more will be revealed

My girl and I are heading to the Big Apple tomorrow! Even though I grew up in state of New York, I never once made the trek over to NYC for a visit, so I’m thrilled to be finally going there. We have quite the itinerary planned out, from a death metal Nintendo-sounding concert Thursday night (we might even dress the part maybe we’ll go as Tetris?), to seeing “Wicked” on Friday, to visiting the Guggenheim, Central Park, and maybe even Ellis Island. We’ll also be checking out some cool restaurants, including a ninja-themed establishment serving Japanese cuisine. I think the food is delivered by ninja’s gliding down from the ceiling on ropes! Ok, not really. But that would be sweet! Pictures and stories to follow…probably. : )

One of the aspects of my work here in Tampa is to manage and work with a number of different websites.  Most of the sites are blogs running Wordpress, which I’m fairly familiar with.  I have yet to go deep into a Wordpress site by doing alot of custom coding, so most of my dealings with the WP sites is to update the content and make sure they are running the latest version.  Fairly easy stuff.

Three of the sites I work with have custom built backends that have required me to do a bit of learning in order to work with them.  The sites work great for what they’re designed to do, but because they are running fairly custom code, there isn’t a whole lot of flexibility for someone like me, who doesn’t code in ColdFusion.

As such, I’ve been keeping my eye open for an open-source CMS that is extendable, easy to use and manage, run LAMP, and visually easily customized.  The bit of reading I’ve done is pointing me towards Joomla.

For these three sites, Joomla might be perfect.  Two of the sites are E-zines, while the other is an online portal with articles, media, forums, etc.  A number of plugins are available that will give me the kind of functionality that I’m looking for, and upgrades would be a snap.  As an added bonus, there are a large number of Joomla designers who offer these template clubs, where one buys a 6-12 month subscription and then has access to anywhere from 20-60 templates, depending on the club.  And these subscriptions are quite reasonable, say $50-$200, depending on the club and length of the subscription.

I’m already running a test site of Joomla and have found several free templates to toy with.  It’ll take a little bit for me to pick up how to configure and organize a site, but it looks uncomplicated.  I always love learning a new technology, so it should be fun!

Today was my first day at the Exponential Church Conference in Orlando, FL, a church conference for church planters. I almost came to the conference last year and at the last moment, decided to come this year. Having my family living in Orlando made it an easier decision, since I can stay at their house instead of driving an hour and a half back and forth from Tampa.

The conference offered a number of different tracks, depending on what focus a church planter might want to take. I decided to go with the Reproducing Churches track, but likely would have gone with the Missional Living track if it wasn’t totally booked.

Besides the different tracks offered, everyone at the conference attended a number of main sessions. Today’s main session was kicked off with Ed Stetzer sharing some statistics about church planting…his PowerPoint from his talk available on his website (at least they should be). Ed then talked with a number of church leaders who are involved in planting churches: Randy Pope, Neil Cole, Bob Roberts, and two other people who I can’t remember. Their dialogue was good, but I didn’t hear anything earth-shattering.

Andy Stanley was the speaker for the second session and he who talked about Vision. He basically summarized the main points of his book Visioneering, which is an excellent book. His talk was a great reminder of how incredibly important vision is in a church. As the proverb goes, where there is no vision, the people perish.

After Andy spoke we all broke out into our various tracks. Bob Roberts spoke about Visioning for an Apostolic Movement Locally & Globally. I took notes as he talked, and though he shared some interesting ideas, I walked away from the session wondering “What was that all about?” I probably need to go back over the notes again, but nothing stuck out to me.

I also met up with my friend Dave, who is planting a church in Springfield, OH this fall. It was good to catch up with him and so exciting to see him getting ready to start a church. I’m looking forward to seeing what tomorrow brings, hopefully it will be a little more insightful than today

Wow…how did a month go by since my last post? It’s amazing how quickly time goes as I get older! I’m going to set a goal of posting once a week, even if it is something short, just to get into the habit of sharing my thoughts, ideas, questions, musings, and memories. Each of us on the Coastland team is or will be blogging regularly, so look forward to continued thoughts on that topic.

Our Easter celebration at Coastland was awesome! A bunch of people came out, more than we normally have on a Sunday (something very uncommon for church plants), and God definitely showed up big time. We were able to give our Easter offering to an Ethiopian church in downtown Tampa. Leaders from the church were there to accept the offering, and we’ll be partnering with them in the future, to help them focus outward in reaching the 3,000 Ethiopians living in Tampa. I found out yesterday that our offering was 10x what they normally receive, so that should be a huge boost for them to be able to serve their city even more!

I’ve been staying quite busy in a number of different areas with Coastland, but mostly with the media aspect of the church. I’m slowly but surely learning Final Cut Pro 6, and will soon dive into the latest version of Motion. I shoot and edit all of our videos right now, most of which are interviews or man-on-the-street, but I definitely want to branch into more creative ventures that will come alongside the weekly message. You can check out the videos at Vimeo.

Another big project that is almost ready to be launched is a redesign of the Coastland website. We’ve teamed up with my good friend Mark over at AntistaticDesign to build us a custom site running on ExpressionEngine. I hope to have that live in the next few weeks.

Outside of work, I’ve gotten into mountain biking, thanks for my friend Eric. Right down the road from where I live is Alafia State Park, which has some of the best MTB trails in the state of Florida! I’m riding a Redline Monocog 29er, which is more or less an oversized BMX bike: single speed, no shocks, lightweight design, and those monster 29″ tires to roll over anything in my path.

The first time I went I hooked up with another group of guys and ended up following them down some seriously difficult trails, one rated a black diamond. They couldn’t believe I went down them my first time out because I was riding so well AND that I was riding a bike as “hardcore” as the one I was on. I’ll be honest…I felt pretty cool. I still have to check out the 3 other nearby locations that have trails, something I’m really looking forward to.

A large part of my current role with Coastland is directing our Sunday morning worship gathering, which is held in the Grande Ballroom at the Crown Plaza.  The Ballroom is divided into three 30′x50′ sections which, when all three put in use, would give us room to seat around 450 or so.  Because we have the room from 6am-noon on Sundays, everything is setup and torn down every Sunday, causing us to have to purchase the appropriate equipment.

We decided to go with two projection screens, and I thought it prudent to get projectors and screens that would work with HD.  Do a quick search and you’ll find numerous HD projectors on the market.  Most in the sub-$2000 range are for home theaters, and the lumens produced by most were no more than 2500.  We needed something in the 4000 range.  Quality HD projectors with 4000+ lumens are not cheap, especially ones designed for auditorium projection.  After a bit of research, I came across the BenQ SP831, which is a 4000 lumen projector that projects 1280×720.  The replacement bulbs aren’t that expensive either, another bonus.  On to the screens…

Da-Lite makes some great portable screens that are fairly cost-effective.  The BenQ projectors would need around 16ft. of space from the screen (use CalculatorPro over at ProjectorCentral to figure out distances!), and since I wanted to make the most use of the space we had in the room, I ordered two Da-Lite Deluxe Fast Fold 62×108″ front projection screens from ProjectorZone.  Unbeknownst to me at the time, each screen is built-to-order, and the lead time was 7 business days or so.  At the time I was placing the order, we were exactly a week out from launch!  I called and spoke to Nate Purscelley and explained my situation, he was able to call Da-Lite and confirm they could rush our order through to get it to us in time.  Talk about customer service!

Two days after placing the projector screens were ordered, we decided that front projection was not the best plan of action and we would do much better to have rear projection.  Another call was placed to Nate, and he came through big by calling Da-Lite and switching our screen type to the Dual-View at the 11th hour, allowing us to have front or rear projection with only a bit of a bump in cost.

To get those sweet projectors throwing a nice HD image on the screen, I opted for a Macbook Pro and set the secondary screen to project at 128×720.  Splitting the signal to both screens is handled nicely by a Siig 2-port VGA splitter, purchased at B&H Photo/Video.  Two 100ft. high quality VGA cables from CCT (ask for Brian, tell him Tom sent you) complete the setup.  Yep, simple VGA cables.  Nothing fancy, but it gets the job done.

ProPresenter running on the Macbook Pro beautifully handles the videos and lyrics for the songs.  The message notes and plugs (aka announcements) are shown using Keynote, which is easily switched to while ProPresenter is running.  I highly recommend ProPresenter!  It’s incredibly easy to use and easy for volunteers to pick up and use.  Pre and post-service music is done with iTunes on the Macbook Pro, which runs it all with ease.  Each service is recorded off the board by a Roland R-09, which allows for easy audio editing the next day.

I did not work out the details of our audio equipment setup, so I’ll probably post info about that once I’m more familiar with our equipment.  We’re toying with videoing the services, but we have to address our lighting situation first.

All of our equipment is neatly stored in custom made cases purchased from Portable Church Industries.  These deserve a post of their own, which they’ll get soon.  Let’s just say that they make setting up, tearing down, and storage a thing of beauty and that I can’t recommend them enough!