obey the call of the Lord to the mission field and are now serving Him in Mozambique. They had an awesome presentation and it was great to hear how the Lord is working through them to bring villagers into His kingdom. I was also tasked to build a photo slide show for the reception following the service. I used 491 photos that they had and built the slide show in SongShow Plus. I really didn’t think that SongShow would handle it because we have been having issues in that area here lately. Like I said before though; God wanted to use it so it worked. We had another great time of fellowship that night too.
As you can now see it was a great, wonderful, worshipful experience. I pray that God raises up gifted, talented, willing people to serve so that experiences like this would become commonplace in churches everywhere.
I thank God for Travis Cottrell, Daniel, Mark Rodenhauser, Roger Patterson, RachelAnne Fleming, Rusty Fleming our worship pastor, Dave Stanford our senior pastor, our family from Africa and last but not least our choir. I didn’t catch Daniel’s last name but he was with Travis and played guitar. All of you were used of God to bring people to a place of authentic worship including myself. THANK YOU!
Ok, Travis was that nice enough for you? :>
Photo #1 - Our own praise group Surrender
Photo #2 - Me with Travis Cottrell
Photo #3 - Travis Cottrell with Roger Patterson
Photo #4 - Travis & Daniel at sound check
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