I've been re-working LifePoint's website so it reflects an actual church rather than a church in planning. It's 99% there ... for now. A few of the tweaks include:I've brought back the right-side modules to highlight upcoming events. This will give the site more flexibility as events increase.Users can now download our Sunday teaching material and related graphics. This will be especially helpful to those LifeGroup leaders who will be using Sunday's teaching as discussion starters in their groups. You'll also get to see my teaching notes in their raw, unedited form. You may even learn to decipher my short-hand.Our creative arts team now has a secured section of the site where we'll post our ongoing creative planning ideas and assignments.You can view our current and past media efforts, including mp3's of our featured artists.Jay has added a category entitled "Worship Thoughts" where he posts occasional, random thoughts concerning worship.Of…

In order to beef-up the laptop to better handle video, I went from 512 MB to 1GB of memory. It's smokin' fast. I went to open MS Word and I never even saw the splash screen. BAM! It was there. We use a lot of video at LifePoint, most of it ran off the laptop using a program called "MediaShout." I highly recommend it to any church that wants to do more than PowerPoint during worship. We use it to put video loops behind song lyrics, show flash animations, and DVD clips. The DVD function is really cool. You can cue up the video from within MediaShout and play it as part of your presentation ... all from the laptop. It also allows you to jump to any thumbnail without having to go in linear order. You can also make edits on the fly without your audience knowing it. For…

Each month at LifePoint we feature a local artist in our "Local Artist Showcase." This is part of our commitment to the local arts -- and part of our way of reclaiming the use of creative arts in Christian expression. There was a time when the church was at the forefront of producing art.In October we will be featuring Jason Turtle, a local singer-songwriter. You can learn more about Jason by visiting his site ... www.jturtlemusic.com. It's well worth it.

It's 8:56 on Monday morning and I've only had two cups of coffee.LifePoint is now two weeks old and moving right along. One of the most exciting parts of starting a new church community is meeting new people. Yesterday we had 50 people attend one of our two gatherings who I did not know three weeks ago. This is in addition to all the people who were there that I did know three weeks ago!We're continually fine-tuning and had our sound down to a more manageable level yesterday. Just like any start-up (church or dot-com), there will be glitches that must be continually worked on. Unfortunately, churches don't have the luxury of beta testers. Even then, I've been around tech companies that released software that they knew was buggy but shipped it any way.One of the great things about LifePoint is that we are not program-driven, meaning that everything must…

A friend sent me a link to an article by David Ruis entitled, "Creativity and the Arts." Ruis emerged as a leading worship voice through the Vineyard churches and has penned some outstanding songs ("Every Move I Make", "You Are Worthy of My Praise", and more).Here's the article reposted on LifePoint's website.