Archive for the ‘sunday morning’ Category

Three Weeks, Two Prospectives and A Question of the Week

Posted: December 31, 2008 in America, basketball, Choir, Christ, Christians, Christmas, church, FCC Owasso, friends, Jesus, Mad Prop's Friday, ministry, politics, Prayer, sunday morning, Tuesday's Question of the Week
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Hello! It has been over three weeks since we last met and we have so much to catch up on! I don’t have a lot of time so let me try to catch you up on the last twenty seven days of my life as quickly as possible.

  • Avalon was incredible! Made some new friends through the process ( Cathy Freeman and Chris Kelly with Spirit 102.3, Greg Long with Avalon) and watched our church do a tremendous job in helping with the event.
  • Mad Prop’s to Cathy Killion for all her hard work on the Avalon show! She was my hostess and really went out of her way to take care of the group.
  • Christmas services FREAKING ROCKED! Jana Gorham had almost thirty people in the orchestra this year and as usual they were incredible, the Choir was bigger and better than ever, Brittany Bolt sang her guts out and rocked our faces off and as always the band was awesome. This had to be the best Christmas service EVER in our church.
  • Christmas Eve services were great as well. We did some things a little different but somehow throwing acoustic worship, Charlie Brown, a live nativity, the Christmas story read by grandpa Tom, communion and candle lighting in to one service worked!
  • Mad Props to my boy Mitch who managed to focus his attention to leading worship on one of the hardest days in his life.
  • Christmas at the Tibbles was awesome! I will always love Christmas morning with my kids more than any other day of the year! This year was awesome… there were nice lessons learned by my youngest. More on this later…
  • In-laws came to our place for Christmas #2. It was nice…
  • Spent more time with my grandparents in two days than all of 2008 combined. I love them so much. They are great examples to us in all aspects of their lives.
  • Had a great Christmas with my small group. I am so appreciative of them and their love for us and each other. Its great to be a part of a group where we are “Tim and April”.
  • I somehow ended up catching a cold that turned into a fever and sore throat… I hate being sick. Then again, who doesn’t?
  • Our Church Basketball League starts up soon… I am uber excited about this. I’m not a great player but I love basketball to a fault.

So that’s my life over the past three and a half weeks. Sorry we were not able to connect. What’s that you ask? What are my feelings on Rick Warren praying for the inauguration? Funny you should ask! What amazes me is the two opposing views of this prayer.
1. The “Liberal Left” is ticked at Obama for inviting a “gay hating”, “anti-abortion”, “narrow-minded conservative” to be a part of his inauguration. It’s funny to me because Obama is doing what he said he would do. Did these people think that he would unite only the Americans who agreed with them?
2. The “Conservative Right” is ticked at Warren because he has accepted the invitation to participate in Obama’s inauguration. This is funny to me because Warren is doing exactly what he is supposed to do as a Christian. Does this group think that Warren should stand up and call Obama a “hypocritical”, “gay loving”, “baby-killing” heathen like a lot of other so called Christian leaders? Isn’t Warren doing exactly what the rest of us should be doing… praying for Obama?

It was great to see you again! Lets meet up tomorrow. I would like to share my 2009 New Year’s Resolutions. Before you go let me give you my question of the week:

What is your top resolution for 2009?

See you tomorrow!

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Set Design

Posted: October 27, 2008 in church, ministry, planning, sunday morning, worship team
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This week we took down our set to prepare for Christmas stage. I really liked the direction this set took. We were pretty limited on budget so we had to put our creative brains to work. This is definitely not the design we initially planned but I loved the result.




We have some big ideas for our upcoming series…

Healing Rain

Posted: September 29, 2008 in church, emotion, FCC Owasso, Jesus, sunday morning, worship
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We got this idea from Hillside Christian Church in Amarillo, TX. This ended up being a powerful way of communicating how far God is willing to go to change lives.

I was moved to tears… made it very difficult to sing. God is incredible!

If you were a part of this group of people, what would you have written on your cardboard?

Weekend Schedule

Posted: August 11, 2008 in children, church, conference, family, ordination, schedule, sunday morning, wedding, Willow Creek, worship
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Friday
9:00 AM – 12:30 PM Willow Creek Leadership Summit
12:30 PM- Lunch with Staff Ministers
2:30 PM- Stage prep for Sunday
4:30 PM- guitar student
5:00 PM- guitar student
6:00 PM- Dinner
7:00 PM- Sermon Prep for Sunday (Dad’s Ordination Service)

Saturday
10:00 AM- ReWrite Sermon (Dad’s Ordination Services)
2:00 PM- Cousin Gina’s Wedding
3:30 PM- Reception
6:00 PM- Review Sunday Services
9:00 PM- Rewrite Sermon (Dad’s Ordination Service)

Sunday
5:30 AM- Wake Up
6:30 AM- Arrive at office for service review
7:00 AM- Tech Meeting
7:15 AM- Service Rehearsal
8:30 AM- First Service
9:45 AM- Leave for Inola OK
10:30 AM- Dad’s Ordination Service
11:00 AM- Second Service (I was not at this one… Jared led in my place)
12:30 PM- Lunch with the Tibbles Family
2:00 PM- Tibbles Family at my place (at one time there were 29 people in my house)
5:00 PM- Dinner with Rob and Rachel (A pleasant surprise as they stopped by on their way through town)
6:30 PM- Meet with Greg and Shawna about wedding music and other Wedding stuff
9:00 PM- Get kiddos in bed
9:30 PM- Post blog
10:00 PM- BED TIME!!!

In the words of Charlie Brown
“Good grief”

High Tech Flannel Board

Posted: August 1, 2008 in church, planning, sunday morning, worship
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I’ve been getting a lot of e-mails on how we plan out our services. To be real honest we are still trying to figure it out. FCC has doubled in size since I started working here about eight years ago. It seems like every time we find something that works, we have to change it all over again to accommodate the new growth in our services.

So far this has been the tool that has worked best. I actually stole this from a friend who leads worship for a church in a nearby town. I think he stole it from a church in KY… Its a flannel graph!

We print a title page for each week. It includes who is preaching, the date, the sermon title (which becomes the theme of the week) and the scripture reference for the sermon. PC usually has those done a few months in advance.


We set up the song order and any “special elements” in the service underneath the title page on little tabs with Velcro backing. We also include any regular service pieces that would be in every service such as communion and the message.

We color code everything. This helps us make sure we are considering not only how much we are trying to cram into one hour but also who is in our services. Part of worshiping in a church that has been around for 100+ years means there is a diverse group of ages participating in the AM services each week.
The green tabs represent fast songs, yellow for medium paced songs, red (obviously) for slow songs and the blue for hymns. The orange tabs are parts of the service that happen every week and pink (I was running out of colored paper)are for special elements such as drama, video or special music. Everything is laminated so we can write on the tabs with dry erase markers. we even have some blank (white) tabs to we can write in new things.

There it is…

How do you plan?

Quicksand

Posted: June 23, 2008 in mistakes, quicksand, sunday morning
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Quicksand. That’s what I call it. I can’t take credit for it though. I actually got it from a movie I watched on TNT some time back. It happens at the worst time too. For me it is usually Sunday morning. No matter how many hours I spend in meetings, no matter how carefully we go over all the details of the service, something unexplained will happen and then I find myself in it… the quicksand. I call it quicksand because it sucks you in. The harder you fight it the more it fights back. We’ve all been there, we make a mistake and the more we try to correct it the more mistakes we make. The harder you fight the worse it gets. I hate quicksand.

What do you do when something goes wrong at the worst possible times?